In the early 1960s, Lisa Ponti, an Italian artist and journalist, who was the daughter of the designer Gio Ponti, paid a visit to the vacation home of her friends Tapio Wirkkala and Rut Bryk. This was no small journey. Her hosts, married designers based in Helsinki, summered with their children, Sami and Maaria, in the northernmost part of Finnish Lapland.
The property lacked plumbing, electricity and even road access. The approach at that time was by boat in summer and by a sled pulled by reindeer over a frozen lake in winter. If the climate 165 miles above the Arctic Circle turned out to be colder than expected, visitors could hardly drop by a department store and pick up a sweater. But Maaria Wirkkala, an artist, who is now 71, recalled that when her father saw the contents of Ms. Ponti’s bags, he pointed to item after item with the refrain, “Not necessary … not necessary.”
His love of extremity is a theme of “Tapio Wirkkala: The Sculptor of Ultima Thule,” an exhibition of 300 of his works that opens April 5 at the Tokyo Station Gallery, before traveling to other sites in Japan. Placing the designer in the context of the remote northern region that bewitched him, the show marks the 110th anniversary of his birth and the 40th anniversary of his death.
Its title refers to two of Mr. Wirkkala’s best-known creations — glassware called Ultima Thule that seems to drip with icicles (released in 1968, it continues to be produced by the Finnish company Iittala), and a 30-foot-long carved wood sculpture also called Ultima Thule, a name that has referred since antiquity to remote northern lands. That art piece, which was made for the Finnish pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal, represents nature swirling and gouging the earth.
For many, “Ultima Thule” described a mythical place, imagined to lie beyond the boundaries of the known world. “Throughout his life, Wirkkala searched for that point — both in his personal life and in his work,” the exhibition’s news release states. “The point where everything superfluous and unnecessary is eliminated.”
In Lapland, Mr. Wirkkala threw himself into the pure, unremitting light and serenity of his surroundings, said his daughter. It was a refuge “for concentration without disturbance. There, he found a place to stop and to balance his hectic life.” She recalled him telling her, “You know, some people are afraid of this silence because you might hear your own heartbeat.”
Free of distractions, he worked whenever he wanted, which was constantly — the summer sun never set. He rose early to sketch the lake. He watched the landscape change, not gradually but with a manic rush in the intensity of the Arctic season.
He first encountered the property in 1959 in a Helsinki newspaper ad. “Two lines, no photo,” Ms. Wirkkala said of the notice. “He had a strong intuition about it.” Only 15 years before, Lapland had been bombed by Germans in World War II, but the home, a farmstead built by one of the indigenous Sami people who inhabited the area, was so far north that it had escaped damage.
As his daughter, who inherited the property and continues to use it, described it, the principal building was a house that was more than 100 years old. A nearby barn originally stored feed for reindeer, and there was a sauna that had been constructed without a chimney, so that smoke from the burning wood that heated the rocks had to be ventilated before the space was used.
Lacking indoor plumbing, the family basked in this sauna as a prelude to bathing in the cold lake. Eventually, Mr. Wirkkala added a second sauna with a chimney, where they could wash, and designed a more comfortable main dwelling. Its kitchen had a massive fireplace and was furnished with his homemade table and benches. He built a boathouse and converted half the barn into a workshop. He bought and dismantled an old house at the other end of the lake, and reassembled it as a place for Ms. Bryk, who was a textile and ceramic artist. (The family called that building, hung with Ms. Bryk’s curtains that burst into phosphorescent color when sunlight infiltrated, Rut’s House. Eventually both she and Mr. Wirkkala moved into it.)
Every summer the family climbed into a minibus or car with large quantities of coffee, salt and potatoes and drove more than 700 miles north from Helsinki to Inari, a municipality that sprawls over 6,700 square miles with a population of 7,125. In Inari, they picked up more supplies. Leaving their vehicle, they boarded a long boat to cross the lake that bordered their property and returned to Inari once or twice in the summer to restock.
Fresh milk and bread came from a neighbor a little over a mile away, who had a cow. Another neighbor, about three miles away, offered them the use of a telephone in case of emergencies.
The family learned how to be self-sufficient, Ms. Wirkkala said. They fished for trout, whitefish, pike and perch and foraged for mushrooms and cloudberries. The fish was smoked or cooked over an outdoor fire or preserved with salt. For a couple of years, until they had a more sophisticated stove, the water they hauled from the lake was boiled indoors in a three-legged pot on the hearth.
For amusement, they read books, took forest walks or gathered around the large wood dining table to decoratively carve its surface. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wirkkala designed a popular example of the Finnish knife known as a puukko (Brookstone would later sell it). His daughter recalled receiving her first puukko when she was 6. When she was 12, she built a timber playhouse for the compound.
Local visitors dropped by, like a man who silently drank multiple cups of coffee before sharing the news he had come to deliver: “I saw a bear yesterday.” Among the international guests, Ms. Ponti returned twice from Milan, and the midcentury designers Robin and Lucienne Day (sometimes described as the Charles and Ray Eames of England) made the trip from London.
Without regular mail service, none of this annual idyll would have been possible, Ms. Wirkkala said. A postman came punctually by boat twice a week to pick up or deliver newspapers, letters, drawings and models that her parents produced or inspected on their busman’s holiday. She recalled only one summer — in 1971 — when the couple interrupted their sojourn, to travel to London, where her father was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art.
To see how Lapland imprinted itself on Tapio Wirkkala, you have only to compare Ultima Thule glassware to the rotund, jewel-colored Bolle (“bubble”) vases he designed for the Venetian glass company Venini. With multiple hues split by seams that encircle their throats and bellies, the vases have a sweet, carnivalesque elegance. They are as different from the glacial Ultima Thule collection as the Doge’s Palace is from an iceberg.
And yet, Ms. Wirkkala pointed out, Venice and Lapland are not so dissimilar. Both are watery places with long, dark boats and a special quality of light. Lapland was a world apart for her father, but it was also a map of a creative consciousness driven by observation, intuition and curiosity, an Ultima Thule of the mind.
To truly appreciate his objects, she suggested, one has to see them as an organic procession with everything in harmony, just like the harmonizing structures that accumulated in his northern outpost.
“A life’s work is also a landscape,” she said.
