Vitra Edition is a laboratory that provides architects and designers with the freedom to create experimental furniture objects and interior installations. Their choices of materials, technologies, applications and formal concepts are not limited to the existing Vitra vocabulary, while they have full access to Vitra’s technical know-how. Working without the constraints of market and production logic has a liberating effect and results in surprising solutions and new ways of seeing design.
When we showed the first Vitra Edition twenty years ago, our motivation then as now was to escape from the strict norms and conventions of the furniture industry. At that time, there was hardly a collector’s market for experimental design, and yet Vitra Edition was widely published and discussed. We presented seating objects by Frank Gehry, Denis Santachiara, Gaetano Pesce, Richard Artschwager, Ron Arad, Shiro Kuramata, Ettore Sottsass and Scott Burton in 1987. In the years that followed, Vitra Edition grew with contributions from Jasper Morrison, Alessandro Mendini, Borek Sipek, Philippe Starck and others. The process of creating the Edition was liberating for Vitra and important new designer relationships were established.
In its industrial production Vitra works with some of the most talented contemporary designers and architects. Exceptionally gifted, they have antennas to perceive the shape of things to come. Still, they have to embrace the fact that industrial production is under great pressure from price, performance, production technology and regulations. Such constraints are beneficial and necessary for the development of good everyday products, but they make it difficult for experimental ideas to be realized. Truly radical concepts are developed with a different set of criteria from those of industrial production; they emphasize certain aspects and consciously neglect others. While these experiments may only interest a small group of people, their impact can be substantial as they provoke new sensations and insights.
Experimental objects often do not want to solve a practical problem; they are manifestations of the designers and architects creative intelligence, an expression of a critical position, a utopian wish or a formal fantasy. Whether some of the concepts will eventually inspire the design of everyday objects remains to be seen.
Vitra Edition is both a process and a result. As a process it contributes to our ongoing design research; the result, instead, is a collection of extraordinary objects representing some of the most advanced positions in contemporary design. They are made available to collectors as a limited edition. The limitation guarantees the aspect of rareness, while – as a direct consequence – the substantial costs of creation and development are distributed on a small number of objects. In this respect Vitra Edition follows a logic which is different from Vitra’s industrial production.
After an initial presentation on the Vitra Campus during Art Basel 2007, the new Vitra Edition prototypes are to be shown in museums and galleries worldwide.
Rolf Fehlbaum
Design: Ron Arad
Even when it first saw the light of day twenty-six years ago, the Rover Chair was never quite as innocent as it seemed. This apparently light-hearted assembly of the Kee Klamp industrial scaffolding system and seats salvaged from the staid but stately British car of the same name was one of the earliest products of Ron Arad’s career as a designer. Arad came to London after art school in Israel to study at the Architectural Association. He graduated as an architect, but ended up working as an assistant in a small studio, and realized pretty quickly that it was not for him. One day in 1981 that he still remembers, he decided there was no point in going back to his drawing board after lunch. He wandered home, and passing a scrap yard full of dead cars, hit on the idea of the Rover. He could turn a couple of salvaged car seats, picked up for a few pounds, into saleable new armchairs with a bit of cross fertilization from the Kee Klamp catalogue, a low cost, readily available system suitable for unexpected domestic uses. This was the High Tech moment, and the “as found“ ready-made aesthetic matched the mood of the time. The salvaged car seats brought something else to the mix. There was a surreal aspect to the car armchair combination that gave the seat a different sensibility. And another, altogether different layer to the Rover was its echo of Jean Prouvé’s adjustable design from decades earlier, an image that Arad had only seen in books at the time. “It might have been in my mind because of course I know that I had seen the photograph. But it wasn’t that that got me to do it.“
The Rover was a design capable of being seen in many different ways, and perhaps it is this quality that was to most accurately provide a pointer to the future directions that Arad’s work would take, even when he was just beginning to find a distinctive voice, working as designer in the cracks of an industrial system which had less and less room for design. Moreover is an equally subtle piece of work. The first Rover was what happened when Arad tried to be an industrial designer without an industry, picking up what he could find to create an approximation of the finish and quality of an industrial object. The new one reflects the shift in the balance of power. Arad now has the clout to be able to work with the level of investment needed to produce industrially made objects. This is in fact the paradox of a design that began life as a bringing together of what was most easily available taking the opposite tack. Moreover is an evocation of the original, but refracted through the perspective of the industrial. But paradox is at the heart of Arad’s work. It was the ready-made Rover that sat in his Covent Garden workshop attracting no interest from anybody, until the legendary arrival of an unknown Frenchman who insisted on buying the pair, and who turned out to be a fashion designer by the name of Jean-Paul Gaultier. And it was the ready-made Rover that first attracted the attention of an unknown Swiss furniture manufacturer named Rolf Fehlbaum. Arad recalls: ‘I saw an interview with him in Blueprint, entitled “The Man Who Loved Chairs”, and he was photographed with a Rover, so I thought he must be OK even if I didn’t know who he was.“ The next thing he knew Arad was on the plane to Weil am Rhein. It was the first time he had ever seen inside a factory capable of making mass produced industrial design. It was 1986, and Arad was being invited to design a piece for the first Vitra Edition. It turned out to be the Well-Tempered Chair, a springy piece of steel, fastened into tight curves by a series of wing nuts. “And it was“, says Arad, “on one level, a failure. I was confronted with mass production, and I simply couldn’t think of anything to deal with it. The Well-Tempered Chair has nothing to do with what Vitra was capable of, it was a one-off.“
The new limited edition Moreover reflects the evolution of Arad himself, and of the world of design too. It is a project that intends to look both at industrial production, and the limited edition. But both are a kind of laying to rest, or completion of a process that started a long time ago with the first Rover Chair. Produced with the expertise of a couple of Royal College of Art automotive design graduates, the discipline of Moreover, like it might be said of a new Mini, is to maintain the essence of the quirky charm of the original, but to make it in a modern way that is of its own time, rather than a parody, or a copy. In the future industrial version, the new chair will have carefully shaped steel tubes, which of course no longer play a structural role. Rather than the crude but effective Kee Klamp connectors, the new chair will have elegant castings. The leather seat will reflect a tighter, leaner profile. The industrialized version will have a leather upholstered seat, and options to become a day bed with extendable foot and head rests. The two versions of the limited edition – one in rust, the other in chrome – will have an unyielding weight that may not be optimized for comfort, but will still provide a useable seat. Moreover is different from the first Rover, but is also the same. Essentially it is still an object that is far from innocent, despite its charm.
