80 years old | Barbro Kulvik cherishes his design tradition throughout his family and throughout Finland

We’re sitting at a beautiful and very thin table. It is Barbro Kulvikin self designed. Behind him is a photographic work, also Kulvik’s handprint. At one end of the table is a giant jug he designed, at the other end Rut Brykin designed bowl.

Indeed, Kulvi and his designer spouse Antti Siltavuori The elegant Helsinki home looks very different from the childhood home in Kulvik’s Engelinaukio, which he describes as an “Art Nouveau home”.

“As a kid, I was nervous about having too much croissants,” Kulvik says.

Jugend’s aesthetics were revoked from his grandfather, an architect who had once been at work Lars Sonckin in the office. When the parents divorced, the design language of the home also changed.

“I came home from school, and by that time the apartment had been emptied. There was only one white rococo chair I had ever seen. I remember watching it in all its simplicity and lines and thinking who it is. ”

The chair was the mother, an interior designer who visited the Ateneum, with whom Kulvik and his two sisters moved from Eira to Taka-Töölö.

Barbro Kulvik is inherited a love for shaping, especially from her mother, who was with her classmates Gunnel Nymanin and Kaj Franckin such design big names. For Kulvik, too, studying the field seemed obvious.

When he applied to the Ateneum College of Art and Design, he was offered a completely new orientation option, industrial design. Kulvik applied there and also got there.

A lot was demanded of the students (the first ten percent of the least successful were pruned on Christmas Eve), but Kulvik recalls that in bright weather.

“I was terribly happy to be able to study there. I got to think about how anything works and if this could be the case. I also got to have discussions and quarrel. I was looking forward to Kaj Franck’s weekly critiques, which gave a lot to his entire future career. ”

A husband was also found in the school, Siltavuori, who started in the same year.

Design for Finland has been a top sport since the 1950s. Even in the speech, names are teeming with names From Armi Ratia to Timo Sarpaneva and From Tapio Wirkkala to Vuokko Nurmesniemi.

On the other hand, the couple also talks about the upheavals in the field: the extension of design to heavy industry, the critique of disposable culture, ergonomics and the designer who visited Finland as well. Viktor Papanekin ecological design ideas.

Kulvik is well acquainted with the tradition and currents of the industry. From the beginning, his career has also included telling and lecturing about design, recording and celebrating it.

When there was talk of a crisis in domestic design in the 1970s, Kulvik was involved in brainstorming Form Function Finland. And when the magazine was founded in 1980, he started it as editor-in-chief.

“The Form Function was set up to have someone’s voice heard. It appeared only in English: it was intended to be heard elsewhere in Finland. ”

However, Kulvik emphasizes that domestic design is not just a kind of nostalgia.

“Even today, we have absolutely fantastic textile artists and absolutely brilliant potters. That’s the way it is, ”he says.

He is therefore concerned about the narrowing of art education and the discontinuation of subjects. Education is a prerequisite for quality.

“I think if something closes and stops, it won’t come back. Competence does not return in the same way. ”

Kulvik and Siltavuori have surrounded themselves not only with design but also with its creators. They live part of their time in Fiskars, a locality populated by artisans, designers and artists, to which they moved in 1989.

The fourth-generation Helsinki resident had no difficulty adapting to Fiskars’ peaceful environment.

“Yrjö Kukkapuro went in to see us and said he did not understand how to move to the land, ‘you are tired a year to watch the squirrels jump from tree to tree’. People did not want to understand that we had a short trip to the airport – not much longer than from Helsinki, ”says Kulvik.

There has also been use for air connections. Kulvik has lectured on domestic design around the world and has taken exhibitions with his wife from Fiskars to both Tokyo and Mexico City.

The next bigger show is already underway, and Kulvik’s second ongoing project is related to the area: he is making a record of the first years of the Fiskars community.

“Those first ten years have rightly been left wondering if there could be one: people were not at war and were not angry with each other. There was no time for that. I had to create and do something to get this started. Everyone has brought something into it. ”