Tapio Wirkkala

Biography

In 1946 Tapio Wirkkala won a competition for a series of art glass for the Iittala factory. He was thirty-one, and until then he had worked more on advertising graphics and sculpture. The competition gave him a place at the factory and his first well-known piece, the Kantarelli vase.

He was born on 2 June 1915 in Hanko (Hangö in Swedish), then in the Grand Duchy of Finland. His father, Ilmari Wirkkala, was a cemetery architect, and his mother, Selma, practised wood carving; his sister Helena Korvenkontio and his brother Tauno Wirkkala also became artists. He attended the Töölö co-educational school in Helsinki. In 1933 he entered the Central School of Arts and Crafts (today part of Aalto University) in the decorative sculpture department and graduated in 1936. Ilmari Tapiovaara, Armi Ratia and Birger Kaipiainen studied there at the same time. He began as an advertising draughtsman.

During the war Wirkkala served as an officer. In the Second World War he served in a coastal brigade on Lake Onega and won a competition for a monument to his fallen comrades-in-arms; he was given twelve days’ leave to prepare the design. In 1944, at the club of the Taidehalli exhibition hall, Kaipiainen introduced him to the artist Rut Bryk, and they married in 1945. Both went on to work in art, as did their children.

In 1947 Wirkkala won the Bank of Finland’s competition for banknote design, and money based on his designs entered circulation in 1955. He also took part in the 1951 competition for stamps for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. From 1951 to 1954 he taught at the Central School of Industrial Art and ran it as artistic director.

The turning point was 1951: at the Ninth Milan Triennale, the largest international design exhibition, the Finnish section, which he had designed, won the Grand Prix, and Wirkkala himself took home three Grand Prix awards. At the next Triennale, in 1954, he won three more, and was also commissioner of the Finnish section. In the same year the Tapio glassware series appeared, with an air bubble in the glass, intended for mass production, and it is still made today. The bubble is made like this: a wet wooden stick is pushed into the hot glass, the water turns to steam and forms a cavity. He added a decanter to this series only in 1983, at customers’ request.

In the 1960s he was designer and art director at Iittala. The Ultima Thule series, imitating melting ice, dates from the same time. It was cast in wooden moulds that charred in the heat of the molten glass, so that each piece differs slightly from the next. It was conceived as a small-run art series but went into mass production. The Finlandia bottle, on which he worked, was produced from 1970 to 1999. For the Italian factory Venini he made glass and porcelain, and for the German firm Rosenthal tableware; the WIR light bulb for Airam was awarded the Grand Prix at the Twelfth Milan Triennale in 1960. His other clients included Ahlström, Kultakeskus, Lapland Knife and Oras. A puukko, a traditional Finnish knife, bearing his name was made in the 1970s. He himself, as reported, often carved his first models with such a knife.

Wirkkala also worked as an exhibition architect: in 1956 he designed the exhibition for the 275th anniversary of the Finnish glass industry, in 1961 the jubilee exhibition of Ornamo, in 1979 the centenary of the Friends of Finnish Handicraft, and in 1981 he designed the premises of the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimäki. From the 1940s he also worked with aircraft plywood: in 1951 he made oval and leaf-shaped dishes from it.

His honours include the Pro Finlandia medal (1955), the Lunning Prize (1951), the Domus Golden Obelisk (1963), the title of Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in London (1964), an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art (1971) and the title of academician (1972). Wirkkala died on 19 May 1985 in Helsinki and was buried in the artists’ area of Hietaniemi Cemetery. Rut Bryk was later buried beside him. In 2011 the foundation that preserves the couple’s legacy transferred several thousand objects to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art.