...With whom over a coffee they spoke about his work, the poetic power of his work, the story behind the iconic La Grange barn — and, of course, the new Vitra Mynt chair... How did the project for the Mynt chair for Vitra come about?...
...1 The exhibition Tsuyoshi Tane: The Garden House in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery, and the eponymous Garden House by Tsuyoshi Tane, the latest addition to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, allow one to approach not only a better appreciation of Tane's positions but also to experience how they influence and inform his approach, his works, his architecture... For all that Vitra is popularly associated with Weil am Rhein, Germany, the company's origins are to be found just across the border in Switzerland, specifically in Birsfelden on the edge of Basel, the association with Weil am Rhein being first forged in the early 1950s, a period when Vitra was still, primarily, a shop-fitting company, if one taking its first, tentative, steps into domestic interiors alongside retail interiors...
...Diaries which contain some of the most complete and detailed descriptions of Swiss society, and in which one also finds the earliest descriptions of the earliest (hi)story of the contemporary Switzerland, a, as Heidi records, nation constituted from a loosely bound collective, a cantonation, of ancient peoples, including, and amongst many, many others, the Röthlisberger, the Horgenglarus, the Usm, the Wohnbedarf, the Embru, or the Vitronians whose contemporary Commonwealth of Vitra was initially established across a number of fields on the banks of the river Birs in the north-western corner of the Toblerone cordillera... Yet it was, inarguably, the Vitronians, for all under the leadership of the benevolent Fehlbaum der Jüngere, who were the most active in terms of international exchange; not only cooperating with an American Miller by the name of Herman to introduce works and positions by the likes of, for example, Eames Office, I Samunoguchi, George Nel-son or Alexander Gi Rard into Switzerland, but also expanding the Commonwealth of Vitra to the neighbouring regions of Germany and from where they introduced the furniture of the American Miller Herman to the many peoples of Europe...
..." The morning of Friday September 27th 2013 was one of those misty autumn occasions that cause SANAA's immense new Vitra Factory Building in Weil am Rhein to merge, almost unseen, with the grey background... And so it was perhaps fitting that the Vitra Design Museum choose this dank September morn to open their latest exhibition, "Lightopia", an exhibition devoted to light...
