Skantherm is a company in Germany that manufactures fireplaces designed to fit within a modernist setting. There is one fireplace they sell, essentially a large black vertical tube, designed by a professor, called Emotion. Emotion presents a “minimalist shape”, Skantherm says, “making a subtle but strong statement while heating beautifully and efficiently,” with “precise air flow controls”.
That’s all very slick, but there’s something essential that the Emotion fireplace seems to miss: The premodern, barely controlled, unsubtle, undesigned emotion of a fire.
That original, unengineered feeling of a flame, engenders a feeling that the Norwegians call peiskos. Peiskos is the emotion of well-being that is aroused by sitting in front of a fire, and allowing oneself to become mentally absorbed into it.
The flames dance. They sputter. They shift and fail and restart again as the wood is consumed. Cracks and hissing provide an irregular, timeless beat to the experience, naturally uneven. For as long as the wood lasts, we don’t need to think about anything else, or we can think about what is most important to us, but at a slow pace that doesn’t move toward a conclusion with dedication at all.
Peiskos is more than just a cozy feeling. It’s an eternal respite from the engineered world away from the fire.
