Hans Wegner

1914-2007

Hans J. Wegner was born in 1914 in Tønder, Denmark. At the age of 17, he finished his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker with H. F. Stahlberg. He moved to Copenhagen and attended the School of Arts and Crafts from 1936 – 1938. As a young architect, Wegner joined Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller in Århus, working on furniture design for the new Århus city hall in 1940. In 1944 he designed the first “Chinese chair” in a series of new chairs that were inspired by portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs. The “Wishbone Chair”, designed in 1949 and produced by Carl Hansen & Son in Odense since 1950, became the most successful of all Wegner chairs. He is often referred to as the master of the chair – having designed more than 500 of them; many of these are considered masterpieces of chair design and continue to be collector’s items around the world.