When Modernism Rediscovers a Baroque Trick: High-Tech Dining at the Villa Spies Mikael Askergren
The Villa Spies (a.k.a. Villa Fjolle, completed in 1969, located on the rocky and craggy coast of the Baltic Sea, not very far from Sweden’s capital Stockholm) was designed by the young Swedish architect Staffan Berglund for the wealthy Danish businessman Simon Spies (rhymes with “peas” and “knees”) and contains some quite remarkable design features—among them a modernist, motorized version of the “flying” confidence table that was so much in fashion among European 18th-century aristocrats. And, not surprisingly, when interviewed about where the idea for this contraption came from, the architect always referred to those 18th-century predecessors. But recent discoveries made by the writer and today’s speaker Mikael Askergren (Stockholm, Sweden) suggest a quite different, and indeed intriguing origin story.