Bruno Mathsson (13 January 1907 – 17 August 1988) was a Swedish architect and furniture designer whose ideas aligned with functionalism, modernism, as well as the Swedish crafts tradition.[1]
Mathsson was raised in the town of Värnamo in the Småland region of Sweden, the son of a master cabinet maker.[2] After a short time of education in school, he started to work in his father's gallery. He soon found a great interest in furniture and especially chairs, their function and design. In the 1920s and 30s, he developed a technique for building bentwood chairs with hemp webbing. The first model, called the Grasshopper, was used at Värnamo Hospital in 1931.[3]
Edgar Kaufmann Jr., director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), collected Mathsson's chairs and included them in several exhibitions in the 1940s.[4] Kaufmann considered Mathsson's importance in furniture design on par with that of Alvar Aalto.[5] Kaufmann and his family also had a Mathsson chair at their house Fallingwater.[6]
Mathsson was also an accomplished architect; he completed about 100 structures in the 1940s and 50s.[7] He was the first architect in Sweden to build all-glass structures with heated floors. His furniture showroom in Värnamo (1950) was a significant example; it is well-preserved and open to the public today. For his glass houses, he developed double- and triple-pane insulated glass units called "Bruno-Pane".[8]
He travelled extensively in the United States and was strongly influenced by the solar houses of George Fred Keck. Mathsson's architecture was also influenced by a visit to the Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames in March 1949, just as it was being completed.[1]
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