This is a reinterpretation of Stool 60 originally designed by Alvar Aalto in 1933.

The original Stool 60 was designed in 1933. After much research, Aalto devised a rigid bent element to serve as both a leg and a seat support. He saw this as a 'type' solution in wood, analogous to the concrete piloti of Modernist buildings, or the Doric column. It reduced the stool to its basic industrial components: an L-shaped leg and a circular top. The stool’s quintessentially simple and functionalist design, consisting a timber disk supported by three bent legs, also allows for easy stacking. He called the standard leg of his three-legged stools the 'Doric' leg or the 'bent knee'. Aalto and Otto Korhonen patented (in Scandinavia and Britain) the method by which the Doric legs were formed: thin sawcuts were made along the grain of a piece of birch wood (most of the length of which formed the leg), thereby allowing the necessary flexibility to bend the piece at the top. Into these slots were glued thin sheets of veneer, which, when set, maintained the right-angle bend. At first, the L-shaped legs had to be manufactured by hand, forming the tight curve out of the separate veneers of wood as it was glued, but a machine was soon developed that could perform this action in a hot press.

Hella Jongerius’ reinterpretation of the Stool 60 is her first collaboration with Artek. Rather than the original lacquered birch aesthetic of the original design, Jongerius has coloured the legs and seat in different selectable bold colour combinations which can be custom combined. The effect was to soften the overall look of the form by creating a tonal colour palette around four wood finishes. Two are the existing Artek finishes of silver birch and honey, and two are darker tones: walnut and charcoal stain, which adds depth and warmth.

This stool was acquired as part of the Shekou Project, an international partnership between the V&A and China Merchant Shekou Holdings (CMSK) to open a new cultural platform called Design Society in Shekou. It was included in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Values of Design’, in the V&A Gallery at Design Society in a section exploring the critical issue of cost in design practice and looks at notions of originality in design when compared to cheaper copies.