vitra.
a celebration of sustainable, timeless design through the decades.
A celebratory collection of some of vitra’s finest and timeless sustainable designs from the last 80 years. “Sustainability is just like morals: one should live by them and not just talk about them. Our roots in modern design make the first step easy: we make products that avoid the superfluous and last for a very long time.” Rolf Fehlbaum – Chairman of Vitra
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30’s Cité
Prouvé – 1930
Cité Armchair is one of Prouvé’s early masterpieces, designed for a competition for furnishing the halls of residence at Nancy’s cité universitaire. Prouvé himself used this armchair with its dynamic appearance, its characteristic coated sheet steel rockers and broad leather arm support straps in the living room of his house.
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30’s Standard
Prouvé – 1934
Chairs take the most strain on their back legs, where they bear the weight of their user’s upper body. Prouvé took this into account very succinctly in Standard Chair. Tubular steel piping is enough for the front legs that take relatively little strain, whereas the back legs are made of voluminous hollow sections and pass the strain on to the floor.
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40’s Folding Screen
Charles & Ray Eames – 1946
The screen is at once a practical room-divider and an impressive sculptural object. Segments of moulded plywood are joined together using textile tape, ensuring mobility and creating the screen’s gentle wavy lines. It can be placed in various positions and folded flat for storage purposes.
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40’s Desk Clocks
George Nelson – 1947
With the diversity of materials used and their sculptural shapes, George Nelson’s clocks embody the joie de vivre of the 1950s. To this day, his table clocks remain a refreshing alternative to the usual timekeepers. The Vitra Design Museum presents a re-edition of the designs so cherished by collectors - in a true-to-the-original form.
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50’s Prismatic Table
Isamu Noguchi – 1957
Noguchi’s “Prismatic Table” is based on purely geometric forms. This novel three-legged side table with its hexagonal tabletop is made of folded sheet aluminium and was inspirerd by traditional Japanese paper folding techniques.
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50’s Heart Cone Chair
Verner Panton – 1959
A variant on Cone Chair, designed one year later and baptized Heart Cone Chair because of its heart-shaped outline. Heart Cone Chair has large, projecting wings reminiscent of Mickey Mouse ears that could also, however, be interpreted as a contemporary take on the classic wing chair.
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60’s Eames Tandem
Charles & Ray Eames – 1962
Tandem Seating is a robust modular system enabling comfortable and relaxed seating in public waiting areas, for example at airports or train stations. It is designed to withstand an exceptional level of wear-and-tear. The resilient seat and back upholstery can be exchanged on site. The generous seat surface and the sandwich structure of the upholstery offer great seating comfort. The simple modular system enables the units to be added together at will or linked with table-tops to form an enclosed configuration.
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60’s Zoo Timers
George Nelson – 1965
Zoo Timers - strongly colourful personalities from the animal kingdom - contrast sharply with George Nelson’s sculptural wall clocks from the 1950s thanks to their graphic touch. The Zoo Timers offer children a playful and enjoyable approach to telling the time.
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70’s Amoebe
Verner Panton -– 1970
The Amoebe was originally dreamed up for Panton’s famous Visiona installation. It is a marvellous example of close-tothe-floor lounge furniture and embodies the spirit of the early 1970s. In bright colours, the re-edition delivers even greater comfort thanks to its flexible backrest shell.
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70’s Wiggle Stool
Frank Gehry – 1972
With the furniture series Easy Edges, Frank Gehry gave a new and surprising aesthetic dimension to cardboard, an everyday material. Although they look amazingly simple, the pieces in Easy Edges pieces owe their robustness and structural stability to the architectural quality of the designs. The Wiggle Stool is vaguely reminiscent of traditional African stools and — like such predecessors — makes an attractive accent in any interior.
