100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection. - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Alfred Mayor

A museum of modernist furniture

Vitra is a Swiss maker of office furniture with its main manufactory in Weil am Rhein, Germany. There, in a building designed by the Canadian architect Frank Gehry, the company has created the Vitro Design Museum housing a collection of more than eighteen hundred pieces of furniture, most of them chairs, dating from 1820 to the present.

The majority of the objects were made after 1925 and are rigorously in the modernist tradition. The museum is particularly strong in furniture designed by Charles Earnes and his wife Ray - understandably since Vitra's first office furniture was made under license from the Herman Miller Company in Michigan, which manufactured designs by the Earneses. When considering an accession, the museum's rules are strict. Vernacular; decorative, and arts and crofts furniture are excluded. Avant-garde furniture, much of it designed by architects, is welcome, as are all associated documents.

The museum stresses its independence from the company, and indeed the collection includes a very small percentage of Vitra furniture. Yet the museum does arrange exhibits at furniture trade shows and it is in active contact with the designers whose work it collects. The designers, in turn, admire the firm of Vitra for its commitment to good design beyond the call of commerce.

The present volume is the catalogue of a traveling exhibition that is on a world tour until the year 2000 - one of a continuing series of exhibitions that constitutes one of the museum's chief reasons for being. The chapter headings are indicative of the museum's cerebral approach to furniture: "Technology," "Construction," "Reduction," "Organic Design," "Decoration," and "Manifesto." However, the individual entries are engrossingly practical. Opposite a full-page illustration of the object is all that is known about it. An example chosen at random from this catalogue is a chair named Blow, designed in 1967 and manufactured by Zanotto near Milan, Italy. It is made of transparent PVC foil with electronically welded seams, and it realized "Marcel Breuer's vision from the mid-twenties - of being able to sit on a column of air." It was designed by four architects taking their cue tram pop culture and the inflatable raft. The result is light, easily moved, and inexpensive, However, as PVC cannot be glued like Neoprene, a number of trials were made before the electronic welding technique was developed and the chair came into being. Accompanying this entry are two illustrations: a colored drawing of children toting Blow chairs to their chosen spot on a beach and a black-and-white photograph of a living room with a man and woman each reading in a Blow chair.

At the back of the catalogue are thorough biographies of each designer and a solid bibliography for each object.