Association of Swiss Interior Architects
The Association of Swiss Interior Architects (VSI.ASAI) ( French Association Suisse des Architectes d'Interieur , Italian Associazione Svizzera degli Architetti d'Interni ) is the Swiss professional association for interior designers . It was founded in 1942 and is based in Zurich .
The VSI is a member of the REG Foundation Council of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation . It brings together representatives of institutional interest groups such as public and private corporations who are interested in the continued existence of this professional group. The tasks include in particular the recognition of the profession and title protection as well as the comparability and recognition of professional qualifications in Europe and worldwide.
history
The initiative to establish an interest group for interior designers came from the then head of the Zurich School of Applied Arts and course director of the interior design class , Wilhelm Kienzle, who, together with his students, developed and realized the vision of becoming an independent professional group in 1942 . The ten founding members were Oskar Burri as its first president, Otto Glaus , Willy Guhl , Hans Guyer , Ernst Klettiger, Wilhelm Kienzle, Oskar Viktor L. Kunz, Albert Nauer, Fritz Solenthaler and Alfred Vogel. According to their understanding, the perception should not come from the outside, as with architecture , but from the user, i.e. from the inside of the building. In the early years, for the founders, interior design was the continuation of the design from the outside to the inside, “as a principle of planning that focuses on people and their individual needs. Whether this concerns the outside or inside view of the architecture is not in the foreground ».
The founding minutes and also the records of some other meetings of the annual general assemblies are no longer preserved, but from other correspondence it can be inferred what moved the men at that time. In the statutes , which were adopted in February 1943, the purpose of “cooperation with the Federation of Swiss Architects BSA and the Swiss Work Federation SWB” - or its sister organization L'Œuvre in western Switzerland - was named. They were also concerned with "the discussion of pending questions of the interior designer profession" within these three professional associations that are active in design. The aim is to «raise the cultural and artistic level of the profession». This obviously wanted to distance oneself from the traditionally backward-looking understanding within the Werkbund and focus on modernity . In addition, the aim was to obtain title protection and recognition of the economically and culturally responsible profession.
The orientation towards modernity was dictated by "an international artistic avant-garde movement" immediately after the First World War, which questioned the traditional language of form and functionality and wanted to redefine modern life, from urban planning to architecture and product design. As in Germany, the term New Building was coined for it . Immediate role models were those of the Bauhaus in Germany and Le Corbusier's studio in Paris . Karl Coelestin Moser and Hans Bernoulli from ETH Zurich were in charge of the architecture . They laid the theoretical basis from parts of "tradition-conscious as well as future-oriented architecture concept"
Furniture
From the beginning, the design of furniture - still in the tradition of the Werkbund - was the most important design feature in the living space. From 1946, the trilingual publication Möbel und Wohnraum was published. The book gives a characteristic impression of the contemporary taste of moderate homeland style. Hans Guyer was largely responsible for production. He died in 1949. The puppet theater at Stadelhofen train station from 1942 has been preserved, albeit slightly different .
In addition to the arts and crafts school, the Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl in Zurich, established in 1931, can be seen as the nucleus of interior design work . With it, there was a great need for interior design. With the help of Max Bill , a vision of this modern life could be realized that appealed to many young, intellectual personalities to live there. Personal circumstances forced Bill to leave Zurich after a few months, but Wohnbedarf AG was founded as early as 1932 , which “saw the production and distribution of durable and inexpensive standard furniture as an expression of a comprehensive reform of life”. Its own furniture industry emerged, but it stalled due to economic difficulties with Switzerland's political isolation before and during the Second World War.
With the second generation of designers, from 1955 onwards, attention expanded from furniture to the living space as a whole. This tied in with an idea that had already arisen in the 1930s, but which had not been able to develop due to the economic constraints of the war. Added to this were influences from the United States, which is now culturally closer, and its showroom approach. Important achievements individual members of the VSI with the store design of the Zurich Household Goods Business Sibler 1956 by Mövenpick and and interior design of the new terminal B at Kloten airport in 1970. In 1992 there remodeling the departure hall in Terminal A, in which the design of Heinrich Oeschger from was "reprofiled" in the 1950s.
With the 1972 study The Limits to Growth , the VSI also became aware of sustainable action. In the same year, the financing of the film Die Grünen Kinder (The Green Children) was arranged by Kurt Gloor , which deals with the large development of the " Gröhner settlement" Sunnebüel near Hegnau, which is considered particularly child-friendly, and its influence on children's development. The Federal Department of Home Affairs and Swiss television co-produced this empirical film . Socially critical texts by the ethnologist and psychoanalyst Mario Erdheim and the author Sil Schmid are conveyed to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach . In addition, parents are interviewed about the child-friendliness of the settlement. The film poster shows a dehumanized living situation. Despite the highest ratings on television, the film was not allowed to run for the Swiss Film Prize for political reasons .
