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(b Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia) 1911; d Santorini, Greece, 1989).

Finnish ceramic and glass designer. In 1945 he joined Arabia porcelain factory, where he dispensed with the notion of the china set in favour of mix and match tableware. His best known series was ‘Kilta’ (designed in 1948, sold from 1953 and relaunched in 1981 as ‘Teema’), which was available in several colours and was enormously practical: he dispensed with decorative rims and shaped the surfaces so that they could be easily stacked. He also worked for the Nuutajärvi glassworks, for whom he produced both functional glass and decorative pieces. In both ceramics and glass, Kaj was probably the most influential designer of the 20th century....

(b 1910; (d 1987).

American glassmaker. He worked in the glass industry, where he invented the fibre used for the insulating tiles that cover the Columbia space shuttle. In 1965 he left the industry and established a studio in Grand Rapids, OH, where he made blown-glass pieces, many of them with extraordinary colour effects made possible by his knowledge of glass chemistry. He was, together with ...

(b Boston, MA, 1842; d Boston, MA, 1910).

American architect, stained-glass designer, furniture designer, and photographer. Preston was the son of Jonathan Preston (1801–88), a successful builder in Boston. William completed a year’s study at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, MA (later incorporated into Harvard University), and then went to Paris where he enrolled briefly in the Atelier Douillard. He returned to Boston in 1861 to work with his father, with whom he remained in partnership until the latter’s death. William then practised independently until his own death.

Preston was a prolific architect, designing over 740 buildings in the course of a career spanning 50 years. His early work was in the French Renaissance style, as seen in his Boston Society of Natural History building (1861–4), a tripartite structure with its floor levels arranged to equate with the proportions of the base, shaft, and capital of a Classical column. It has monumental Corinthian columns and pilasters and a central pediment flanked by a balustraded parapet. He worked in a typically eclectic manner during the 1870s and became an extremely fine designer in the Queen Anne Revival style in the 1880s and early 1890s. The varied massing, stained-glass windows, terracotta, moulded brick, and carved-wood detail of the John D. Sturtevant House (...

(b Brussels, Aug 31, 1847; d Brussels, Sept 11, 1917).

Belgian architect, designer, engineer, writer and politician. After graduating as an engineer at the University of Ghent in 1870, he established himself in Charleroi before settling in Ghent on his marriage in 1872. Under the influence of Jean-Baptiste-Charles-François Baron Bethune, he worked in the Belgian Gothic Revival style on architecture, furniture and wall paintings and in stained glass, gold, iron and embroidery. From 1875 to 1895 he directed the workshop for stained glass founded by Bethune. Verhaegen’s most important building is the new Beguinage (1873) of Sint Amandsberg near Ghent, which conforms to the severe Gothic Revival ideals of Bethune and anticipates some of the features of garden-city designs. His churches and conventual buildings at Ghent (Poortakker, 1874; St Macharius, 1880–82), Hekelgem (abbey, 1880; church destr.), Paris (Oeuvre des Flamands Church, c. 1875) and Rome (Everlasting Adoration, 1885–6) and châteaux at Watermaal-Bosvoorde (1880–81) and Merelbeke (...

(b 1915).

Japanese industrial designer , active in the USA. He worked in Charlotte Perriand ’s Japanese office, and in the 1950s emigated to the USA, where he designed two stools that have since become famous: the fibreglass ‘Elephant’ stool (1954), which was the first all-plastic stool, and the ‘Butterfly’ stool (...