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The Danish architect, designer and cultural critic, Poul Henningsen, 1894–1967, was one of the most internationally oriented figures in Danish modernism. His PH-lamp system was a highly praised example of industrial design, produced by Louis Poulsen from 1926 onwards and promoted by figures such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto. Henningsen was also editor-in-chief of Kritisk Revy, published from 1926 to 1928, the Danish critical periodical that was closest to international avant-garde journals in its polemical tone and experimental lay-out. But even if, in Danish public opinion during the 1920s, Henningsen would play the role of a full-blown modernist, he nevertheless maintained that Danish conditions and traditions were distinct and that Danish architecture and art industry had found its own way into modernism, that is to say, he advocated a certain Danish exceptionalism. Accordingly, in the later 1920s, in several articles in Kritisk Revy, he still expressed reservations about Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, whom he saw as being too propagandistic and as reducing modernist ideas to a narrow set of stylistic motifs or even a fad. It took the modernist splendour of the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 to convince him that the doctrines and international idiom of functionalism was a necessary path towards modern culture and, with it, towards an egalitarian society. This change of heart seems to have developed from a somewhat belated re-engagement with cubism, which he understood as a paradigmatic aesthetic turn and a political worldview, and on this basis he came to embrace the international style. Thus, rather than merely a shift in aesthetic preferences, this reveals Henningsen as an interesting example of ongoing negotiations around the role of national traditions and international movements in art, design and architecture in twentieth-century Denmark.

Covering the 1960s and 1970s, this volume explores new ways of investigating, comparing and interpreting the different domains of design culture across the Nordic countries.

Challenging the traditional narrative, this volume argues that the roots of the most prominent features of Nordic design's contemporary significance are not to be found amongst the objects for the home collectively branded as 'Scandinavian Design' to great acclaim in the 1950s, but in the discourses, institutions and practices formed in the aftermath of that oft-told success story, during the turbulent period between 1960 and 1980. This is achieved by employing multidisciplinary approaches to connect the domains of industrial production, marketing, consumption, public institutions, design educations, trade journals as well as public debates and civic initiatives forming a design culture. This book makes a significant contribution to current, international agendas of historiographical critique focusing on transnational relations and the deconstruction of national design histories.

This book will be of interest to scholars in design, design history and Scandinavian studies.