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80’s Architecture
Herzog and De Meuron
Following a major fire in 1981, the company Vitra has pursued a conscious approach to its own architecture, starting with the commission awarded to the English architect Nicholas Grimshaw to build a new factory hall. His high-tech architecture was seen as upholding the vision of Vitra as an enterprise synonymous with technical excellence. After completion of the first structure, he was assigned the task of developing a master plan for the Vitra grounds. This idea of “corporate identity architecture” was called into question, however, by the 1984 erection of the sculpture “Balancing Tools” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It served as the trigger for an entirely new architectural concept: deliberately contrasting works of architecture were to confront one another and imbue the site with vitality and a distinctive identity. In keeping with this idea, Vitra commissioned a different architect for each building project. Such as Frank Gehry, for example, who designed the expressive main building of the Vitra Design Museum with its towers, ramps and cubes that was dedicated on 3 November 1989.
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80’s Vitra Design Museum
Nicholas Grimshaw
In 1989, Vitra Design Museum was brought to life under the direction of Alexander von Vegesack. A cultural institution independent from the Vitra company, the museum fully covers its own budget through travelling exhibitions and publications. These exhibitions have played a major role in the international popularisation of design and architecture. The Vitra Design Museum collections evolved from modest beginnings in the 1980s to become one of the world’s most important collections of modern furniture. In 1989, the collections included some 1000 objects. In the years since, they have grown to encompass approximately 6000 pieces. Two furniture collections – one compiled by Rolf Fehlbaum for Vitra starting in the early 1980s, the other that I began as a personal initiative in the late 1960s – came together to form the foundation of the Vitra Design Museum collections.
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90’s Meda Chair
Alberto Meda – 1996
Designed by Alberto Meda, this chair is flexible and comfortable. It follows the movements of the body without recourse to com-plicated mechanisms under the seat. Meda Chair successfully combines comfort, technology and a new approach to aesthetics.
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90’s Ad Usum
Ad Usum offers flexible table configurations: such as a classi cal table layout with fixed elements, or table components which can be arranged in different configurations, or even simply individual tables.
Alberto Meda – 1996
Electrification – an easy solution: Every workstation can be equipped with a separate electric socket. Power is distributed via a central connection under the table tops via cable ducts. Rotax offers another alternative. An electric socket integrated into the tabletop allows for direct access to the power supply and the network connection.
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00’s Kast
Maarten Van Severen – 2005
A key theme in the oeuvre of Maarten Van Severen is storage furniture, be it shelves, cupboards or sideboards. The design for Kast, which Van Severen worked on during the last few months of his life, can be considered the quintessence of his exploration of the subject. Kast is a storage unit that is modular in structure, the base version of which is a sideboard. Supplemented by two simple wooden crates and a further basic module, a shelf/wall cupboard combination arises. Van Severen paid special attention to the colour for the sliding doors, which not only emphasise Kast’s elegant and yet seemingly classical proportions, but also give it a fresh and optimistic sense.
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00’s Chairless
Alejandro Aravena – 2010
Chairless is a seating device for the modern nomad. This sturdy strap of fabric allows its user to sit down in a relaxed manner – but with neither seat nor backrest. It is thus a solution par excellence for times when chairs are in short supply: lunch in the park, while waiting in a crowded airport, a picnic on the lawn, sitting down at a concert, reading on the beach and on countless other occasions. Chairless is so light and compact that you can carry it with you wherever you go. Chairless relieves the spine and legs, so that hugging your knees or using a support is no longer necessary. Now your hands are free to operate your laptop or your iPod, for reading, eating etc.
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Sustainability
Today, companies are increasingly being judged on what they are doing to take on ecological, social and economic responsibility. Vitra does not see this responsibility as a duty that has to be forced upon the company, but rather as an aspect of design that has always been a part of the company’s industrial culture. At Vitra, it goes without saying that furniture is valuable when its production, utilisation and recycling does not harm people or the environment. For Vitra, the manufacture of sustainable products means intense pre-production development, where the highest-grade materials are selected and tests are carried out that simulate 15 years of use. Individual components should be easy to replace and ultimately recycled.
Vitra Design Museum Charles-Eames-Str. 1 D-79576 Weil am Rhein 0049 (0)7621 702 3200 0049 (0)7621 702 3590 Designed by Sophie Saunders Published Feb 2012 All imagery sourced from vitra.com
info@design-museum.de
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