Reflections on a Soup Spoon (original) (raw)

Arts|Reflections on a Soup Spoon

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/arts/14iht-design14.html

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Design

May 11, 2012

NEW YORK — It is a single piece of metal weighing just over an ounce. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as: “A utensil consisting essentially of a straight handle with an enlarged and hollowed end-piece used for conveying soft or liquid food to the mouth.” This particular example was designed to convey a specific type of “soft or liquid food” — soup.

It is a soup spoon. Not just any soup spoon, but the best I have ever used. Not that I am a connoisseur of either soup or spoons, but it soon became evident that this one was special. It looks striking and feels pleasant to hold, but, best of all, it somehow makes the soup taste better, which is, surely, what a well-designed soup spoon should do.

Let’s be clear, with global poverty soaring and the biosphere deteriorating, there are far weightier challenges for designers to wrestle with. But if special utensils for eating soup exist, as they have since the 1700s, they should be designed as intelligently as possible (just like anything else) which made me wonder why this one is so appealing.

It isn’t new, on the contrary, it was designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in the late 1950s for use in one of his architectural projects, the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Then in his late 50s, Jacobsen was the most famous architect in Denmark and was renowned internationally for the sensitivity with which he softened the ascetic Modernist style with gentle curves and sensual finishes.

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Arne Jacobsen.Credit...Fritz Hansen

The new hotel was to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” for which Jacobsen would design the building and most of its contents, down to doorknobs and spoons. He collaborated with Denmark’s finest manufacturers on the furniture and fittings, including Royal Copenhagen on the dinnerware and Georg Jensen on the cutlery.

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