Deyan Sudjic
Design: Jurgen Bey
A campus (Latin for ‘field’) is an open space, usually grassy, which is gradually surrounded by buildings until it becomes the heart of a university. The campus begins as a field, transformed temporarily into a building site. Later it becomes a sports field, often performs as a place of political demonstration, and then becomes a garden. It ossifies in this final form, perhaps embellished by memorial statues or fountains, passed through by generations of students. Occasionally it reverts back to its earlier incarnations, as new groups charge the space with politics again. Later, the whole complex – field and buildings – is referred to as the campus. The university is conceived, we could say, as a field of operations that is deliberately undetermined, defined by its inhabitants through social congress. It is thought that the word ‘campus’ was first used to refer to the grounds of Princeton University in New Jersey. In other words, it is an American space. European universities are traditionally urban, taking their forms directly from monasteries. It is striking, when you visit an American university, that the campus is the only space of many American towns designed principally for pedestrians (apart from parks, perhaps). The campus is not part of the grid, it is not built to maximize financial returns or aid automotive mobility. It is intended as a place of social exchange. It is as close as American cities get to a European piazza – a place within the grid, the particular within the generic.
The campus, says Jurgen Bey, is how the world of work is developing, and, he says, the Slow Car is part of a series of rethought infrastructures that speculate about the way we make places work. His ideas attempt to suggest how we might turn the generic into the specific. He has made wall-sized illustrations of massive cranes building modular skyscrapers and themselves being incorporated into the buildings. At their feet are beetle-like cars that form the personal space of this plan. While the idea of the Slow Car has many obvious and practical effects on road safety, the environment, and so on, its most interesting potential is social: it is a machine that could transform what Marc Augé would call the nonplaces of the contemporary world into places more like a campus. Think of an airport. It is a sprawling mass of a building, made completely contingent and defined by security and pedestrian mobility. There is no exterior public space at all. There are shopping centres but no public spaces. There is nothing particular, and no hope of it. But imagine a fleet of moving rooms, places where you could sit, sleep, keep your luggage, and use to transport you to a park or a church. If all corners of the place were within reach of every passenger then how might that transform the character of these generic places? How much more time might one want to spend there? Where would the civic centre of an airport be, and what would it look like? The airport is the funnel through which pass the skills, knowledge and talent of any international industry. Imagine if those people could drive themselves to a park, or perhaps into a huge library, teeming with tiny, personalized cars, beetling around like workers in a quarry. This project is an enabling infrastructure of mobile rooms that could make shared spaces in generic places.
Beyond the airport, the 40 km/h speed limit of the Slow Car slows down the city. Perhaps the campus model could work at this scale. The Slow Car suggests mobility at the scale of the largest city, but not the scale of a country. The city is the Slow Car’s field of operation. As a result, it is liberated from aesthetic conventions that dramatize mobility. It is clearly free from aerodynamics, for example. It has another purpose. It is more like a small building, a shelter that allows us to experience public spaces at a much larger scale. It allows us to live at the scale of the city; it extends the territory you can call your neighbourhood.
Kieran Long
Design: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec
One might wonder, at first sight of these unusual, slightly archaic-looking volumetric objects, what on earth they could be. Storage furniture, perhaps? Or interior partition elements? Maybe even artworks? The brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec intentionally left some ambiguity in the design of these objects, which were created with the aid of computer technology and given the name of Rocs. From a distance, these interior architectural objects do indeed resemble boulders whose surfaces have been rounded by centuries of erosion, projecting from the earth with just enough contact to maintain a secure stance. The association with natural forms lessens, however, as one approaches the objects and gets a closer view of their modular structure and puzzle-like composition.
