Jan Kuypers (1925-1997) was a Dutch-born designer who spent most of his life and career in Canada.
Kuypers was born in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and studied at the Academy of Arts and Architecture at The Hague. Following his graduation in 1947, he moved to the United Kingdom, first working for Grenfell Baines Architects in Manchester and later working for H. Morris & Company in Glasgow, where he remained from 1948 to 1951.
Towards the end of his time in Glasgow, Kuypers successfully applied for the job of chief designer at the Imperial Furniture Company in Stratford, Ontario. Kuypers moved to Canada to take the job, which he kept until 1960. During his time at Imperial, Kuypers was responsible for a number of award-winning modern furniture designs, as well as for updating existing designs of furniture, most notably "Imperial Loyalist," a line of antique-inspired reproductions.
In 1955, Kuypers undertook post-graduate studies in industrial design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, he became a partner at Orr Associates in Toronto, and in 1961 joined Julian Rowan and Frank Dudas in forming the industrial design consultancy Dudas Kuypers Rowan (DKR). Kuypers subsequently helped establish the industrial design firm KAN.
Bibliography
edit- Gottlieb, Rachel; Golden, Cora (2004), Design in Canada: Fifty Years from Teakettles to Task Chairs, Toronto, ON: Key Porter Books, ISBN 1-55263-631-3
- Parr, Joy (1999). Domestic goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0802040977.
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