KNUD HOLSCHER DESIGN

The list of international design prizes and awards, Knud Holscher has received for his work, is impressive and constantly growing. This makes him one of the most honoured contemporary Danish architects and designers.

Knud Holscher graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1957. From 1960-64, he worked as a partner in the office of Arne Jacobsen and was the project architect for St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Architect and industrial designer Knud Holscher is well known not only in Denmark, but also in the rest of the world. His buildings include the University of Odense, the additions to the Royal Theatre and the extension of Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen and the National Museum in Bahrain. His most famous work in the field of industrial design is the d-line series of door handles, and his most recent being the Quinta spotlights for the German company ERCO.

Holscher is an outstanding representative of an architectural attitude that was more or less neglected by Deconstructivism and the ruling aestheticism characteristic of the last decades. Thus, he still believes that architecture and design are essentially a matter of daily life. His enormous scope ranging from classic tectonic business to the design of everyday things such as lavatories and vacuum jugs indicates his devotion to overall solutions as well as his passionate attention to detail. In this one cannot but recognize the Influence of the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen with whom Holscher started his career.

For Holscher architecture and design have nothing to do with accidental qualities that vary through time according to aesthetic conventions; rather he conceives it as an intrinsic dimension in our metabolism with the world. For him designing is solving problems. It has to do with our body, with our hands, with our surroundings before it becomes a fancy category of the mind.

Good design accumulates all the aspects of a specific use in one form and thereby reduces complexity to such an extent that the form seems almost natural. A key word for both the architect and the industrial designer Knud Holscher is technological simplification, but nevertheless by means of technology. There is no romantic nor nostalgic spirit in his works except for the fundamental care that he thinks architecture and industrial design should still be rooted in.

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