published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Autumn 2009 Issue, Volume #10
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When Loft asked me to write about Thomas Eriksson, I visited the homepage of Stockholm Design Lab, one of the companies of which he is a co-founder, hoping to find an exhaustive personal presentation. To my surprise, I had to scroll through an alphabetic list of employees in order to find him. Instead of photographs, the team was presented as monochromatic circles. Thomas Eriksson himself was a soft grey circle with the title ‘Founder’ only after ‘Creative Director’. An unexpected way, perhaps, to introduce one of the men the Wall Street Journal called “Scandinavia’s corporate branding gurus” but surely appropriate if taken to represent a grey eminence in the field of design. 

Considering their influence, SDL and its sister company Thomas Eriksson Architects seem surprisingly unsung outside the world of design. TEA was founded in 1988 by Eriksson, and had within a few years already worked with Scandinavian giants like IKEA, SAS and Absolut. While leading TEA, Eriksson saw the need for a closer dialogue between architecture and design, and by 1998 Stockholm Design Lab had fully materialized, co-founded by Eriksson, Björn Kusoffsky (Art Director) and Göran Lagerström (Strategist). Since then, brands like H&M, Filippa K and V&S have added to an illustrious and ever expanding client roster. With TEA and SDL’s efforts having such a high visibility, it is interesting that they themselves do not.. For almost a decade I lived less than two blocks away from their headquarters without noticing their discreet sign. Their unobtrusiveness has not spared them international notice, however, and Eriksson finds himself spending an ever increasing amount of time in contact with foreign companies. Recently SDL unveiled an acclaimed collaboration with the Japanese mail-order company ASKUL and designed a series of credit cards for Hyundai. During a few days of e-mail contact with Thomas, he travels between his office, a weekend house in the Stockholm archipelago and a client in Malaga. The global reach, however, is greatly exceeded by their creative scope. A remarkable thing about SDL and TEA is their interdisciplinary cooperation, and rather than using the term ‘sister companies’ it might be more accurate to call them Siamese twins. This holistic approach is unusual, and they profess to be the only company in Scandinavia to work the way they do. I ask Thomas what this cooperation has taught him (or possibly proved to others).

Thomas Eriksson (TE): It shows that all parts work together to constitute the total impression whether we deal with a corporation or a family house. No one can take shortcuts anymore – you must deal with every aspect and format of your company or brand in order to maintain credibility and to earn the trust of an all the more demanding and spoiled customer... David Ottoson (DO): How would you characterize this spoiled customer? TE: A kind of satiation with experiential sensations – you want something that surprises and gives you kicks without knowing what it is or really wanting to pay for it... I think it is a sign of our times that we are in too much of a hurry, have too many options and might not always realize that amazing things take time.

Time is essential to Thomas Eriksson. In the book Nordic Architects, Thomas explained: “We don’t strive for timeless solutions, but we regard time as the most important factor in our process.” His point of view seems to be that both the collaboration and the designs themselves should be lasting, demanding constancy and durability of the designer and design, respectively. The view Thomas takes of constancy was clearly put forward in the interview with J.S. Marcus of the Wall Street Journal: “You always need to be redefining the brand over and over again, forever. Otherwise there won’t be a brand. It’s like having a huge garden with very sensitive orchids.” On the subject of durability, Eriksson mentions the danger that “Architecture fails to serve society when it gets too short-sighted regarding quality. We are often in too much of a hurry to produce and get the money back when it comes to new housing products. In a good world, architecture should create a sense of pride and belonging to society. It must make people happy and comfortable. We need much more spirituality on the architecture scene in Sweden!” Thomas’s combination of holistic solutions, spirituality and gardening metaphors is not without precedent. Asked for a book that has been meaningful to him, Eriksson names Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). And, reading it, some passages reveal a striking similarity of focus;

“...different people find sympathy in different forms of art; but further and more important, repetition of the same appeal thickens the spiritual atmosphere which is necessary for the maturing of the finest feelings, in the same way as the hot air of a greenhouse is necessary for the ripening of certain fruit. An example of this is the case of the individual who receives a powerful impression from constantly repeated actions, thoughts or feelings, although if they came singly they might have passed by unnoticed. [This idea forms, of course, the fundamental reason for advertisement.]”

