Roundtable:

Danish designers and critics throughout the 20th century. The receptions of modern, foreign impulses like art nouveau, functionalism and beyond have been followed by different sketches of age-old tradition to explain how Denmark could resist, temper or naturalize incoming styles. I will present some of these reactions and the understandings of tradition behind them. We can discuss how these reactions places Danish design in relation to the centres of historical development. As an autonomous centre itself, as a voluntarily chosen periphery or even as a pure and sound province – produced by self-exoticization? While the other Nordic countries often have seen Denmark as their bridgehead to the European continent, Danes have at some points seen their role as being a dike or bulwark to the tides of arbitrary fashions or uncultivated modernity. Some reasons for this lies of course in differences in geo-political positions. Even the most international Danish designer as Arne Jacobsen or Poul Kjærholm are thought to have ’grounded’ their impulses from Eames and Mies van der Rohe in local traditions of materiality and usability. I will not discuss these examples, but present different expressions of this understanding. There have been some research into the foreign reception of the Nordic countries at international exhibitions, see especially Ingeborg Glambek ”’Nordic Form’ as seen from the outside”, 2009, but little systematic research on the reverse Danish receptions. And this might be a result of this self-understanding.