Rocs belong to a category of design objects that utilize the most recent technological advancements, while also exhibiting qualities specific to artistic craftsmanship. Due to the complexity of their construction, it is not (yet) possible to apply standardized industrial methods to their production. The hollow shells, which rest on a solid wooden base, consist of cardboard segments covered in bookbinders’ linen. The exposed edges are folded outward to give the surface panels a distinctive coffered structure. None of the cardboard segments are identical – the dimensions of every piece must be individually calculated. This is done by a computer that also controls the cutting process. The finishing and assembly of individual segments, however, is performed by hand according to a sophisticated plan. Analogous to the Algues, which were created by the Bouroullecs several years ago, Rocs are representatives of a synthetic natural world. Though obviously derived from natural forms, both of these design objects exhibit their artificial lineage in a forthright manner. The stimulating appeal of these pieces is founded on the contradictory aspects of their appearance, in the playful quality of their visual associations and, above all, in their strong spatial presence. Principally conceived as elements of interior architecture, Rocs can be used to organize an interior space in a distinctive way, to energize it, or simply to enhance its attractiveness.
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Design: Fernando & Humberto Campana
I always wear a Martin Margiela jacket when travelling. Tucked away inside the lining are numerous pockets to hold everything I need. It gives me a sense of still being at home: a nomad, sure – but a nomad with roots. The eclectic Italian artist-designer, Bruno Munari, showed his deep understanding of humankind when he described our homes (leaving aside the terrace!) as outsized garments that envelope us; clothes, on the other hand, are houses that leave our heads, hands – and sometimes feet – free! (Pensare confonde le idee, Maurizio Corraini, Parma 1993.) If my jacket of many pockets is a home, why then should a house not have pockets, to make it feel a bit more like a comfortable jacket, more like a home? Who but Fernando and Humberto Campana would think of creating pockets for a house? Like Bruno Munari, the Brazilian brothers see the poetry of the everyday. Like children, they know that pockets are full of surprises. Pockets contain things we have deliberately put there but also chance finds: a seed, a stone, a shell or a coin. There they lie, becoming souvenirs, with time even good-luck charms. In one of the pockets of my black jacket there is a fève, the prize hidden in the galette des rois, the French Twelfth Night cake. I reach into my pocket and touch it every now and then, and once again I am the queen of the feast resplendent in a gold paper crown.
Fernando and Humberto Campana’s pocket Drosera for the home is not just a soft container for the jumble of things we want to keep out of sight. It is a quality accessory. It drapes like a haute couture creation. You are meant to slide your hand into the inviting folds and enjoy the sensual pleasure of discovery. It is made from special fabric: a sturdy yet supple copper mesh that holds the shape of the folds. Like tulle it reveals and conceals. The Campana’s pocket is both decorative and organizational. It recalls the four symmetrical pockets on the overalls designed by Thayaht, the name in art of Ernesto Michaelles, the Florentine futurist artist and fashion designer. Framed like a picture and hung on the wall, it is an enticing invitation to our curious side. The Campana pocket also brings about a metamorphosis. Walls with pockets become furniture, for, as Munari pointed out, drawers are the pockets of furniture and pockets are the drawers of clothes. If a home has pockets, what is furniture for? Is furniture merely the stolid accoutrements of a civilization of settled populations? Now that we have once again become nomadic, always on the move, even if only in thought, perhaps we should just have pockets. And, instead of producing furniture, Vitra could start making “clothes to live in“.
Design: Naoto Fukasawa
To understand Naoto Fukasawa’s work, you may first want to tune out the world and put your mind into a quiet place. It is about sensing and perception rather than thinking out loud. For the last few years, Fukasawa has been working on the concept “without thought“. This is an effort to rediscover how people unconsciously put to use whatever is convenient and available around them to make themselves comfortable – and function properly – and then give the most dissolving form to support such activities. Dissolving? Let me elaborate. Two ideas: you may be walking on a steep mountain trail. As you breathlessly climb, a random collection of rocks on the ground would suddenly suggest a flight of stairs. Or, you might arrive at your friend’s house on a rainy day, and there is no umbrella stand. You would carefully place the tip of your umbrella against a long groove embedded in the floor tiles, so that it will not fall.
When we say “dissolving“, we are talking about objects that dissolve into their environments, becoming part of the whole. For Fukasawa, the ideal is this: the act of design is accomplished, and the purpose is fulfilled, yet the designed object is almost absent – dissolved into its surroundings. So, in the latter example, his ideal umbrella stand would not be a bucket, but rather a slim gutter on the floor that might or might not be discovered by the guests as a spot to place their umbrellas. Fukasawa bases his approach on the work of American psychologist James J. Gibson (1904–1979), who created the concept known as “affordances“ – regarding the complementary relationship between animals (including humans) and their environment. Fukasawa believes we are constantly given affordances – such as the rock “stairs“ – and that, as primitive animals, we are reading and sensing them as we walk, as we see, as we touch, and so on.
Fukasawa finds affordances even in the most complicated modern environments. For example, a teenager in Tokyo is walking in the subway station, text-messaging. While his eyes are fixed on the small screen of his mobile phone, he steps confidently forward along the bumpy yellow plastic strip that had originally been installed for blind people but has afforded him this different use. Environment is shaped not only by nature, but also by manmade objects, social customs, trends and even our mood.
What about chairs, then? For Vitra Edition, Fukasawa seeks to extract the most primitive and iconic relationship between you and the environment when you are about to sit down in different circumstances. Even as he tries to minimize the sitter’s awareness of the designer’s intention, his wit is apparent. His work understands: as people move through the world, the environment anticipates and responds, often kindly.
