Bodil Kjaer

Bodil Kjaer (1932-) was one of the great pioneers of Danish design. Her most famous creations all date back to a handful of years at the turn of the decade of the '50s and the beginning of that of the' 60s and have only recently been the subject of a successful critical rediscovery thanks to reissues curated by brands such as Karakter, Cassina, Fritz Hansen and Carl Hansen & Søn. She was a student of Finn Juhl, but she soon detached herself from the tradition of Scandinavian design by moving shortly after her studies in the United States, first to New York and then to Boston, and there she received strong creative influences from designers such as Charles & Ray Eames. At the center of her vision there has always been the relationship between furniture and space: the pieces she designed were not initially intended for mass production, but for reasoned insertion in a specific context. However, this did not prevent them from becoming true icons, as happened to the desk designed in 1959 (and re-proposed by Karakter with the simple name of "Office Desk"), which ended up appearing in several television programs and even in three films by James Bond saga. Bodil Kjaer also worked for the large London studio Arup (1967-1969) and was a professor at the University of Maryland (1982-1989).