Since its founding, the history of the Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra has been inextricably linked to seating design: after Vitra founders Erika and Willi Fehlbaum saw chairs by Ray and Charles Eames in New York in the early 1950s, they set about acquiring licenses to produce and distribute Eames Designs in Europe. Something they have done successfully since 1957: collections such as the Eames Plastic Chairs or the Eames Aluminium Chairs not only representing technically innovative manufacturing processes and material solutions, but also revolutionary functional properties and ergonomic design. Thanks to decades of experience and in-depth expertise, Vitra has repeatedly re-written modern design history and influenced generations of next-generation designers with its dining and office chairs. In addition to designs by design legends such as Jean Prouvé, Charles and Ray Eames or Verner Panton, Vitra is also at the forefront of contemporary design chairs: Vitra Dining Chairs, such as the HAL Collection by Jasper Morrison, represent a contemporary combination of material, form and functionality and can be used in a wide variety of areas and situations.
Eames Plastic Chairs from Vitra
... for outdoors as well
Vitra rocking chair RAR with and without upholstery
Vitra Dining Chairs by Charles & Ray Eames
Fiberglass Chairs from Vitra
Eames Fiberglass Chairs in a domestic setting
LAR Plastic Chair
Vitra Shell Chairs
Vitra EA 107/108 Aluminium Chair
Vitra ES 104 Lobby Chair
Vitra Panton Chair Junior
Panton Chair from Verner Panton
Evo-C, Chaise Tout Bois and other Vitra dining chairs
Tip Ton chair by Barber & Osgerby
Vitra Standard chair by Jean Prouvé
With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and...
...Originating in context of, and presented parallel to, the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... de/burg-galerie/ Chairs: Dieckmann!...
..."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... 2 And indeed unlike Junge Dieckmann was a member of the NSDAP; and as Aya Soika convincingly discusses in the Chairs: Dieckmann!...
...With the exhibition Chairs... Chairs...
...For our part we were particularly perturbed by the claim in the section on Plastic Chairs that the high sales figures for Gerd Lange's early 1970s Flex 2000 indicate that "Thonet had its finger on the pulse of the plastic age" If there's one thing the Thonet (hi)story teaches us it is that "plastic age" (largely) passed them by, that having established the company on two material/technological innovations they missed a third, lest we forget, which we can't because they are two examples in the exhibition, in the 1950s & 60s Thonet cooperated with Verner Panton on wooden chairs, you do the math... A state of affairs Bentwood and Beyond with its inter-twinned specific and general discussions on 200 years of modern furniture design very convincingly, satisfyingly, underscores and reinforces; despite moments such as Plastic Chairs or Super Normal Bentwood and Beyond isn't a hagiographic celebration of Thonet, but a series of reflections on Thonet in context of wider realities, a series of reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design and the path to our contemporary furniture understandings through the conduit of Thonet, and for all an exhibition which tends to underscore and reinforce the truism that continually evolving social, cultural, economic, technical, et al realities not only carries design forth but defines, and continually redefines, our relationships to our objects of daily use, demanding the new, discarding the obsolete, the foolish, the faddish while preserving, nurturing, certain universal archetypes as it rolls onwards...
