From the beginning of his career, Verner Panton set out to change the arena of installation design. Panton was one of the first designers to consider each aspect of a domestic space as an entire living environment and made exceedingly bold moves for the time with his use of color, texture and spatial relationships. At the 1959 "Købestaevnet" furniture fair in Denmark, Panton inverted his booth and hung his entire room setting from the ceiling because, he said, "otherwise people can’t see anything but each other’s backs." At the 1968 Cologne Furniture Fair, Panton created the Visiona 0 exhibitions featuring his "Feet and Lips" textiles covering the floor, walls and ceilings, eliminating the formal boundaries between the three areas. His "Flower Pot" lamps hung several inches off the floor to illuminate the "Lips" in his softly colored lights.

Panton’s next ground-breaking installation was created for the 1970 Cologne furniture fair. His undulating upholstered foam landscape used planar space in a way people had never imagined, creating unique areas within the room at different levels. His "Living Tower" was the architectural basis for the room in his "Phantasy Landscape," forming schematic layers of upholstered jetties in the classically wide array of Panton colors. The curves of the wall cupped his spherical "Globe" lights, creating a unity of form between the lighting and furniture elements. His "Spiral" lamps added to the illusion of motion created by the furniture, as they rippled above and his wall mounted "Ring" lamps mimicked the waves and concentric circles of the lamps and the upholstery. Panton’s almost obsessive attention to detail in the textiles, lighting, furniture shapes and his flamboyant use of color made his environments an experience of complete immersion.

Intrigued by Panton’s approach to interiors, forward thinking firms and restaurants like the Spiegel Publishing House in Hamburg (1969), the Varna restaurant in Arhus (1971), the Gruner & Jahr publishing house in Hamburg (1973) allowed him free reign to create their interiors. The Spiegel Publishing House was the most courageous of these, with an employee swimming pool illuminated from above by a number of rows of Panton’s colored wall panels. The lights played off the water, creating a multi-colored and multi-dimensional landscape unlike anything the interiors world had ever seen or, most likely, even imagined. Panton employed chandeliers created from shells, spiral pieces of plastic, foam and plastic balls and plastic panels to create a landscape of lighting that became one of the strongest architectural elements within the space. Even by today’s standards, Panton’s interior landscapes look futuristic and are more comprehensive in their use of space than almost anything else ever done in corporate or residential interior design.

Wall elements for J. Luber, AG, Switzerland.


R Gallery's recreations of two of Panton's environments.


Wall elements for the Cologne furniture fair 1970. Manufactured by Holacher, Switzerland.


The Plus-linje showroom, circa 1960. Photo courtesy of Marianne Panton


Verner Panton's "Art" chair, seen in R's adaptation of the Visiona 2 environment.