Vitra is a Swiss based manufacturer of designer home and office furniture, lighting and accessories. Originally founded in Weil am Rhein, Germany in 1950 by Willi Fehlbaum, the company moved to Birsfelden, Switzerland in 1994. Soon after being formed, Vitra acquired licences for the products of major American designers Charles and Ray Eames, and George Nelson. The buildings housing Vitra and the Vitra Design Museum include works by Nicholas Grimshaw, Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Jean Prouve and Zaha Hadid. Most notable perhaps, the stacked showroom, Vitrahaus by Herzog & de Meuron, contains the Vitra Home Collection which launched in January 2004. The Vitra collection houses a plethora of new and historically significant works by some of the most renowned furniture designers. These include Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Jean Prouve, Verner Panton, George Nelson, Antonio Citterio, Jasper Morrison and Barber Osgerby. Vitra produce licenced iconic designs which include Eames 670 lounge chair and ottoman, Panton chair, Eames RAR rocking chair and Sunburst clock by George Nelson.
twentytwentyone is an official stockist of Vitra and is pleased to offer their collection of furniture, lighting and home accessories.You have found a place Trimble hasn't been to ... yet. Please check the URL and try again.Design duo Barber and Osgerby's minimal and "visually calm" Pacific chair is their first office seating for Vitra. Launched at the Orgatec 2016 trade fair in Cologne, the Pacific chair conceals its mechanical parts behind an extra-long rectangular backrest, which extends below the base of the seat. Its linear form is echoed in the chair's short, straight armrests. "To us the contemporary work chair has become a contraption – a collection of controls and levers," said Edward Barber. "Rethinking how to minimise the visual impact of these elements has been at the centre of our design. Our chair is simple to use and visually calm." The duo recently launched a geometric tile collection for Mutina and a minimal table based on Japanese joinery.
The Pacific chair comes in several different sizes and colours, and with a matt black or reflective frame. The height of the back can be adjusted, and the furniture adjusts automatically to each sitter. "To optimise comfort, we joined with Vitra in developing a new mechanism that responds to the individual weight of the sitter," added Jay Osgerby. "Further lumbar adjustment is provided from a seated position by the vertical movement of the backrest." Vitra launched the Pacific chair at trade fair Orgatec, which was held in Cologne from 25 to 29 October 2016. Vitra put on a massive exhibition of work furniture concepts for the event, at which it also unveiled office tables created in partnership with the Bouroullec brothers. The Bouroullecs hope their Cyl furniture will introduce a more domestic atmosphere to the workplace. Elsewhere in the world of office furniture, Herman Miller has updated its own iconic Aeron chair, fine-tuning it to be more responsive to different body types.
The brand has also designed a range of seating tailored towards fidgeting workers. Ergonomic seating, modern office furniture and office layout and design readily available in one convenient place. Office Layout & Design End-to-end solution for furniture, design expertise, floor planning, and installation. Save money with preferred pricing, volume discounts and dedicated account representitives. All qualified furniture industry professionals are eligible for our new program. For over 20 years Office Designs has helped individuals and small businesses outfit their office spaces with top quality office chairs and office furniture. Our goal is to make ergonomic seating, modern office furniture and office layout and design readily available in one convenient place. Visit our blog for articles filled with industry news, advice, and inspiration on how to setup your work spaces for success.WEIL AM RHEIN, Germany — Thousands of objects in the collection of the Vitra Design Museum, including prototypes of 20th-century classics by Charles and Ray Eames and Alvar Aalto, have long been hidden from public view, sealed away in storage for most of the time.
But that has changed with this month’s opening of the Schaudepot, a new archive and exhibition space designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.Herzog & de Meuron has buried the Schaudepot’s storage spaces underground. Perched on top is a 7,000-square-foot gallery with a conventional pitched roof. As visitors approach it, they can see the museum staff at work through the windows of the offices, library and conservation laboratory.“As well as opening up the collection to the public, we want to make design research visible by exposing the workings of the museum,” said Mateo Kries, co-director of the Vitra Design Museum.The Schaudepot is the latest addition to the industrial and cultural campus built by Vitra, the Swiss furniture company, in this German town just north of Basel, Switzerland. A fire destroyed the original factories in 1981. Faced with the need to rebuild the site, Rolf Fehlbaum, now chairman emeritus of Vitra, which was founded by his parents in 1950, decided to work with architects whose work he found most interesting.
One of the plants was designed by Frank Gehry, and another by SANAA, the Japanese architects of the New Museum in New York. Their compatriot Tadao Ando designed a conference center, and the fire station was the first building realized by the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, who died this year. Her staccato cluster of concrete slabs is in sharp contrast to the mellow red-brick facade of the Schaudepot, which is Herzog & de Meuron’s second building for the site. The first, a furniture showroom, opened in 2010.The inaugural exhibition at the Schaudepot traces the history of furniture design since the late 18th century in 430 pieces, starting with an anonymously made wooden chair from Britain, and ending with the first chair to be 3D printed in aluminum, by the Dutch designer Joris Laarman.Hanging on one wall is a dilapidated plastic chair, the first model of the S-shaped Panton Chair, named after its Danish designer Verner Panton.“Verner had shown it to a couple of companies in Germany, but they’d said no, so he brought it here in 1963 to show my father and I, hoping that we’d produce it,” Mr. Fehlbaum said.
Little did the Fehlbaums realize that plastic technology was still so limited that it would take 36 years of technical experiments to produce the chair as Mr. Panton envisaged it. That version of the chair was introduced in 1999, a year after the designer’s death. Its evolution is illustrated in the earlier versions displayed near the original model.Among the other exhibits are rare original versions of works by Aalto and the Eameses, as well as one-offs designed in the 1920s by the Irish architect Eileen Gray, and anonymous pieces including a 1930s aircraft seat. A central display explores the Radical Design movement in 1970s Italy. The museum is compiling a digital archive of information on the objects that will be accessible online.Hundreds more works can be seen through glass walls in storage in the basement, together with a reconstruction of Charles Eames’s office in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice. The Vitra Design Museum collection includes the Eameses’ furniture archive as well as those of Mr. Panton, George Nelson, Alexander Girard and other designers.
The collection began in the early 1980s when Mr. Fehlbaum started to buy what were then inexpensive works by his favorite designers.“I bought an Eames chair here, a Jean Prouvé chair there,” he recalled. “I didn’t plan to build a collection; I just put the chairs in my office. Over time, there were so many, that I thought of displaying them in a little building. I’d just met Frank Gehry, and asked him to design it.” Mr. Gehry worked on the design for the museum, which opened in 1989, at the same time as the factory beside it. Self-indulgent though Mr. Fehlbaum’s design and architecture patronage might seem, he is convinced that it benefits Vitra, which makes an unspecified annual donation to the museum, a separate nonprofit entity.“The cultural program helps to define Vitra’s image,” he said. “And our designers often use the collection for research.”Edward Barber, co-founder of the London-based group Barber & Osgerby and a furniture designer for Vitra, agreed: “We often pull out pieces from the collection to better understand their construction,” he said. “