Noriku Takiguchi
Design: Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry is one of only a few major architects today who does not merely pursue the development of furniture and other interior objects as an infrequent sideline, but devotes the same amount of attention and innovative energy to them as he does to his architectural projects. For example, both of his cardboard furniture series, Easy Edges (1969–1973) and Experimental Edges (1979–1982), resulted from an in-depth exploration of the material’s properties. Gehry’s contribution to the first Vitra Edition, the now legendary Little Beaver, was also created during this experimental phase. Not only were his inventive applications of corrugated cardboard patented; for a time he was legitimately concerned that he would not be taken seriously as an architect because his furniture was the focus of so much attention.
The collaboration between Gehry and Vitra continued on several different levels: the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (Germany) opened in 1989, and his building for the Vitra headquarters in Birsfelden (Switzerland) was inaugurated in 1994. In addition, a number of different concepts for furniture and lighting were discussed and, in some cases, implemented. Light has been a central theme in Gehry’s work from the very outset. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the present, the architect has pursued innovative lighting concepts and designed distinctive lamps for his diverse building projects. With the exception of his experiments with the material Colorcore, which led to the limited series production of his Fish and Snake lamps in the mid 1980s, Gehry’s lighting designs have always been one-off productions developed specifically for an individual project. Together with Vitra and Belux, Gehry developed the Cloud lamp as a product line suited for series production. Originally conceived in the material of paper, the Cloud lamp exhibits the qualities of roughness, improvisation and offhandedness that are typical of Gehry’s work. As a further evolution of this project, Mamma Cloud P was created for Vitra Edition 2007.
The Edition object Mamma Cloud P is not conceived primarily as a lamp, but as a light sculpture. Elements made of polyester fleece, a material that resembles paper, are completely covered in a printed wood pattern. Due to the variegated texture of the American plywood print, in combination with the letter “P“ scattered across the flexible skin, the object acquires a contradictory ornamentation that subtly transforms the character of the material. Neither does it retain the restrained appearance of a soft cloud formation, nor does the graphic reproduction of a stiff wooden panel confer these properties to the substrate material. With the choice of this motif, Gehry also makes reference to his early works, which were often constructed with common industrially produced materials such as plywood, corrugated metal and wire fencing. The lamp comprises approximately fifty organically shaped, pliant segments with reinforced edges. They can be joined together with clips to form variable shapes and volumes. Inside, a filigree wire skeleton serves as a flexible framework. Because of its modular structure, which does not specify a fixed shape for the final product, every model can be individually formed – thereby making it unique.
Martin Josephy
Design: Konstantin Grcic
Furniture, in so far as it carries meaning, is always about something. Throughout history, furniture’s subjects have included ancient gods, Jesus, rationality, ergonomics and fictional narratives. Konstantin Grcic’s subject matter is formed by the process of making the furniture itself, and not by external, predetermined or abstract values (that is, Jesus, rationality …). His process occurs in the specific context created by the personality of a client, the demands of a brief, a production technology, an intended user, a model-making method, or even the character of one of his four assistants who might work on a given project. Grcic is an unobstructed thinker; the only assumption that he makes is that furniture should be useful in some way. Moreover, he distinguishes between useful and functional: where function serves a predefined utilitarian need, useful only has to serve a purpose. By making inventively useful things, Grcic critiques the functions and forms of established typologies. He is also formally unrestricted. Working in specific contexts his logic guides the shape of his designs and since the contexts in which he works are diverse, so too are his forms. Grcic’s designs are liberated both functionally and formally. Although the purposes and forms of his designs are radically original, they almost always make historical references to older typologies and thereby carry familiar qualities. Grcic’s process, or subject matter, invokes a series of oppositions; craft model-making and industrial production, experimental yet practical uses, and forms that are at once new and historical.
Design: Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid’s architecture sees form and space pulled around, out of shape and into breathtaking, fluid spatial progressions. Hugely theatrical and enticingly urbane, her buildings have begun to transform notions of what can be achieved in concrete and steel, blending the revolutionary aesthetics of constructivism with the liquid organicism of expressionism. The progression in Zaha’s buildings from the jagged, suprematist forms of the Vitra Fire Station (1993) to the awesome, flowing urban spaces of the Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg (2005), show a consistent desire to question the traditional orthogonal plan, form always pulling towards an invisible mass, space and time warped and woven around structure. These are buildings which emerge from the city as sculpture yet which are also capable of knitting disparate blocks together, always surprising but also constantly making connections. Mesa evolved from an architectural experiment which was similarly to do with creating connections. Elastika was an installation created in the Moore Building in 2005 for the Miami Design Fair. The brief had been a sculptural structure to revivify the 1921 building’s atrium. Zaha’s proposal was an organic set of tentacles which linked spaces and floors across the atrium, defying changing levels and criss-crossing each other in mid-air. The effect was like a huge, sticky chewing gum pulled out of shape across the interior. It is a sci-fi alien piece which transforms the heart of the building, reaching across space. It looks as if the structure was attempting to resolve itself back into a single solid.
