Af Camilla Zuleger

2. juni 2025

With movement, color, and sensuality, Verner Panton created a radical alternative to the classic Danish design tradition.

Imagine a cave of soft, organic shapes in shades of blue, purple, and red. The ceiling isn’t just a flat surface above you – it’s a textile sky that undulates overhead. The floor, too, rises in gentle hills or forms seating nooks with cushioned walls as backrests. There are no sharp edges, no right angles, no boundaries between furniture and architecture – everything blends together in one continuous landscape.

Lamps are hidden behind fabric, creating a dreamlike atmosphere where up and down, left and right, seem to melt into one another. This is not just a room – it’s a total experience, enveloping all the senses and inviting the body to explore, lie down, crawl, and move freely.
Visiona II – Panton’s groundbreaking installation from 1970 – challenged every convention of how space could be experienced. The installation is a concentrated expression of Panton’s design philosophy: a life in motion, bursting with color and sensory richness.

Danish Design’s Enfant Terrible

Born in 1926 on the island of Funen, Verner Panton first studied at the Odense Technical School before graduating as an architect from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1951. Though best known for his furniture and lighting, his architectural approach to designing spaces that support a good life shines through all his work.

His first job after graduation was at Arne Jacobsen’s architectural firm. But Panton quickly became a counterpoint to the established Danish design scene—defined by figures like Jacobsen, Hans J. Wegner, and Børge Mogensen. While they created tightly choreographed designs, Panton embraced playful freedom.

»There’s a lack of furniture that invites change and play,« he once wrote to his friend and collaborator Peter Weiss.

His answer to that gap was the Phantom chair—a flowing, sculptural seat meant for lounging or climbing. That’s what Panton lived and worked for: curious play, movement, and an exploration of what life could be if we surrendered to color, sensation, and instinct.

A Life in Motion and Color

Panton was a colorful character himself – he only wore blue. But his signature style didn’t stem from aesthetic concerns. Rather, he was driven to create the tools people needed to live dynamically. His visions went far beyond visual appeal or mainstream taste.

Firmly believing that humans aren’t meant to sit still, he designed many of his chairs to tilt, rock, swivel, or otherwise encourage new ways of inhabiting space.

It was a chair, in fact, that solidified his place on the international design scene: the S Chair—also known as the Panton Chair – which is said to have been inspired by the silhouette of the female body. It’s arguably the most photographed chair in the world.

There Are No Ugly Colors

Panton pushed back against Denmark’s dominant design ethos of white walls, natural materials, and handcrafted aesthetics. His designs exploded with color, and he was obsessed with the idea of producing furniture entirely through industrial processes. The futuristic but now-classic Globe lamp, for instance, may look like it’s made of glass, but it’s actually acrylic—a man-made material that shares little with nature.

Today, the lamp is available with a white core—but that’s likely a choice Panton himself would have rejected. Though he famously said there are no ugly colors, he rebelled against everything white.
»The only color I’ve ever heard you speak badly of is white. White means surrender, and you wanted a special tax on the color white,« wrote Niels-Jørgen Kaiser in a memorial piece for his close friend in the architectural magazine Arkitekten after Panton’s death in 1998.

Immersive Worlds in Every Color

Throughout his life and career, Panton was focused on the good life—and he saw color as essential to human well-being. That’s why many people, when thinking of Panton, picture vivid reds, oranges, purples, or blues. These colors dominated his total installations, such as the cafeteria at the German news magazine Der Spiegel, where screaming orange walls and furniture create a nearly psychedelic backdrop for lunch.

The same goes for his art installations Visiona 0 (1968) and Visiona II (1970), as well as more commercial projects like the redesign of Copenhagen’s Cirkusbygningen, where color takes over every row of seats, column, wall, and floor.

Today, you’re more likely to find a single chair or a Flower Pot lamp in homes both in Denmark and abroad. But Panton’s vision of creating holistic environments that stimulate all the senses has never truly gone mainstream. Still, his approach to space feels more relevant than ever—and continues to be enjoyed whenever museums stage new interpretations of his playful, immersive worlds.