Vitra

Vitra is a Swiss furniture company still owned by the family that founded it. It is famous for two things: it makes in Europe some of the greatest classics of 20th-century design, from the seating of Charles and Ray Eames to the Panton Chair, and it has turned its German factory at Weil am Rhein, on the border with Basel, into a collection of buildings by the greatest contemporary architects.

A trip to New York

Vitra was founded in 1950 by Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, who at first fitted out shops. In 1953, on a trip to New York, the couple discovered the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, made in America by Herman Miller. Willi Fehlbaum obtained a licence to produce it in Europe, and from 1957 Vitra began manufacturing it. Since 1984, when the partnership with Herman Miller ended, Vitra has held the rights to the Eames and Nelson designs for Europe and the Middle East.

The Panton Chair

In 1967 Vitra presented the chair by Verner Panton: a single continuous form in plastic, without legs, cantilevered like a wave. It was the first cantilever chair made entirely of plastic and became a symbol of Pop design. Since then Vitra has added the furniture of Jean Prouvé and Alexander Girard to its catalogue, alongside contemporary designers such as Antonio Citterio, Jasper Morrison, Alberto Meda, the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius and BarberOsgerby. In 2013 it acquired Artek, the Finnish company founded by Alvar Aalto.

A campus of architecture

In 1981 a fire destroyed a large part of the Weil am Rhein factory. The founders' son, Rolf Fehlbaum, who had run the company since 1977, decided to rebuild it in a different way: instead of a single plan, he invited a different architect for each building. The results include:

• the Vitra Design Museum by Frank Gehry (1989), the architect's first building in Europe, white and sculptural, a symbol of Deconstructivism;
• the fire station by Zaha Hadid (1993), her first completed building, all concrete edges like a frozen explosion;
• the conference pavilion by Tadao Ando (1993), his first outside Japan;
• the factory halls by Álvaro Siza (1994) and SANAA (2011), and the VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron (2010), a stack of houses with pitched roofs.

The campus has also received a geodesic dome after Buckminster Fuller and a 1953 petrol station by Prouvé. The Vitra Design Museum, an independent foundation born from Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, organises design exhibitions all over the world and is one of the most important design museums in Europe.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Vitra (en)
• Wikipedia – Vitra Design Museum (en)
• Vitra – sito ufficiale