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Art Clock Tower
Verner Panton1996
The Olympic Museum
Lausanne, Switzerland
Tower formed of 49 coloured rings in seven colours and a large Swiss Swatch watch at the centre.
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Details
- Title: Art Clock Tower
- Creator Lifespan: 13 February 1926 - 5 September 1998
- Creator Nationality: Danish
- Creator Gender: Male
- Creator Death Place: Copenhagen, Denmark
- Creator Birth Place: Gamtofte, Denmark
- Date Created: 1996
- Designer: Verner Panton
- Description: Sculpture donated by the Swatch Group SA to the IOC in 1995.
- Collection information: The Milan designer Alessandro Mendini and the Swatch company organised a competition to design and create “Art Clock Towers” in various cities around the world. Eleven international designers answered the call, and in 1995 Verner Panton and Design/Production presented a tower prototype. It was composed of 63 individually coloured rings. They were put together in Lausanne in 1996 on the occasion of the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. The sculpture is now on display in the Olympic Park with only 49 rings.
- Artistic school or movement: Verner Panton moved to Odense on the same island in 1944 to enrol at the Technical College, where he became involved with the Danish resistance against the German occupation. In 1947, he started an architectural degree at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Arts. From 1950 to 1952, he worked as an assistant to the architect Arne Jacobsen and helped him on his “Ant Chair” work. In 1955, he created his own studio of design and architecture, and Fritz Hansen launched Panton’s first mass-produced pieces of furniture, the “Tivoli Chair” and the “Bachelor Chair”. But the “Cone Chair” was his real first success, a chair he designed for his parents’ restaurant in 1959. His popularity enabled him to experiment with new techniques and materials – mainly plastic – and create furniture never produced before, such as the inflatable chair or the “Flying Chair”. Panton’s furniture was made of vibrant colours and geometric forms inspired by the Pop Art movement. In 1963, he settled in Basle. In collaboration with Vitra, the European licensee of Herman Miller, he developed the famous “Panton Chair” in 1967, the first cantilevered chair made from a single piece of plastic. His modernist and happy style was totally snubbed during the 1970s, before a spectacular comeback in the mid-90s, when his furniture was reissued and featured in many set decorations and photo shoots.
- Type: Sculpture
- Rights: International Olympic Committee, 2003, ©IOC/G.Peter
- Medium: Sculpture made of galvanised iron
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