In the early 1960s, Lisa Ponti, an Italian artist and journalist, who was the daughter of the designer Gio Ponti, visited the holiday home of her friends Tapio Workkala and Rut Bryk. This was not a little trip. Your hosts, married designers in Helsinki, with her children Sami and Maaria in the northernmost part of the Finnish Lapland.
The property was missing plumber, electricity and even access to road traffic. At that time, the approach was in summer and through a sled that was drawn by reindeer over a frozen lake in winter. If the climate turned out 165 miles over the Arctic circle as colder than expected, visitors could hardly come to a department store and pick up a sweater. But Maaria Workkala, an artist who is now 71 years old, remembered that her father, when he saw the content of Ms. Ponti's pockets, pointed out to the object with the chorus: “Not necessary … not necessary”.
His love for the extremity is a theme of “Tapio Workkala: The sculptor of Ultima Thule”, an exhibition of 300 of his works, which will open on April 5 in the Tokyo Station Gallery before traveling to other places in Japan. The show put the designer in the context of the remote northern region, which enchanted him, and marks the anniversary of his birth and the 40th anniversary of his death.
His title refers to two of the best-known creations by Mr. Workkala glasses called Ultima Thule, which seems to drop with icicles (published in 1968, it is still produced by the Finnish company Iittala), and a 30-foot-long-carved wooden sculpture, also called Ultima Thule, a name that has been in northern farms. This feat, which was produced for the Finnish pavilion on the Expo '67 in Montreal, represents nature that swirls and emits the earth.
For many, “Ultima Thule” described a mythical place that imagined to lie beyond the borders of the well -known world. “Throughout his life, Effala searched for this point – both in his personal life and in his work,” says the press release of the exhibition. “The point where everything is superfluous and unnecessary is removed.”
In Lapland, Mr. Wedkala threw himself into the pure, incessant light and serenity of his surroundings, said his daughter. It was a refuge, “for concentration without a disorder. There he found a place where he stopped and compensated for his hectic life”. She remembered that he said to her: “You know, some people are afraid of this silence because you hear your own heartbeat.”
He worked free of distractions whenever he wanted, which was always – the summer sun never set. He rose early to sketch the lake. He observed how the landscape did not gradually change, but with a manic rush in the intensity of the Arctic season.
He met the property in 1959 in a newspaper advertisement in Helsinki. “Two lines, no photo,” said Ms. Effala about the message. “He had a strong intuition about it.” Lapland had been bombed by German only 15 years earlier in the Second World War, but the house, a farm that was built by one of the indigenous Sami population living in the region, was so far north that it had escaped damage.
When his daughter, who inherited property and continued to use it, continued to use it, the main building was a house that was more than 100 years old. A nearby barn was originally feed for reindeer, and there was a sauna that had been built without chimney, so that smoke from the burning wood that heated the rocks ventilated before the room was used.
The family was missing in the interior clearing in this sauna as a prelude to swimming in the Kalten See. Finally, Mr. Workkala added a second sauna with a chimney where they could wash and designed a more comfortable main apartment. The kitchen had a massive fireplace and was equipped with its homemade table and his benches. He built a boathouse and converted half of the barn into a workshop. He bought and disassembled an old house at the other end of the lake and put it together again as a place for Ms. Bryk, a textile and ceramic artist. (The family called this building, hung with Ms. Bryk's curtains that broke out in phosphorescent color as sunlight infiltrated, ruts house. Finally, she and Mr. Workkala pulled in.)
Every summer the family got into a minibus or a car with large quantities of coffee, salt and potatoes and drove more than 700 miles north of Helsinki to Inari, a community that spreads over 6,700 square miles with a population of 7,125. In Inari they recorded more supplies. They left their vehicle and climbed into a long boat to cross the lake that bounded on their property and returned to Inari once or twice a summer to replenish again.
Fresh milk and bread came a little more than a mile away from a neighbor who had a cow. Another neighbor, about three miles away, offered them to use a phone in emergencies.
The family learned to make themselves self -sufficient, said Ms. Workkala. They fished for trout, Whitefish, pike and perch and raid for mushrooms and cloud berries. The fish was smoked or cooked outdoors over a fire or kept with salt. For a few years until they had a more sophisticated stove, the water that they dragged out of the lake was cooked in the interior in a three -legged pot at the stove.
For pleasure you read books, made forest walks or gathered around the large wooden food table to decoratively carve its surface. In the early 1960s, Mr. Workkala designed a popular example of the Finnish knife, which is known as Puukko (Brookstone would sell it later). His daughter remembered that she had received her first Puukko when she was 6 years old. When she was 12 years old, she built a wooden play house for the site.
The local visitors came by, like a man who drank several cups of coffee before shared the news that he had to deliver: “I saw a bear yesterday.” Ms. Ponti returned twice from Milan among the international guests, and the designers of the mid -century Robin and Lucienne Day (sometimes called Charles and Ray Eames of England) returned from London.
Without the regular mail service, none of these annual idyll would have been possible, said Ms. Workkala. A postman came twice a week on time by boat to pick up or deliver newspapers, letters, drawings and models that produced or inspected their parents on vacation their busan. She only remembered a summer – 1971 – when the couple interrupted his stay to travel to London, where her father received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art.
In order to see how Lapland has shaped on Tapio Workkala, you only have to compare Ultima Thule glasses with the Venetian glass companies Venini Venetian Glass Company. With several colors that are divided by seams that circle their throats and bellies, the vases have a sweet, carnival elegance. They differ from the collection of the Glacier Ultima Thule as the Palace of the Doge comes from an iceberg.
And yet Ms. Effala pointed out that Venice and Lapland are not so different. Both are aqueous places with long, dark boats and a special light quality. Lapland was a world for her father, but it was also a map of creative awareness that was driven by observation, intuition and curiosity, an ultima theater of the mind.
To really appreciate his objects, you had to see them as an organic procession with everything in harmony, just like the harmonizing structures that have accumulated in its northern outpost.
“A life's work is also a landscape,” she said.