Tom Vac by Ron Arad for Vitra. And New Objectivity!

As with so much of Ron Arad’s commercially available, serially produced, furniture designs the story of Tom Vac starts a long, long way away from the domestic conformity one has become accustomed to seeing them in.

In this case the story begins on a street corner in Milan.

In 1997 the Italian architecture and design magazine Domus launched a PR campaign which involved asking contemporary designers to create an installation which embodied the fundamentals of the magazine.

The first commission came from Ron Arad, was unveiled during Milan Design Week 1997 and involved a stack of 100 aluminum chairs Arad had specially developed for the project.

Called “Domus Totem” the installation was, if we understand it correctly, an exploration of both novelty and memory in design, art and architecture.

And all good, clean fun.

As project sponsor, Vitra subsequently re-created the chairs in plastic, and since its launch in 1999 the Tom Vac has been one of the staples of the Vitra seating collection.

That one can currently find the reduced, unassuming, almost chaste, Tom Vac in front of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart under the banner “Otto Dix und die Neue Sachlichkeit”, (Otto Dix and the New Objectivity) is surely an oversight.

If you’re going to choose a Ron Arad work in such a context then the Rover Chair or Bad Tempered Chair pass much better to Otto Dix’s in your face depictions of war, prostitutes and the depravities of the Weimar Republic.

Or maybe were misinterpreting a brilliant piece of critical juxtaposition on the part of the curators.

Either way. It amused us.

And we wanted to share it….

Tom Vac by Ron Arad for Vitra. And New Objectivity!

Tom Vac by Ron Arad for Vitra. And New Objectivity!