Furniture / Bodil Kjaer, A beautiful executive desk

BODIL KJAER (b.1932)

A BEAUTIFUL EXECUTIVE DESK

A free-standing rosewood rectangular desk with chromium-plated steel frame, top with four integrated drawers.

Manufactured by E. Pedersen & Søn.

Label of the company.

Circa 1960.

Dimensions

Height : 73 cm (29 in.)

Width : 200 cm (79 in.)

Depth : 100 cm (39 in.)

Note

Born in Denmark in 1932, Bodil Kjaer attended the School for Interior Architecture in Copenhagen and the Royal College of Art 

in London during the sixties and was also a professor at the University of Maryland.

An eclectic career involved building homes and offices, city planning, but also created a range of furniture and objects 

to match the needs of contemporary architecture. 

This program led to a fruitful collaboration with leading figures of modern architecture such as Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph 

or Jose Luis Sert.

It also led to the creation of a desk for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., in 1959.

It was intended to fulfill the requirements of the new working environment as she stated herself in 1995 :

«As an architect and designer I often ran into problems of finding furniture that would express the same form-ideas as those 

we employed in the buildings we designed and which would, at the same time, express the ideas of contemporary management. 

The office furniture I found on the market in 1959, I found to be clumsy and confining, while neither the new architecture 

nor the new management thinking was the least bit clumsy or confining. 

My clients, for whom I was designing office spaces, more often than not were flexible people with open minds. 

They were bright and ambitious, and had many new ideas as to how run industries and institutions. 

Many of these ideas that materialized around 1960 have since spread and become accepted as the way to do things today. »

Literature

Mobilia 1961.

E. Pedersen and Sons A/S, manufacturer’s catalog.

Price on request.