Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it.

Ed Be and Jared Blake remember when they started selling Alvar Aalto’s work in their New York furniture store, Lichen, in 2020. Soon after, as they began manufacturing their own pieces—among them a sharp pivot cabinet and a great minimal dining table—the famous Finnish architect’s oeuvre loomed larger.

“If you try to do anything furniture-related with simplicity and grace, you’re going to run into Aalto and [Donald] Judd,” says Blake. “It’s like trying to make a new kind of water. How much can you really do?”

Regarding Aalto’s Stool 60, currently celebrating 90 years in continuous production under Artek, the company Aalto founded, the answer is not a lot.

Today, as when Artek started producing them in the 1930s, 60 stools are essential decor. They’re infinitely stackable and sturdy, and have multiple uses, whether as a chair or a side table. Vintage pieces develop nice, yellowed patina if exposed to the sun; the new models can, too, over time. Old 60s generally auction for less than $1,000, while new productions ask upwards of $400. When they were first produced, they were modestly priced, which made them a fixture across Finland.

Sean Sullivan, a 35-year-old creative consultant who moved from the U.S. to Helsinki in 2020, sees Artek at every turn. “Jean Sibelius, Aalto and a couple of dudes from their wars,” he says, “are on their national Rushmore.” (Helsinki’s airport is known to have held flights for the architect when he ran late, and his face appeared on the country’s 50-mark bill from around 1986 through 2002.) In Finland, Artek is almost a birthright: a daycare on Sullivan’s route has “tables and the mini 66 chairs everywhere,” he says. “You’re literally born into sitting on Artek furniture.”

If Artek is Finland’s national brand par excellence, abroad it’s a standard bearer of restrained, functional design. Made from curved, minimal birchwood, its products—like the 153 bench, a minimal masterpiece, and the 42 and 401 armchairs with their familiar, pared-down silhouettes—form the grammar for a thick thread of midcentury-modern style.

One of the best things about decades-old objects like these are the enduring philosophical statements that come with the work. Through his designed items and buildings—and through books and speeches (and love letters to his wife, Aino, it turns out)—Aalto advanced the idea that natural forms and shapes could nonetheless be rational and modern. The 60 is the most visible example of this theory in practice. It’s simple, functional, and made out of affordable, abundant materials. It’s a technological and ideological achievement… and, what’s more, it’s beautiful.

For some, the 60 is more than just a functional item. In the past decade, the stool has evolved into an objet d’art by fashion houses. Comme des Garçons included a flowery stool with their series of chairs, while streetwear brand Supreme’s flip on the subject leaned on a checkerboard pattern. Marianne Goebl, Artek’s managing director, says these brands appreciate the stool’s cultural impact, its “design and balance,” and that its production process was a “technical solution” to a problem that is perhaps now most attributed to Ikea: how to flat-ship beautiful, affordable, and multifunctional furniture.

Little has changed since the 60 was introduced in 1933; production requires the same 48 steps. To make a 60, three single pieces of wood are bent to form patented curved legs, which are then attached to the seat with three screws each. The seat itself is made from the legs’ offcuts. It’s a gesamtkunstwerk, so to speak, much like Aalto’s famously detailed architectural commissions: every step is thoroughly considered, amounting to a “green” design long before the term existed.

To be sure, sustainability wasn’t what drove Aalto’s theorizing when he dreamt up the 60. Goebl tells me the stool’s practicality and affordability sprang out of Finland’s material conditions at the time. Having declared independence from Russia less than 20 years prior, the country was growing, but poor. Finns didn’t have much cash—they expected their furniture to last, and not require yearly replacement. Birch was everywhere, so Artek used it, hence the trademark light-wood construction.

For the 60’s 90th anniversary, Artek is producing a series of three new iterations that Goebl says highlight the manufacturing process while refocusing on materials. “We’re bringing back natural features,” she says. One model, the Villi, a collaboration with Italian design studio Formafantasma, uses parts of the birch tree with marks and imperfections.

The novel process is being planned for other Artek designs, adds Goebl. The hope is that by using more “wild birch,” she says, Aalto’s works will be more connected with the forest they come from. The emphasis on the wood’s grain emphasizes the idea behind the vintage productions, making for a full-circle moment.

And so, 90 years later, it’s still about process. The 60, then and now classic and forward-looking, has a lot of theory and thought behind it. That’s helped it endure. But so has its aesthetic, its multiple uses, and its accessibility. These are characteristics everyone is after, but ones that are hard to synthesize when designing, it turns out. “Once you start speaking a certain design language,” says Blake, “you realize they’ve been speaking it longer.”

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If purchasing an original 60 stool is out of reach, you can get the aesthetic with a little digging on secondhand sites like Live Auctioneers. From more popular pieces to those lesser known, below are a few of my favorite enduring artifacts designed by Aalto.

Ubiquitous

The 64 high stool, also designed in 1933, is as minimal as the 60, but a foot taller. It’s less widely seen and less versatile—it’s not as stackable with its tall legs, and not exactly the right height for a bar table. But at 30-inches high it may be the perfect bar stool. They run about $100 or so used on auction sites.

Sleeper

One of Alto’s more futuristic pieces, the 611 chair is one out of a few that relies on right angles. It creates a nice incongruity: we’re so used to seeing rounded soft birch and natural angles from Aalto that this thing jumps out as a surprise. From some angles it recalls Joe Colombo’s Universale chair—also a stacker—but in birch. It commands high prices at auction.

Rare

It’s hard to surface a rare item by a furniture designer whose face was literally on currency, and so we’ll settle for things that are less than omnipresent. The 111 shelves, from 1934, are somewhere between a perfect bookshelf and a modular storage systems. Originals run in the $10,000 range on auction sites, with more recent models occasionally going for less.

More from Sami Reiss:

Why Do Homes by Modern Masters Keep Getting Torn Down?

Related Reading:

The Inimitable Artek Stool—and 16 Other Alvar Aalto Designs to Bring Warm Modernism Into Your Home

Architect Josh Blumer Explains Why He Backpacked Through Europe With an Alvar Aalto Vase

Design Classic: Alvar Aalto’s Artek Stools