Pira

Product Description

Pira

The original Pira shelf designed in 1954 was as contradictory as the man who conceived it. Olle Pira (1927-2018) was a traditional master cabinet-maker who crafted cherry, maple and matured oak with age-old skills. Yet he won a place at the renowned Konstfack school of art, craft and design, the birthplace of concepts ahead of their times. And became the first Swede to win a gold medal at the Triennale in Milan in 1952.

Pira is a metallic work of art that creates a centre-piece wherever it stands. Yet each shelf carries up to 50 kg, thanks to its sheet-steel construction with an integral ridge. Or indeed, 350 kg in each section. Enough for life’s treasures. Or necessities. Or both.

Pira is the sum of many parts. An interlocked series of joints, poles, flats and triangles, each no longer than a metre yet extendable to reach most ceilings from all floors. With machined tolerances down to 0.02mm, yet all as rugged as the machines that cut them.

Modular, yet assembled it seems to have been built as one. As a jointless centrepiece with no joints, beginnings and ends.

Pira's metalwork reassures. Yet its walnut and white oak bookends and cabinets pacify. A technical feat but also a beautiful one. Two schools in one space: the welcoming and the working.

Thanks to the efforts of some of Sweden’s most bright and wayward minds, it’s a masterpiece, complex and sophisticated, but capable of creating calm and wellbeing wherever it lives.