Vitra.

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/ Deyan Sudjic

Vitra’s collections have been assembled with an awareness of both these purposes in mind; they have learned from each of them and moved on. The company has a unique track record in manufacturing and conceiving new typologies for furniture. Studying the collections has played a real part in making that possible, in a way that the founders of the Victoria and Albert would recognize. In the early 1980s, before the Vitra Design Museum had been built, you could wander through the offices attached to the Vitra factory and find in between the desks the battered and faded survivors of the heroic days of the modern movement. They were a challenge to do better today, object lessons for a creative company, rather than trophies. And this collection is still there, in the midst of the company’s production facilities, as a kind of reference encyclopaedia.

It is also a reflection of Fehlbaum’s world view; in which industrial design offers a crucial insight into the nature of the contemporary world, engaged both with the material, and the cerebral. Of course, a collection like that of MoMA or the Pompidou in Paris has a wider range. Vitra does not collect computers or cars, washing machines, or helicopters, or guns, or fashion. Its focus is on furniture in the context of architecture and interior design. And with the exception of a few classically styled pieces that demonstrate innovation in mass production, it limits itself to modernism and its descendants in its stylistic choices. But in its chosen territory – and that now extends into lighting – of the modern period, Vitra has unmatched depth. When Ray Eames died, there was no American museum with the resources ready to take on the bulk of the archives of what was perhaps the most brilliant mid-century design studio in the world. Vitra found the means to do it – and for its pains was presented for a moment as an unwelcome interloper, making off with a priceless piece of American heritage. Similarly, when the Barrágan papers in Mexico were in danger of dissolving into dust, it was Vitra that rescued them. The Vitra collections include Sottsass and Memphis of course; they have pieces by Panton, Kuramata, Aalto and Arad, Pesce and Colombo. But they also go back to the dawn of industrial production, with items by Thonet, and even earlier.

The collections began with Rolf Fehlbaum’s acquisition of a single chair designed and made by Jean Prouvé, the great, quintessentially French, engineer designer. What intrigued him was the combination of manufacturing skill and aesthetic sensibility that it represented. The collections took on their present form when Fehlbaum met Alexander von Vegesack. After a spell in theatre, and as an exhibition organizer, von Vegesack had knocked on Billy Wilder’s door in Los Angeles to look at his collection of Bauhaus designs. Over the years, von Vegesack built up a substantial collection of his own, fuelled by the very special kind of knowledge that comes not from academic history but from the visceral insight into the evolution of production and technique that comes from the focus of a collector. Fehlbaum bought von Vegesack’s holdings of bentwood and tubular steel furniture. As Fehlbaum says, he had no clear strategy about where to take the collections next. He has always taken pleasure in seeing where events will lead him.

No collection can be objective. It is in the nature of collecting that it is based on choices. What category of things to collect is one key choice. Which pieces to focus on is another. Unerringly, these choices will reveal the personality behind the collection. Fehlbaum is inspired by how things are made. Standing by the Vitra production line, he becomes lyrical when he talks about the magic that accompanies the moment when a rubber disc closes up to connect the bent metal of a chair leg to the fibreglass shell of the seat. But he is as excited by the cultural significance of a chair and its ability to reflect an artistic moment, or a social development. He has a catholic, but coherent, taste that informs the choice of every object acquired for the collections and it is that taste, as much as anything, which makes the collections so impressive.

The idea of building a museum to show the collections was not part of the original plan. Fehlbaum had thought about buying a villa to house them. But then, as part of the wider expansion of the Weil am Rhein Campus of Vitra’s industrial buildings, the possibility of a structure to show the collections came up. There was a casual introduction to Frank Gehry from Claes Oldenburg, commissioned by Fehlbaum to produce a sculpture as a gift to his father for his seventieth birthday. Fehlbaum had already asked Gehry to think about furniture for the company, and somehow never managed to get a reply. The factory with museum attached, or possibly the other way around was Gehry’s belated response.