Mesa takes as its starting point a similar situation. Stripping the formal idea back to its constituent parts – ground, structure, surface – the design creates a world in between the two horizontal planes, a world which becomes structure but in which the voids express the form as much as the solids. Those voids do not appear merely as holes but go on to define the surface. Zaha compares it to water lilies sitting on a pond, flat mats supported by an unseen, complex and organic structure beneath. This highly unusual attenuation of surface from structure gives form to four organically-shaped sections which constitute defined divisions on the surface, described as ‘place-mats’. As one end is attracted by an invisible gravitational force, it skews the symmetry, an attenuated prow dragging the other forms along with it while the structure below stretches elastically to accommodate the distortions. Mesa becomes a microcosmic extrusion of the spatial ideas inherent in Zaha’s architecture. Form does not follow only function but instead is drawn along by the narrative of the plan and flow of space. It becomes something plastic and elastic, more Einsteinian than Cartesian, an evocation of a world shaped by unseen forces and dark matter, a fluid, flowing, four-dimensional world in which a table can distort the space within it and around it. It transforms any space into a Zaha room.
Edwin Heathcote
Design: Hella Jongerius
For Vitra Edition 2007 Hella Jongerius has designed three curious wheeled objects – Office Pets – combining worlds of difference. The underside, the wheels and the material used make each object seem at home in the context of corporate identities. But at the point where you would expect seats and armrests, semi-abstract shapes emerge which allude both to Jongerius’ vases and animal figures. These strange office creatures combine rationality and imagination as if they were quantities which always and self-evidently belong together. Office Pets not only provide office staff with a light-hearted escape from their tightly organized office life, but also represent a new stage in design. Jongerius pushes a slowly developed phenomenon beyond its ”natural” boundaries. In the last half century the word ”functionality” has practically lost its original instrumental meaning. Contemporary design is concerned with image, context, meanings and messages rather than immediate utility and use.
In 2007 we ask so much more from products than the serviceability that was the central feature of industrial design at the beginning of the twentieth century. Appliances also feed our minds and our imagination; we feel a need to cherish them as if they were living beings. This shift in the significance of design has led the profession in many respects to seek support from the visual arts professions. Yet Jongerius explicitly calls herself an industrial designer, not an artist. Her ”pets” could be said to disentangle the contemporary meaning of functionality. ”We express who we are by the furniture, the appliances and the accessories with which we surround ourselves day by day. There is hardly any point in making a fundamental distinction between these different things. All of them, in their own way, are necessary, functional.”
While these strange objects apparently herald a new direction in Jongerius’ work, their content actually makes them very easy to place. All her work is characterized by an experimental feeling for the boundaries of the design profession, with a crucial role being played by materials, methods of production and their intrinsic meanings and allusions. Steering a middle course between one-off traditionally made objects and industrially produced series has yielded many famous designs, including the B-service for Tichelaar (in which excessively high kiln temperatures led to the creation of unique examples in an industrial production process) and repeat, an unusual fabric design for the textile producer Maharam. Office Pets form the daring but logical next stage in Jongerius’ career. They are produced in a limited edition, mostly hand-crafted, while at the same time alluding to serially produced office chairs. The animals, which recall Jongerius’ designs for nymphenburg and Maharam, seem to have just escaped from a pretty parable into the commercial world of the open-plan office to make a powerful appeal to the imagination – a pre-eminent human need.
Louise Schouwenberg
Design: Greg Lynn
Known for his keen interest in science fiction and B-movies, Greg Lynn’s designs often resemble hyper-natural and animalistic forms: a mixed-use complex in the shape of flowers, a cultural institution painted the colour of Costa Rican tree frogs in bright shades of green and red, houses made from a slatted structure that gives the impression of fish scales …you get the picture. Beautiful, yet unsettling, the outlandish forms derive from Lynn’s investigations into advanced digital design. He is a forerunner in the use of new manufacturing and construction techniques and often employs methods used in the film, aerospace and automotive industries based near his studio in Venice, California, to bring his complex structures to life. He is best known for work that favours ”isomorphic polysurfaces” – more commonly known as ”blobs” – voluptuous forms that have intricate surface textures and structural properties. Lynn’s most well-known building to date is the Korean Presbyterian Church in New York, designed with Michael McInturf Architects and Douglas Garofalo Architect, completed in 1999. Since then his work has included numerous housing projects, several space-based installations and research-based projects, such as the Embryological House, an investigation into mass-customized housing made from a digitally controlled prefabricated design that can be adapted to suit local environmental conditions.
Although his studio focuses on architectural projects, Lynn nevertheless enjoys working across a range of disciplines to engage new ideas and methodologies. He recently seized the opportunity to design a limited edition piece of furniture for Vitra and experiment at the more intimate scale of interior design. His tongue-in-cheek design is a response to the current interest in ”design-art”, or limited edition works of furniture that reside somewhere between high-end design and art. As in much of his architecture, Lynn draws reference from animal imagery, creating what looks like two wildebeests let loose in a furniture showroom. Fondly named the Duke and Duchess, the pair of ultra shaggy chairs is made from a white gold-plated and chrome base, topped with Heidschnucke (German sheep’s wool) and angora goat respectively. Lynn refers to them as a ”cross between Las Vegas and luxury”. The unique bulbous forms of the loungers originated in an earlier design created by Lynn for Vitra. Named the Ravioli Chair, after the familiar plump pasta parcels they resemble, the earlier version is made from a gel-coated fibreglass base with an upholstered top. This play between hard and soft materials is exaggerated in the Duke and Duchess limited edition to luxurious proportions with the addition of plush fleece. The spacious bucket shape of the chair encourages a variety of seating positions, making it not only a fun and distinctive design but also extremely comfortable. ”Put me in a high-culture setting”, affirms Lynn, ”and I go Pop”.
