String System shelves we use in our Amsterdam store have a curious quality: though the system is  celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the shelves seem like they could’ve been designed yesterday. Originally conceived as bookshelves by Nils and Kajsa Strinning for Swedish publishing giant Bonnier, the first String units did not look much different from the ones you find today. The essential formula remains unchanged: sturdy wooden planks which hook over the trellis-lines of two wire-frame panels, giving the planks the appearance of floating. In its proportions, in its functions, and in its materiality, String Furniture is rooted in the visual and conceptual tenets of modernist design: that is, light, rhythm and order.

The greatest invention of modernist design was not a building or a house but the invisible grid which holds everything together. Space on a grid is not so much drawn as it is suggested: one or two lines placed here or there is enough for you to know where the next square falls. In the String System, where the lines – the bold horizontals or the fine verticals – are placed is just as important was where they are not. String shelves are particularly elegant in wide proportions, the long sweep of a shelf can be interrupted by a slender stroke of a wire panel.

Image: Eileen Grey’s modernist masterpiece, Villa E-1027.
Photograph by Simon Watson.