...While the rest of the international design museum community retreat from the warmth of the summer sun, taking shelter in the cool of their depots and archives, Leipzig's Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst are busy preparing for one of its annual highlights: Grassimesse... A craft, applied art and design fair instigated in 1920 which has witnessed, and survived, the highs and lows of the past century in Leipzig and environs...
..."1 Just one of a great many questions of chairs, seats, sitting and sitters A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, encourages, empowers, you to reflect upon... A Chair and You is scheduled to run at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Johannisplatz 5–11, 04103 Leipzig until Sunday October 6th...
...Wilhelm Gutmann used the occasion of Grassimesse Leipzig 1920 to present... And all of which leads one to an opinion that in contrast to the popular reception of his art, in his interior and furniture, and lighting, design work Wilhelm Gutmann was not only talented but original; and for all makes one all the more anxious and desirous to see what Wilhelm Gutmann presented at Grassimesse Leipzig 1920...
...After several years of preparation, and a lot of, at times (very) heated, discussion, this past March saw the staging of the inaugural Grassimesse Leipzig in the city's Rathaus... Richard Graul, Director of the Leipzig Kunstgewerbemuseum by way of a response to, an answer to, the increasing concerns amongst many professional creatives regarding the quality of contemporary objects of daily use presented at the bi-annual Leipzig Fair, for all the quality of the novel machine produced goods of contemporary industry, the Grassimesse intends to be not only a platform for presenting the highest quality of contemporary craft, applied art and design, but also to be a platform for exchange and mediation between creatives and industry and commerce, and thereby seeks to help to stimulate an increase in the quality, usefulness, beauty and value for money of the everyday goods of contemporary life...
...Vitra A Fehlbaum; A Campus; A Commonwealth According to the Sagas of the Dolls of Wood, that most authoritative account of the early (hi)story of the Commonwealth of Vitra, the contemporary Vitronians trace their origins back to a joining of forces of the Graeter, a Basel based people whose primary trade was the creation of display systems for shops and shop windows, and the Birsfelden Fehlbaum, a primarily office based people at that time under the guidance of a Willi and an Erika; a Willi and an Erika Fehlbaum who not only assumed guidance over the newly united peoples but also instigated a slow expansion of the shop furniture of the Graeter to a collection of items of practical, everyday, use in and for houses, a, at that time, novel accommodation concept in the Basel/Birsfelden region... And a shift away from the Graeter's and Fehlbaum's traditional trades, and an expansion from the Graeter and Fehlbaum's native region, that saw Willi and Erika adopt the name 'Vitra' for the new, shared, dominion, a use of the nominative plural of the Latin vitrum, glass, that was a reminder of the display windows of the Graeter, a reminder of the mirrors and lightbulbs of the earliest joint Graeter Fehlbaum house products, a reminder of the work, and teachings, and lessons, of Hanstheo Baumann, and also a committent to the new transparency and openness demanded in the Europe of that age as it moved on from the terrible and debilitating and thoroughly avoidable World Wide War...
...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...
