Sixten Ivarsson

Sixten Ivarsson (1910-2001) was a Swedish-born pipe maker who worked in Copenhagen. His legacy lies less in individual pipes than in method: he placed at the center of his bench a hand-shaping technique that freed the bowl from the symmetry imposed by the lathe, and in the same years supplied models for a factory's mass production.

In this way, pipe making in Denmark became both a craft capable of standing on its own and a design language recognizable from a distance; today it is regarded as the starting point of what is called the Danish school.

From Repair Shop to Independent Bench

According to records, he was born in the Skåne region of southern Sweden and settled in Copenhagen in the mid-1930s. The war had halted the entry of English and French-made pipes into the Danish market; the pipes people already owned were repaired again and again, and repair shops worked at an unusual pace. Ivarsson entered the trade under these conditions, at a repair shop called Suhr's; for years he did nothing but repairs, then began making new pipes on the same bench. The reason he left Suhr's was a disagreement with the workshop owner over how to share the royalty arising from shapes he had supplied to a pipe factory. When he opened his own workshop in the early 1950s, he became, according to records, the first person in Denmark to do this work independently.