Paavo Tynell
How many of Helsinki's landmark interiors were left untouched by a metalworker's apprentice who never finished school?
Paavo Tynell was the seventh of nine children in a working-class Helsinki family that couldn't afford schooling beyond the elementary years. At sixteen he went straight into an apprenticeship at G.M. Sohlberg's metalsmith workshop ā six years as a sheet-metal worker, then a further year training as a blacksmith, his final project a brass light fixture. Morentz shows his work as it was intended: fixtures where craftsmanship in brass and steel does the work that ornament usually does elsewhere.
The apprentice who lit Helsinki
That hands-on training in sheet metal shaped everything that followed. In 1918 Tynell co-founded Taito and became its managing director and chief designer, working alongside figures including Alvar Aalto; by the 1930s the company had turned exclusively to lighting and become the trendsetter of the Finnish industry, with major commissions such as Helsinki's Parliament House. Tynell served as chairman of Ornamo, Finland's association of industrial designers, and trained a generation of young designers as drafting assistants at Taito ā among them Helena Turpeinen, a glass designer he married in 1947.
In 1948 Tynell travelled to New York to oversee the installation of Taito's lighting at Finland House, work that drew coverage in the New York press. His most prominent American commission followed: the office lighting for Trygve Lie, the United Nations' first Secretary-General, in the new UN Building.
Perforated brass across a city
Tynell's lamps are recognisable by their delicate detailing ā perforated brass and metal shades pierced with stylised leaves, vines and snowflakes that scatter soft, diffused light rather than direct glare. His fixtures still hang in the buildings they were designed for: the chandeliers at Helsinki Central Station, the lit interiors of the Original Sokos Hotel Vaakuna built for the 1952 Olympics, the ballroom of the former Helsinki School of Economics, and the altar candelabra and nave lamps of Meilahti Church.
His snowflake chandeliers, hand-assembled at Taito's Helsinki workshop, remain his most sought-after and least numerous works. Gubi's recent reissues were developed in close collaboration with the Tynell family, studying original examples to restore the exact brasswork and perforation patterns rather than approximating them.