NEW YORK — It is a single piece of metal weighing just over an ounce. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as: “A utensil consisting essentially of a straight handle with an enlarged and hollowed end-piece used for conveying soft or liquid food to the mouth.” This particular example was designed to convey a specific type of “soft or liquid food” — soup.


It is a soup spoon. Not just any soup spoon, but the best I have ever used. Not that I am a connoisseur of either soup or spoons, but it soon became evident that this one was special. It looks striking and feels pleasant to hold, but, best of all, it somehow makes the soup taste better, which is, surely, what a well-designed soup spoon should do.


Let’s be clear, with global poverty soaring and the biosphere deteriorating, there are far weightier challenges for designers to wrestle with. But if special utensils for eating soup exist, as they have since the 1700s, they should be designed as intelligently as possible (just like anything else) which made me wonder why this one is so appealing.


It isn’t new, on the contrary, it was designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in the late 1950s for use in one of his architectural projects, the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Then in his late 50s, Jacobsen was the most famous architect in Denmark and was renowned internationally for the sensitivity with which he softened the ascetic Modernist style with gentle curves and sensual finishes.


The new hotel was to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” for which Jacobsen would design the building and most of its contents, down to doorknobs and spoons. He collaborated with Denmark’s finest manufacturers on the furniture and fittings, including Royal Copenhagen on the dinnerware and Georg Jensen on the cutlery.


Much as he loved fine craftsmanship, Jacobsen was a rationalist, who believed that every element of a design project should be determined by its intended purpose. The form of a building or object should follow its function. He took this to extremes with the hotel cutlery by producing numerous models and prototypes to identify the minimum amount of stainless steel required for each knife, fork or spoon to perform its allotted task efficiently.


In an era when expensive hotels like the SAS Royal sported elaborately decorated silver-plated cutlery, Jacobsen’s consisted of single slabs of stainless steel in oddly curved abstract shapes. The only sop to decoration was the gleam of silver plating.


The hotel manager hated his designs, complaining that they befuddled the guests. The Danish media poked fun at them, and one newspaper sent a reporter to the hotel restaurant, where he was photographed struggling to eat peas with a fork. The hotel soon replaced Jacobsen’s radically styled cutlery with a conventional set, though Georg Jensen continued to manufacture it. Among its admirers was the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who insisted on using the cutlery as props on the spaceship in his 1968 sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Almost all of the other props in the movie were specially designed to look suitably futuristic, but Kubrick was convinced that Jacobsen’s cutlery already did.


Twenty years ago, when I was planning to buy new cutlery, I plumped for Jacobsen’s partly, I must confess, because it was in “2001.” Silly, I know, but it turned out to be the right decision, even though I made it for the wrong reason, because I have used it ever since.


As well as being exemplary eating tools, the different pieces often serve dual purposes. The knives can be pressed into service as makeshift screwdrivers, and the tiny teaspoons are excellent at extracting the last drops of skin cream from the corners of containers, but the soup spoons are my favorites.


Unsurprisingly, designers often do their best work if they are likely to enjoy using the outcome, and Jacobsen loved soup. He often ate it for lunch in his studio and, after designing a stainless steel cocktail kit in the late 1960s, he carried it there each day in the martini mixer. His appreciation of the nuances of eating soup is evident in the design of his spoon.


Firstly, he made it asymmetrical by connecting the handle to the top of the end-piece, rather than to the center. If the spoon slips in your hand, the soup falls away from, rather than toward you. To ensure that both left-handed and right-handed people could use the spoon equally easily, Jacobsen designed a version for each. The handle extends to the left for the former, and to the right for the latter.


Secondly, by using the least possible material, he produced a spoon that is agreeably light, slender and comfortable to hold. Thirdly, Jacobsen chose the precise size of end-piece to deliver a perfectly judged quantity of soup to the mouth. He even finessed the shape to ensure that it is wide enough to cool the soup slightly, without losing all of its warmth, which can happen if it is too shallow. The soup tastes better, because Jacobsen anticipated what would happen at each stage of eating it.


Just in case he had miraculously designed the perfectly shaped soup spoon for me but no one else, I canvassed a second opinion from the industrial designer Jasper Morrison, who is: a) a perceptive critic of other designer’s work, and b) the author of “A Book of Spoons,” which is based on the spoons he and his friends have collected over the years.


He had never used a Jacobsen soup spoon before, and was doubtful at first. “It looks like something that has been designed to look as if it is functionally superior, rather than to actually work better,” he said. But then he started to use it. “I am coming round,” he admitted. “It really does work better than other soup spoons. It is a fine difference, but it has the ergonomic edge.”