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/ Alexander von Vegesack

Our joint collaboration began in 1987. Following his acquisition of a portion of my collection in 1988, Rolf Fehlbaum charged me with the task of systematically building up and expanding the combined holdings. To provide the objects with a dedicated venue, Fehlbaum had asked the architect Frank Gehry in 1986 to create plans for a small museum building. The building – originally conceived as a place to house the collections and show the holdings to friends, customers and business partners – became the present-day Vitra Design Museum, as well as Gehry’s first built project on European soil. My own proposals went beyond the original idea of merely displaying the collections to embrace the concept of a publicly accessible museum that would operate independently from the company. In addition to its own programme of exhibitions based on the collections, it would also show alternating temporary exhibitions.

As founding director, I opened Vitra Design Museum in 1989 and have watched it grow into an important international facility with a diverse yet distinctive profile. In the two decades of our collaboration, Rolf Fehlbaum and I have worked with the Museum’s head of collections, Serge Mauduit, to find and obtain the best examples of industrially produced furniture through individual purchases, auctions or the acquisition of complete estates. By far the most important acquisition was the complete threedimensional estate of Charles & Ray Eames, which we obtained in 1988. In addition to designs that went into production, this estate also contains studies and prototypes that are of inestimable value in documenting and examining the creative processes underpinning the couple’s work. No doubt the pre-eminent highlight of the collections, this estate is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that it made its way from Venice, California, to Weil am Rhein.

The other important estate holdings in the collections include furniture, drawings, manuscripts and photos from the office of George Nelson; the patents and correspondence of Anton Lorenz, the ‘éminence grise’ of the international tubular steel furniture industry; and the artefacts and documents collected by Alexander Girard, who accumulated samples of textiles, paper and other objects from all over the world and initiated an influential dialogue in the 1950s between the fields of design and folk art. The works of Harry Bertoia, Verner Panton and Eero Saarinen are also represented with extensive holdings in the Museum’s collections, with the Panton estate containing many of his iconic fabric designs.

Surveying the collections as a whole, the following areas emerge as focal points: the period from the 1850s to the turn of the century shows a focus on bentwood furniture, the designs of Viennese architects and pieces by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright. The first three decades of the twentieth century are most prominently represented by the work of Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus, as well as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. Along with the sizeable holdings from American sources, particularly Charles & Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia, the period up to the Second World War is also defined by the French ‘constructeur’ Jean Prouvé, whose work is superbly documented with his most significant furniture designs, as well as many of his facade elements. From Scandinavia, there are designs by such figures as Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner, Poul Kjaerholm and Verner Panton and, from Italy, pieces by Gio Ponti, Carlo Mollino, Achille Castiglioni, Studio Memphis and Alchimia. Furnishings from the Arts and Crafts movement along with Art Deco and Art Nouveau are represented, albeit with relatively few examples. Taking the position that subsequent developments in modern furniture can only be fully understood as the ideological and stylistic heirs of these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements, the earlier periods would presumably be the mostly likely candidates for expansion within the collections.