Zoë Ryan
Design: Jürgen Mayer H.
When Jürgen showed the owner of Vitra his sketches for Lo Glo, a story sprung to mind. He often visited Charles and Ray Eames in the United States and was occasionally asked to bring something along. A Baumkuchen is what the Eameses wanted, a tall traditional cake. Made of many delicate layers, each baked and fused on a hot spinning tube, the Baumkuchen is then turned upright and carved to form an undulating profile that suggests stacked disks of uneven dimension, and finally coated in sugar or chocolate frosting. A wobblier, edible facsimile of the Eames walnut stool, that is: seat, table, object, icon. Mrs Eames loved the Baumkuchen so much she took photographs of it. Her pictures show the cake sliced in the customary way, cut horizontally to reveal its inner rings, like a tree trunk that has been cut. They also show the interior void, the space that remains after the hot spinning tube has been removed. It is a sectional surprise, that hidden hole at the centre, with the combined layers offering a complex taste treat, some more firm, others a bit softer.
When Jürgen showed me his concept sketches for Lo Glo, a story sprung to mind. I recall visiting the Grotta Azzurra in Capri when I was a boy, my first encounter with phosphorescence in nature. Many years later, in Vieques on the night before the millennium, I jumped with some friends into another phosphorescent bay. Their bodies, and surely mine, were reproduced as glowing vectors as we swum in the moonlight and left traces of light in our wake. And as I write that sentence, I recall Walter Benjamin’s “To live is to leave traces“ and, almost simultaneously, another memory: the nightlight in my childhood room, that little glowing bulb that helped me find my way in the dark. Lo Glo: piled-up disks that glow in the dark, elastic forms that gently yield and deform as we use them. We might talk about the interactive or performative surfaces of J. Mayer H., and how they activate experience, including this most recent, unprecedented stage of research at the scale of furniture. And when we do, we would do well to recall how this interactivity, however physical, is also phantasmagoric, and operates firmly within the realm of the remembered, the uncanny, and the longed for. Jürgen makes things that touch back. His earlier, thermosensitive works depend on our caress; with Lo Glo, Jürgen ascribes to objects a more autonomous inner life. These are works that hover in a quasi-subjective realm, greeting our bodies with an unmistakable stickiness. It is a pseudoscience Jürgen pursues, with none of the heaviness of neo-Organicist claims. no biomimicry here. Lo Glo is pure fiction: a cake that looks like a tree, spun and glazed like a dense and chewy story.
Henry Urbach
Design: Alberto Meda
Paradoxically, thanks precisely to his training as an engineer, Alberto Meda harnesses technology to one of the guiding principles of his work: the simplification of relations with objects. Meda has always in fact maintained that technology is not an end in itself, but a means to achieving simple things… Simplification, reduction to the essential, riddance of waste, energy saving, the pursuit of lightness … All these aspirations – and elements of his language – stem, however, from a common datum: the observation of nature.
Meda has always drawn inspiration from nature, from its complex and marvellous fascination; as Goethe did when he observed every tiniest detail of organic forms and the modes of their growth and evolution. In tune with today’s increasingly “environmental“ awareness, Meda, too, puts a respect for the natural balance of things at the core of his dealings with industry, treated as the privileged, and indispensable, interlocutor in any design dialogue. The design of a mobile wall to act as an energy accumulator seems to mark a turning point in his work. On one hand, the project for a reactive surface shares all the basic requirements of a technical object (not least a patient and serious process of experimentation to study its “behaviour“ under the most diverse conditions). On the other, it opens a new line of research already to be seen in his more experimental creations: that of looking at objects as presences capable of mediating our relationship with the environment.
Organic inspiration has always distinguished his designs. If on one hand it is a way of expressing that type of necessary relation between all the individual elements that go into the making of a unitary design, on the other it implies examining the panorama of domestic objects that design our everyday landscape in order to reconsider them in precisely “organic“ terms of the natural course of things. In nature, nothing is created, nothing is destroyed; in an incessant process of transformation, every thing is born, grows, develops and ultimately dies to be reborn and to give form to new life. Thus also the sun’s energy, the cycle of the seasons, heat and cold, become pivotal elements of a dialogue when designing everyday objects. Likewise, objects will adapt to this incessant force of transformation, becoming part of it so as to construct a more “respectful“ relationship with the environment. His design for a “performative“ screen springs in fact from the observation of the properties of phase-changing materials which yield or absorb heat according to external environmental conditions and behave basically as energy accumulators. On the hottest summer days this mobile wall, having absorbed the coolness of the night’s breezes, will refresh people feeling the heat who seek shelter in its “shade“, by returning the coolness accumulated inside it. And, during the winter it will keep them warm with its heat accumulated from the sun.
Francesca Picchi
Design: Jasper Morrison
Depending on the varying stylistic trends that have dominated product design during the past two decades, Jasper Morrison has been alternately regarded as a rebel or a trendsetter. In fact, the British designer has simply followed his own path over the past twenty years. During the 1980s, when the flamboyant design vocabulary of the Italian group Memphis dominated the scene, Morrison’s objects stood out because of their simplicity, subtlety and multiplicity. He transformed a common funnel and flexible tubing into a ready-made lamp; the shape of a light bulb was adapted to a doorknob. The “New Simplicity“ of the 1990s, which was especially prevalent in furniture design, found in Morrison one of its most convincing protagonists.