Kandinsky’s paintings have never moved me, but his literary images are arresting. I remember a summer evening that ended with a bitter argument when I approvingly quoted Kandinsky’s bafflingly specific opinion that green is like a “cow lying still and unmoving, only capable of chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid dull eyes”, leading a beautiful girl to reply that people who don’t appreciate green should be shot, after which the party went swiftly downhill (I eventually came to terms with green, however, and later moved in with the girl).

A different, more benevolent image in the vein of Kandinsky, can be found in Thomas’s description of his initial approach to a project, mentioned in connection with the idea of the orchids: “A lot of other companies, our competitors, they give loads of ideas and say, ‘Pick one.’ We want to take away. We are subtracting, until we find the small, pounding heart of the company. And we go from there.”

DO: How does your personal vision inform the search? TE: My own visions or intuitions guide my search, often in a very irrational way – until the point where you find the unique and valuable parameters that you want to circle your creative work around. DO: And how would you define the heart of SDL, of TEA? TE: A very strong belief in the power of good and serious design and architecture work, and the changes it can bring on board. We really put our ‘heart’ into everything we do – sometimes we may be a pain in the ... for our client, but that is part of getting somewhere.

Being “a pain in the ...” (ass, presumably) can’t be something most creative directors would so readily admit. It seems more like what you might expect from a friend. And it does appear to be a part of what Eriksson offers; a sort of social control for corporations and institutions. Social control is a sociological term for the pressure exerted on you by those around you. If, for instance, we are about to make a mistake, a friend will hopefully point it out or steer us away from it. This power can be corrupted, and in Scandinavia ‘Jante’s Law’ (which denotes a suffocating atmosphere of negativity) is the bane of entrepreneurs, but for those with poor self-restraint and good friends, social control is valuable. Companies have an intrinsic lack of restraint and usually a lack of friends as well, leaving them free to pursue bad habits. They take up excessive smoking and drinking, act capriciously, and let their appearance deteriorate into a mess of conflicting images, ultimately making them very difficult to like. Eriksson is an expert at developing corporate social skills, and his answer to the question of what the favourite part of the work process is, might be unsurprising: TE: The initial phase of meeting a new client and starting to engage in their situation and finding a solution that makes a difference. The rough sketch, the drawing, the reasoning... It is fascinating and it gives and takes a lot of energy...

DO: Is there a part of the process that bothers you? TE: Bothers me...? It may be the point where you suddenly realize that there is a crack in the trust from the client. These things happen and it is important to be honest at all times... Even if it means that the project comes to a stalling position. But Thomas Eriksson and his team seem to be skilled at maintaining their friendships, or tending to their orchid gardens, greenhouses and beating hearts. The most impressive collaboration of them all might be the one with SAS, maintained since 1993. The SAS redesign project was truly innovative, and typical for the holistic SDL approach. The idea was to create a cosy atmosphere in the airport lounges and airplanes, foregoing the 1980s approach of pasting the brand everywhere, and reworking everything from the sugar packets (where the SAS logo was replaced with haiku-like snippets, not unlike the mystic statements of Chance the gardener in Being There) to the employees’ wardrobes. But beyond the airplanes and buildings, Thomas’s ability to work in smaller proportions is attested to by his collaboration with Cappellini, which has produced the Cross medicine cabinet, a cult item that has been included in New York’s MoMA collections. Eriksson himself maintains that an idea for a table might eventually end up as a house.

DO: What future projects do you look forward to the most? TE: To create new solutions for the iconic or often static clients such as libraries, schools or even churches. We will need to turn every stone from now on and find new and unexpected ways and combinations: “Everything is different”.

On the subject of libraries, Thomas Eriksson Architects have a particularly beautiful plan. For a contest to design a public library in Dubai, TEA drew an amazing building that looks like a stack of books, surrounded by palm trees and water. 

Having myself bought Alan Hollinghurst’s book The Swimming-pool Library just because of the title, the Dubai idea seems like a promise of good things to come. In the meantime, we’ll be confronted with Eriksson’s work every time we fly with SAS, visit IKEA and make trips to Stockholm for that virtually essential pilgrimage to Moderna Museet. And more likely than not, Thomas has planted something new, or weeded out something superfluous, as he continues to cultivate our gardens.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Autumn Issue 2009 Volume #10.