Day: 2 May 2011

Jo Hammerborg joined Fog & Mørup as head of design in 1957 and retired in 1980, only a short time before both his own death and the demise of the company. The Hammerborg era was F&M’s most successful period – both creatively and commercially – as Hammerborg’s distinctively understated modernist designs and the unremittingly high standards of quality he imposed at the company won international acclaim and generated huge markets both at home and abroad. The sleek Hammerborg style spawned copies and lookalikes by the dozen, but none were able to attain the perfection in proportion or the unparalleled quality that are the hallmarks of a Hammerborg creation.

Hammerborg’s prolific work rate generated an astonishingly wide catalogue of light designs, all of which have survived the test of time and look as fresh and compelling today as they did 40 or 50 years ago. They include the Alfa, Askepot, Beta, Central, Classic, Club, Corona, Cylinder, Dano, Diskos, Eiffel, Etna, Flet, Flora, Flora-Lite, Fuga, Golf, Heliotrop, Horisont, Hydra, Juno, Kardinal, Kastor, Kegle, Kubus, Life, Lotus, Medio, Metro, Milieu, Monolit, Nordlys, Nova, Optica, Orient, Pastel, Penta, Pisa, President, Poker, Pompei, Regent, Reijmyre, Roulet, Runda, Saturn, Sektor, Senior, Sera, Single, Skala, Studio, Tarok, Trombone, Tunika, Ultra, Variant, Vega, Zenith, Zero and Zone.



This much we have been able to piece together. But beyond that – about the man himself – very little information is available. Who was Jo Hammerborg? We know that his full name was Johannes Hammerborg, that he was born in 1920 and died in 1982. Per H Hansen and Klaus Petersen’s Den Store Danske Møbelguide tells us that he trained in 1944 as a silversmith and subsequently studied at Copenhagen’s Art Academy before joining Georg Jensen to work as a silversmith from 1949 to 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the 1966 special edition of Mobilia magazine that was entirely dedicated to a 100-year retrospective of Georg Jensen makes no mention of Hammerborg or his work.

The only known photograph of Hammerborg is the one reproduced above, a tantalising portrait in which his eyes seem to pierce through the blurry image and speak directly to us. People who worked with Hammerborg at Fog & Mørup say he was physically small in stature – almost child-sized. But beyond that, it seems no one has anything to say, and although in the past decade his name has become a worldwide byword for innovative lighting design, there is no sign of any contribution to the global conversation about him from any spouse, children, siblings or other family members.

Since those who knew him personally or worked with him will today be of a certain age, there is every possibility that they will take the information they hold with them to the grave, and their precious insights into this diminutive giant of lighting design may be lost forever. We therefore appeal to anyone who has even the smallest snippet of information to share it with us. Leave a response to this post, email us at info@vintage-danish-lights.com, or simply write it all down and give it to someone who will share it with the world for posterity.