Vitra.

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/ Deyan Sudjic

Imagine if Volkswagen were to open a museum of car design. A museum of car design that was based on bringing together all the archives of Henry Ford, Pierre Boulanger and Harley Earl, with a collection made up of the most significant cars in the development of automobile history from three continents, going back for a century, alongside a selection of the most intelligently designed engines ever produced. Or consider the likelihood of Chanel doing something similar with fashion not limited to the company’s own output, or Boeing contemplating such an initiative with aircraft, and you have an idea of what Rolf Fehlbaum, its founder, and Alexander von Vegesack, its director, have achieved with the Vitra Design Museum in just twenty years. Of course neither Volkswagen nor Chanel, despite their generous cultural patronage across many fields, have attempted any such thing. Vision apart, there are simply too many questions of conflicting interests and ambitions at stake for them to try it.

A less confident company than Vitra, or perhaps it is better to say, a company without the level of curiosity that drives Vitra, would be too busy asking itself why it should be investing in safeguarding and celebrating the heritage of what could be seen as commercial rivals, to invest so much time and effort in the enterprise. But moved by Fehlbaum’s sense of curiosity about design, a curiosity and enthusiasm that go far beyond the boundaries of his own company’s output, Vitra has created one of the most remarkable collections of twentieth-century design anywhere. Much more than a corporate museum, it offers a perspective about what design can be in the contemporary world.

There are many design collections in the world now. Among the oldest of them is that of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which established the idea of collecting design in the 1850s. Its purpose was not so much to entertain the public, as to educate it, and, above all, to provide the research and the reference material that the British government believed its manufacturers would need to help them make better products which in turn could better overseas imports. The Victoria and Albert was followed by a wave of similar institutions, from the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (the MAK) in Vienna, to the Neue Sammlung in Munich. In time, of course, the Victoria and Albert became something else. It suffered mission creep, and turned into a museum of decorative art, where snuff boxes and Raphael cartoons, and collections from throughout Britain’s colonial possessions accumulated apparently almost at random to fill up hall after hall. Now, it is a museum that is about a lot of things, but a focused idea of what design can offer a contemporary manufacturer is no longer one of them. It was followed in the 1920s by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where industrial design was admitted to the collection on the basis of its aesthetic relevance to modernism in art. It was another definition of design, one which proved just as influential as that of the Victoria and Albert, and inspired as many other institutions to follow its lead. But the price of admission for design into the art gallery was that it would be presented as if it were art: as large-scale sculpture in neutral white spaces, with no sense of context or process.