Susanne Wasson-Tucker 

After the end of the World’s Fair, Susanne Wesson-Tucker followed her husband to Boston, where he found a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While her husband was employed, she first had to find a new job. Marcel Breuer, to whom she had applied, used his contacts to help her get smaller commissions, and she also worked on exhibitions at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

From 1941 to 1943, she was a partner in the Finnish furniture company Artek in Boston, which experimented with the design of inexpensive furniture. She also lectured on furniture design and interior decoration to students at various decorating schools and, like her husband, at MIT.

In 1943, her Arnold Wasson-Tucker was drafted into the Canadian armed forces and Susanne Wasson-Tucker moved to New York. She became the curator for industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1944 and assistant to Serge Chermayeff, a Russian-English architect who had emigrated to the USA in 1940.

Exhibitions were to become a completely new field for Susanne Wasson-Tucker. Her first documented work as an assistant in the exhibition field was Art in Progress: 15th Anniversary Exhibitions: Design for Use in 1944, followed by Tomorrow’s Small House, about an urban planning concept in North and South America, also at MoMA. After the end of the war, she and Serge Chermayeff conceived a solar house, a visionary plan for sustainable building as part of a modern, new lifestyle.

She then began to be active for the Knoll company. At first, she was responsible for the interior design of the American embassy in Cuba, followed by the embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm from 1951-1959. The embassies were furnished with modern American furniture designed by the architects Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames. This new professional step was accompanied by a new personal one. Her husband went to Mexico as technical director of Knoll International, she decided to move to Sweden after her divorce and stayed there.

Her freelance activity was important to her, as she had realised that institutional freedom was essential for the creative process of a designer. She worked as an exhibition architect for the Svensk Form Design Centre in Stockholm, designed furniture and furnishings for the departments of Nordiska Kampanit, the most upmarket department stores’ in Stockholm, which was known for focusing on new trends and innovations, and for the Foresta Hotel on Lidingö, a revolutionary flat hotel at the time. Other important commissions included the design of the art section of H55 in Helsingborg in 1955, an important trade exhibition for architecture, industrial design and home textiles, which brought Scandinavian design a great deal of international attention. In the 1950s and 1960s, she designed a number of Swedish design exhibitions abroad, including the Swedish pavilion at the Milan Triennale in 1957 and the home section at Le Maison Ideale in Brussels in 1965.

In addition to organising design exhibitions, Susanne Wasson-Tucker designed interiors for aircraft such as for Scandinavian Airlines and Malaysia-Singapore Airlines.

Wasson-Tucker’s designs, which were not subject to fashion trends but remained true to her modernist, timeless style, were very chic in their day. She was reappraised in the 2000s. Susanne Wasson-Tucker died in Stockholm in 2008.