Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen is known for softening the ascetic modernist style with his industrial and furniture designs. In the late 1950s, he designed the SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Jacobsen conceived the hotel as a gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. In addition to the architecture, he designed everything from the furniture throughout the hotel, to the cutlery in the dining room, to the doorknobs. Most of us are probably familiar with the chairs Jacobsen designed for the hotel: the Egg chair™, the Swan chair™, and the Drop chair™; all three embrace the comfort curved forms bring to the public. He wanted the cutlery to be in direct contrast to the stringent geometry of the rectilinear hotel, so Jacobsen partnered with manufacturer Georg Jensen to create what is still deemed a futuristically modern set of flatware.

Jacobsen believed that every element of a design project should be determined by its intended purpose and that form should follow function. When designing the hotel cutlery, he produced numerous models and prototypes to find the minimum amount of stainless steel needed for each knife, fork, and spoon to perform at an affordable price. During this time, silver was typically used for flatware appearing in luxury hotels like the SAS Royal. The AJ line consisted of five pieces of cutlery: a small and large fork, a small and large spoon, and a knife. The knife’s transition from handle to blade is only indicated in the contour, and the short tines of the fork make the AJ cutlery stand out. The large spoon from the collection is probably the most admired piece from the set. In 2012, the New York Times published an article about the merits of the AJ soup spoon: since all the pieces are asymmetrical, the handle connects to the top of the piece rather than the center. That means if the spoon slips in your hand, the soup falls away from you rather than toward you. The article’s author sought industrial designer Jasper Morrison to test the spoon. Morrison is not only a designer himself but a critic of other designers’ work and the author of A Book of Spoons. He had never used Jacobsen’s soup spoon before and was doubtful about its performance. “It looks like something that has been designed to look as if it is functionally superior rather than actually to work better,” he said. After using it, he admitted, “I am coming round … It really does work better than other soup spoons. It is a fine difference, but it has the ergonomic edge.”

The hotel manager hated Jacobsen’s cutlery, complaining that it upset the guests. Those three short tines on the forks apparently gave some guests problems when picking up smaller foods like peas. Eventually, the hotel replaced Jacobsen’s radically styled cutlery with a conventional set also manufactured by Georg Jensen. In 1957, the cutlery made its public debut at the Milan Triennial where it received extensive coverage. It has remained an internationally recognized design icon ever since.

Despite the hotel manager’s complaints, the set had its admirers back then, and it continues to be sold through Georg Jensen as well as on the secondary market. It can also be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick insisted on using the futuristic-looking cutlery as props on the spaceship in his 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.