The Stool 60 designed by the architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) in 1933 represents what Aalto himself viewed as the most important discovery in his furniture design. The stool is constructed of a round seat in solid birch and three legs mounted directly to the underside of the seat without the need for complicated connecting elements. The innovation was the idea of the “bent knee” which meant that a piece of solid birch wood was sawn open at the end in the direction of the fibers just below the level of the planned bend and thin pieces of wood veneer strips were then inserted and glued into the grooves. Afterwards the wood was bent to the desired angle, in this case 90 degrees.

The production method meant a simplified bending process and gave the component an increased stability and Aalto patented it in 1933. [1] With this technique Aalto could create furniture that was stable, hardwearing, and suitable for standardization, but keep the warm and organic qualities of wood which he preferred to the cold tubular steel. As with most of Aalto’s furniture designs the stool was designed for a building project, the Discussion and Lecture room in the Viipuri Library (1927-1935). When not in use, the functional design made it possible to stack the stools in decorative serpentine towers – an innovation suitable for a room that had multiple functions. [2]

The Stool 60 represents Aaltos views on design and how interlinked they were with architecture. Aalto spoke of the furniture leg as “the columns little sister”. Through the creation of the new leg construction, he had transformed the style of his furniture just as “clearly as the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns each resulted in a special order or style of architecture.” [3] Aaltos simple L-leg was was followed by the Y leg in 1947, the fanshaped X leg in 1954 and a fourth “order”, the H-leg, a leg made of wooden strings. [4]

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