Due to the intelligent use of materials, the emphasis of radial geometries in contours and details, as well as subtle colours (devoid of patterns or ornamentation), his products have an innate serenity and implicit naturalness – irrespective of whether the object is an electric kettle or a streetcar. This applies in equal measure to Morrison’s latest design, the Cork Chair, which was created for Vitra Edition 2007. Its computer-generated form is precision milled from a solid block of material, which has the advantage of dispensing with joints or connections of any kind – the chair requires no screws, adhesives or veneers. Morrison explains: “I wanted to find a form which suited the material and was a bit mysterious in terms of when, where and why it was ever made. I described it to Rolf [Fehlbaum] as a chair looking like it was made by Eskimos (if they had cork oak trees of course).“ Morrison had already used cork in a small table for Vitra, for which he sought a distinctive type with a heavy grain incorporating larger bits of material. “The [...] reconstituted cork block [...] makes use of reject wine bottle stoppers, which are visible in the material. It’s a very beautiful material, recycling something not very beautiful or at all useful into a material with an incredible quality.“ The markedly inclined backrest of the Cork Chair offers a very relaxing seat. It is paired with a rectangular block of cork as a low side table. Who knows, perhaps the chair’s shape will eventually find its way into Inuit culture and be reproduced in a material that is hardly scarce in their natural environment: ice.
Gerrit Terstiege
Design: Jerszy Seymour
Two years ago Jerszy Seymour visited Vitra to show an ordinary plastic garden chair that had been cut and reconstructed with a cushion and bicycle elastic. It was the start of a research effort to create the new order of chair. A first result is the limited edition of an experimental and unique seating object that is part of the Vitra Edition 2007 project, but in the future it might also lead to an industrially produced chair. The limited edition bears the name New Order, a key notion in the philosophy of Seymour, his main strategy being the return to the zero degree of design, the primeval soup and beginning of everything, from where a new alphabet and language can be created that allows him to reconsider materials and shapes, the way the industry is affecting the value of things, and how all this fits in a social structure. The word Scum that has become his hallmark not only refers to this global strategy but also to the material that emerged as his favourite: the polyurethane foam that, despite being the furniture industry’s most-used material, mostly remains hidden and unnoticed, but regains its full force – crude like lava and in apocalyptic colours – in his projects, sprayed onto walls, furniture, lampshades and clothes, or as building material for a half-pipe or the giant Atomic Brain he built at designbrussels. With his love of found objects, the ordinary and omnipresent plastic garden chair was a choice that fitted in the same logic while developing New Order, a chair for the masses with the basic ergonomic movement of a high-class office chair.
“It is the most efficient chair ever produced, and by default the chair that has succeeded“, says Seymour. “It represents the pinnacle of an evolution. In some way it is totally devoid of design, but it also stands for and pre-empts a zero degree. It is the last of the old static chairs. The new dynamic chair that will push you back and forward was simply created by cutting the armrests of this plastic chair, and linking them with a bicycle elastic around the back, giving it the basic movement of an office chair.“ Metal reinforcement was added where necessary, while free-formed polyurethane foam was used for padding the arms, headrests and seat. The new order is also in the choice of low-class materials, a visible, dilettante and almost autistic re-ordered construction and a philosophy that all seek to revitalize design by stripping away its “bourgeois“ and commodity exterior whilst allowing the beauty of the simple crude materials to shine through. “The idea may be sophisticated, but I thought it important to stick to a raw aesthetic“, says Seymour. Liberate has always been his watchword. It involves a struggle in which his inspiration comes as much from Che Guevara as from Peter Sellers. While combining a radical and critical approach with a careful understanding of the fundamentals of design, and tempered by humour and a great sense of self-irony, New Order, in its effort to offer more comfortable seating for all, and to make the world less static, is only a next step in that battle.
Max Borka
Design: Tokujin Yoshioka
Tokujin Yoshioka does not seek to design things; he incites circumstances. He does not want to put the clock on hold so as to charm the viewer with beautiful objects; he sets up devices to make us participate, willing or not, in living time and space. His designs do not stop at the surface of things, but go on to involve everyone who happens to be there on the spot. Which is why they always seem just a little incomplete and open-ended. In creating an installation, his sure command of spatial presentation can turn an enormous room, viewers included, into a living, breathing work of art. And when the exhibition is over, the vision disappears without a trace – not even the same component elements can conjure the magic again. Tokujin’s genius is in once-only aesthetics. His light-hearted “air chairs“ – Honeypop, which fans open out of honeycombed layers of paper, or Pane, structured out of tubes of panettone cake-like foam – evidence the same ‘phenomenal’ inventiveness with which he approaches spatial installation work, a world apart from mass-producing exact duplicates. He relishes the idea of creating unprecedented experiences, because therein he touches upon the future.
