Stockholms Auktionsverk - Helsinki, the world's oldest auction house, is selling a truly unique item at the international auction scene by renowned Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto.
Manufactured in the years 1974–75, the round table with six nickel-plated shelves and a two-part ashtray on top of the tabletop is marked AA Valaistustyö Ky. The model for the table was designed by Alvar Aalto as early as the 1920s, but the first table had a smaller ashtray. In the early 1970s, Aalto returned to the original round table with the six polished tops, which he now modernised with a slightly larger ashtray placed further out towards the table edge.
“When you look at the table’s functionalist design language with the round floors, it reappears in Aalto’s architecture, for example in the Pemar sanatorium, and also in the luminaires Beehive and Angel Wing,” says Dan von Koskull, Specialist - Furniture and design at Stockholms Auktionsverk - Helsinki.
The table would be of the highest quality and the address was already set at MoMA, New York. The table was a commissioned work by the museum and with this work Aalto would have placed himself in the same distinguished company as Ellen Gray, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, whom he greatly admired.
As fate would have it, the delivery was interrupted when manufacturer Valaistustyö Ky’s founder Viljo Hirvonen fell ill and died in 1975 and the company ceased to exist. The table never came on board the boat to New York and the following year Aalto also died. The order to MoMA was thus never completed. The table has been privately owned ever since and will now be sold at this spring’s auction Modern Art & Design in Helsinki on April 24th.
The asking price is set at € 50,000 to 70,000.
Photo: Stockholms Auktionsverk - Helsinki
