Vitra Design Museum Expands Reach - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Janet Koplos

The Vitra Design Museum, housed in a Frank Gehry building located on the grounds of the Vitra furniture factory in Well am Rhein, Germany (near Basel), has established its first branch, the Vitra Design Museum Berlin. The new venue opened July 1 with a retrospective of Verner Panton (Denmark, 1926-1998), designer of the first single-unit cantilevered chair of molded plastic and known especially for his extravagant forms and intense colors in the 1960s.

The new branch is located in the Humboldt transformer plant in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district, which was designed by Hans Heinrich Muller in 1924 and erected the following year for the Bewag utility company, which still owns it. Vitra occupies a 7,500-square-foot exhibition space (the former machine hall), about 1,600-square-feet of which is devoted to a museum shop, reception area and cafe, plus a section of the control tower that is used for lectures, press conferences and other events. Bewag still operates some parts of the facility but plans to rent or sell the entire complex to cultural institutions or galleries. Vitra is currently offering only temporary exhibitions but expects to eventually show part of its permanent collection of more than 3,000 examples of modern furniture design.

The museum is also scouting other locations, Milan and Paris foremost, for appropriate spaces. The 11-year-old museum, under founding director Alexander von Vegesack, is almost entirely self-supporting through rental of shows to an international array of "exhibition partners" (kunsthalles and museums in Europe, the Americas, Australia and Japan), sales of its own publications and a line of chair miniatures, as well as a series of workshops with international architects and designers and other special programs. Curator Mateo Kries will be responsible for the Berlin branch, which will start out with shows developed at Well am Rhein, including retrospectives of Luis Barragan, Isamu Noguchi, Charles and Ray Eames (the museum acquired the estate in 1988), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, and will later organize shows as well.