His latest Kimono Chair fully exemplifies this design stance. While still nominally a chair, it represents an experiment to see how far he can remove it from mere seating. As he himself explains, it is like Star Wars spaceships racing through forests, an attempt to make us here and now on earth wonder about the cosmos. The kimono, the flat-folding, eminently compact Japanese traditional garb, is of simple straight-cut construction, yet fits nicely to the body, accentuating the wearer’s own individual shape. And, as Tokujin reminisces, “having grown up reading manga comics, I guess I’m attracted to flash transformations and instant metamorphoses“. Thus far, trying not to get caught up in the nuances of colour, Tokujin has worked atonally – or rather, he most often opted for white and transparent – but this time he has gone red. He says he wanted to reveal built-up layers of different materials, perhaps a more Japanese sensibility. Initially, Tokujin considered shaping with resin, but knew he wanted to deliver a more living feel. Although not using natural materials, he instead sought to make the object-human interaction a moving, changing experience. Not overly predetermined, but again open-ended. The first studies before deciding on a material were modelled out of cut aluminium sheeting, then paper, then vinyl and leather. Ultimately, he settled upon artificial suede for its readily adhesive workability and pleasing texture. Tokujin claims he could not be certain until the very last moment, but finally felt reassured on seeing the artificial suede prototype. “A beautiful finish isn’t everything“, he says. Recently, he has become interested in the relationship and balance between industrial design and the skilful hand-tooled markings of craft, which he regards as a means of fusing future and past.
1987: The first Vitra Edition. I first met Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman of the Swiss company Vitra, in 1984. A mutual friend, the artist Balthasar Burkhard, introduced us at the opening and unveiling of Balancing Tools, a large-scale sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen. Rolf had commissioned this work to celebrate the seventieth birthday of his father Willi Fehlbaum, founder of the company. Still situated in front of the main plant in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the sculpture remains a dynamic and playful emblem of the Vitra philosophy.
That first encounter with Rolf was followed by many more, and I came to understand and enjoy his passionate, curious and risk-taking approach to design. In the mid 1980s, I was working as a curator at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, and Rolf and I had many common interests and spirited discussions. During one of our conversations, he described a Vitra project that involved building experimental objects with the eventual goal of developing new products.
I was also taken with the idea of objects that explore process and form and had recently organized the exhibition “Alberto Giacometti, retour la figuration, 1933–1947“. During the 1930s and 1940s, Giacometti produced utilitarian objects commissioned by Jean-Michel Frank and Albert Skira, as well as his sculptures and drawings. As I developed the exhibition, it became clear to me that Giacomettis visual investigations were not confined to categories, and I decided to show his functional pieces alongside his artworks. Mantles, lamps, vases, pots and cabinets shared space with more traditional high art objects. The meaning and significance of his achievement encompassed these stunning designs.
Based on our shared interests, Rolf and I embarked on a collaborative project together in 1986. Its purpose was to explore the notion of the object both as sculpture and as functional product. We decided to invite architects, designers and artists to work within the parameters of a specific project: the production of prototypes for chairs.This was the genesis of the first Vitra Edition, exhibited at the Muse Rath in Geneva in February 1987. The eight participants were Ron Arad, Richard Artschwager, Frank Gehry, Shiro Kuramata, Gaetano Pesce, Denis Santachiara, Ettore Sottsass and Scott Burton. The goal was to see as wide a range of approaches as possible, and the wild and wonderful results are reflected in the titles of the works: Well-Tempered Chair (Arad), Chair/Chair (Artschwager), Little Beaver (Gehry), How High the Moon (Kuramata), Greene Street Chair (Pesce), The Sisters (Santachiara), Teodora (Sottsass) and Soft Geometric Chair (Burton).
The exhibition was an unconventional choice for the Muse Rath whose programme generally followed a more classical and conservative approach. The museum was also unfamiliar with working so quickly: it took only a few months from the projects inception to its realization. Somehow the limited timeframe added to the intensity of the experience and accelerated the generation of forms.
The artists brought their extensive knowledge of craft and tradition to the process. I remember thinking that the prototypes held their ground as sculptures, embodying the same drives, questions and resolutions. Not every prototype became an industrial product but they all possessed independent and singular presences. The thinking and practice that went into them resulted in a stimulating exhibition that revealed a sense of freedom and play. The project offered real opportunities to see the close connections between technology and art. It also explored the potential of one of Modernisms great hopes: the manufacture of high-quality mass-produced objects.
I also recall that the exhibition received a somewhat negative response: why show prototypes of chairs? Why was the museum collaborating with industry? From this vantage point it is difficult to imagine that resistance. Fortunately, times have changed. The boundaries between art and design are blurred and their close connections are more easily accepted. Design occupies an important place in todays art world, both commercially and curatorially. This is due, in part, to the establishment of design museums, such as Vitras. Todays design landscape has profoundly changed for the better, I think, since that first Vitra Edition some twenty years ago.
Hendel Teicher
Design: Ron Arad
Design: Ron Arad
Design: Ron Arad
Design: Richard Artschwager
Design: Scott Burton
Design: Coop Himmelblau
Design: Paolo Deganello
Design: Frank Gehry
Design: Ginbande Design
Design: Ginbande Design
Design: Ginbande Design
Design: Shiro Kuramata
Design: Alessandro Mendini
Design: Jasper Morrison
Design: Jasper Morrison
Design: Jasper Morrison
Design: Gaetano Pesce
Design: Denis Santachiara
Design: Borek Sipek
Design: Borek Sipek
Design: Borek Sipek
Design: Ettore Sottsass
Design: Philippe Starck
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