Danish School

The Danish School is the design and craft movement born in Copenhagen in the middle of the twentieth century that changed the course of handmade pipes worldwide. Carrying into pipes the functionalist (funktionalisme) sensibility that dominated Danish architecture and furniture design in the 1930s and 40s, the school is known for lines stripped of ornament, a rigor that puts smoking mechanics ahead of aesthetics, and a master-apprentice tradition passed down through generations.

Today a significant share of the world's independent pipe makers, wherever they work, are considered heirs of this school, directly or indirectly.

Origins: the Copenhagen Workshops

The movement's founding figure is generally held to be Sixten Ivarsson, who began working during the Second World War years at Suhr's pipe repair workshop (Suhr's Pibereparation) in Copenhagen. Work that began as repair turned in time into design; in Ivarsson's hands, the pipe was rethought according to the era's Danish design principle that "form follows function."

After Ivarsson, the workshop's foreman role passed to Poul Rasmussen, who later set up his own workshop and died in 1967. Known for fine-lined classic shapes and a coloring technique referred to as "laboratory staining," this workshop trained figures such as Emil Chonowitsch, Björn Bengtsson and Tom Eltang; after Rasmussen's death, his wife Anne Julie carried the workshop on. Copenhagen's long-established pipe and tobacco shop W.Ø. Larsen also opened its own workshop in the early 1960s; Else Larsen, known as Denmark's first female pipe maker, along with Poul Ilsted and Hans "Former" Nielsen, worked there. This workshop closed in the mid-1970s.