Friso Kramer

Background

Friso Kramer (13 August 1922, Amsterdam – 14 February 2019, Amsterdam) was a Dutch industrial and furniture designer, interior architect and teacher. The son of the architect Pieter Lodewijk Kramer, he studied interior design at the Institute of Applied Arts in Amsterdam from 1941 to 1943, where his teachers included Mart Stam. In 1948 he joined De Cirkel, a steel-furniture manufacturer that had merged with the Ahrend group in 1939.

Signature Style

Kramer's furniture is strictly function-led and reduced to a simple formal language. At De Cirkel he worked with industrial methods such as cut-out sheet steel, producing pieces that are light, strong and suited to serial production.

Notable Works

• Revolt chair (1953)
• Reform table (1955)
• Result chair (1958), with Wim Rietveld, relaunched by HAY with Ahrend
• Repose and Resort armchairs (1960)
• Kuip swivel chair (1966)
• Seating bench WKH for Wilkhahn (1967)
• Conical street lamps for The Hague

Legacy

In 1963 Kramer co-founded the design office Total Design; from 1971 to 1983 he was again at Ahrend as art director. He was appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts in 1979 and received prizes including the BKI Prize (1961), the Piet Zwart Prize (1983) and the Kho Liang Ie Prize (1990). He is regarded as one of the most important Dutch designers of the 1950s and 1960s.