Iittala glassware, with its distinctive red dot decal, first started appearing in my parents’ house in the mid-1980s. At the time I was rather more consumed with another Scandinavian import, Legos. For me, trips to Denmark and Sweden, where we often visited family friends, resonated with a singular obsession—acquiring a brand-new Lego something or other. In 1984, my fascination with the little knobby plastic bricks reached its apex when my father took me to Legoland in Billund, Denmark. For a kid who spent hours building miniature Lego lands, finding myself in a world made of Legos was as near to a religious experience as my secular upbringing allowed.
This past summer I found myself thinking about that historic trip for the first time in years. The memories were triggered by a parallel, albeit more mature, journey my father and I made—driving north from Helsinki, Finland, to Iittala, the small town where the world-renowned com-pany of the same name produces much of their glassware.
Iittala was founded in 1881, and for 50 years focused primarily on utility glassware and pharmaceutical bottles. It wasn’t until the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, and a shift toward handcrafted art glass, that the brand began to make waves. In Paris, ten vases designed by Alvar Aalto, Finland’s master architect, captured the public’s attention. The undulating, asymmetrical designs were based on the free-formed shapes Aalto was simultaneously exploring in his architecture (like the pool at the Villa Mariea). Known simply as the Aalto or Savoy (after the Aalto-designed Helsinki restaurant that commissioned a number of the vases for its interior), the vase would bring Finland, and Iittala, global recognition and a repu-tation for forward-thinking design.
In 1951, these notions were further cemented with Tapio Wirkkala’s installation at the first full-scale postwar Milan Triennale. Wirkkala, Finland’s foremost contributor to 20th-century design, had been employed by Iittala since winning a design competition in 1946 with an etched vase called Finestra (windows). At the Triennale, Wirkkala designed not only the exhibition space but also all 33 of the objects shown. Among these designs were variations on the now iconic Kantarelli (chanterelle) vase—a modernist homage to the trumpet-shaped mushroom. Over the next 30 years, Wirkkala would produce over 400 designs for the company, creating a catalog of works (both production pieces and one-off works of art) that would showcase continual technical advances as well as the combination of natural and artificial forms.
When we arrived in Iittala, we found a small town bordered by stands of birch and pine trees and dominated by a large factory building. Nearby, the buildings of an old farm have been transformed into the Iittala Glass Center, which comprises the Iittala Glass Museum, the i-Shop factory outlet, a café, and a variety of touristic (i.e., inconsequential) stores selling local goods. Of these, the centerpiece is the museum—housed in a former cow shed—which makes for a fitting introduction to the Iittala experience. Two floors of exhibits guide visitors through the glassblowing process and a variety of pieces by Aino and Alvar Aalto, Timo Sarpaneva, Kaj Franck, and of course Tapio Wirkkala (highlights of his work include an almost one-meter-wide glass plate commissioned for President Urho Kekkonen in 1970, and the rare Paadar’s Ice series of vases).
After a bowl of traditional salmon soup at the café, my father and I joined the hourly tour of the factory to watch the glassblowers in action. In a huge corrugated-metal building housing a giant kiln, 20 workers, many of whom have been with Iittala for over 20 years, operated in a synchronized dance of automated machinery and old-world craft. From an observation deck we watched as hot globs of glass were gathered on rods, rotated, dropped into molds, blown into, cooled, and moved onto the next stage in production. The day we visited they were producing Aalto’s Savoy vases—which are still the heart of Iittala’s line, with around 800 made each day—and Tapio glassware. These glasses are initially blown in artificial carbon molds, but their distinctive bubble is later added by hand with a wet stick of ash wood; the hot glass forces the wood to release steam, which in turn creates the bubble. Somewhat ironically, for an indus-trial environment, the wet sticks are stored on a small table in another Wirkkala design, Ultima Thule.
After the temperature became unbearable for our guide (who had obviously grown weary of spending every day near a 2,200 degree kiln), we wrapped up our tour—as is customary for Americans—with retail. I don’t recall what I managed to convince my father to buy me at Legoland, but 20 years from now, I’m sure I’ll still be drinking out of the Wirkkala-designed glasses I bought on this trip.