When the first IKEA store outside Scandinavia opened in Spreitenbach in 1973 , the VSI was in a state of shock. While the oil price crisis caused economic stagnation in the early 1970s, the popularity of cheap everyday furniture for self-assembly robbed the Swiss furniture industry, which is often organized in the VSI, of important market shares. Above all, however, the popularity of cheap furniture scratched the basic understanding of VSI and the Werkbund to bring elegant, but above all high-quality utility furniture onto the market.
In addition to the decline in membership due to the closure of the business, an indefinite vocational training also had an impact in the years 1975 to 1998. In addition, it had a negative impact that the Swiss Association of Industrial Designers (SID) had been a competition organization since 1966, to which numerous members migrated, especially since well-known designers such as Willy Guhl, Kurt Thut , Eugen Gomringer and Andreas Christen were now involved.
public relation
In the course of its history, the association issued various publications. The first organ was the book Möbel und Wohnraum (1946), which at the end of 1949 was out of print with its 9,000 copies of the first edition and 2,000 copies had to be reprinted. In the years 1954 to 1966 the first quarterly magazine was published, with which the statutes were fulfilled, in which it was stated that one goal was "to highlight the cultural and artistic level of the profession, through lectures and collaboration in existing specialist journals". Although the sale of the book generated a profit of CHF 10,000, the publication of the magazine put a considerable strain on the association's budget. Tensions between the then President Ernst Kettiger and Wilhelm Kienzle, which resulted from different strategic goals, now emerged openly and led to their rift. While Kienzle advocated the preservation of the magazine as a “public education organ” until the end, Kettiger, for pragmatic reasons, preferred to spend the budget on other things, such as working out an applicable fee schedule . In Germany, too, there was only a binding fee schedule for architects and engineers since 1977 . Despite the satisfactory sales figures of 10,000 copies with 1,000 subscribers, the discrepancies between the publisher and the board of directors became increasingly apparent; the general assembly of 1967 resolved on application in favor of the abandonment of the self-publication a cooperation with the Forster-Verlag, which however failed a year later as well as the cooperation with other specialist journals.
During this time, internal association notifications were used, initially under the name VSI-Information , then under VSI-News . In 1989 Marianne Daepp and Andre Denz published the VSI magazine Intern , which was renamed to Imprint a little later, at great expense in terms of personnel and finance . In 2002 this was adapted as the first website , supplemented by a newsletter .
The traditional publication Das Werk , founded in 1914 , merged in 1980 with Bauen + Wohnen to form Werk, Bauen + Wohnen (WBW), the publisher of which was the Bund Schweizer Architekten BSA. Two years later there was a cooperation agreement between the VSI and the new publication WBW. After the VSI member Christina Sonderegger left the editorial team in 2004, aspects of interior design were no longer taken into account to the same extent as before. In 2012 the VSI let the cooperation agreement expire. There has been a collaboration with the living magazine Ideales Heim since 2017 .
Special publications appeared on both the 50th and 75th anniversary of the association. The 50 Years of Interior Design , published in 1992, is "still today the standard work of Swiss interior design work."
education
As mentioned above, the association emerged from a nucleus within the Zurich School of Applied Arts. In addition to Zurich, the arts and crafts school in Basel and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences pioneered the training of interior designers. The first craft courses shaped the professions of carpenters , upholsterers and decorators . From their understanding of overcoming the status of handicrafts and developing their own design skills, the professional profile of the furniture designer developed into that of the interior designer. Kienzle and Guhl were the driving forces that established the "planning and design training". From 1970 this training was also introduced in Basel and 1973 in Geneva. Geneva, however, only offered a two-year training course that was initially not recognized by the VSI.
Another important component was the dual apprenticeship training . From 1961, courses were offered for interior design apprentices in Zurich. According to the understanding of the VSI, interior design was “not just creative planning, but also requires specific knowledge in technical planning and execution”. In 1971, the association of teachers for interior design draftsmen (LVIBZ) was founded together with the master joiner association . With a previous apprenticeship , the path to becoming an interior designer took eight years.
For the VSI, an entry in the REG ( Foundation of the Swiss Register of Experts in the Areas of Engineering, Architecture and the Environment ) was an important professional qualification instrument, also with regard to international exchange and the comparability of degrees and qualifications. Since 1974, under the leadership of Kurt Thut and Jürg Bally, submissions have been made to the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects (SIA), the leading professional association in Switzerland. A satisfactory agreement could only be reached in 2012. Since then the VSI has also been a member of the REG sponsoring association.
Fee schedule
Contrary to the architects of Switzerland, who with their professional association SIA had already had a fee schedule since 1877 and which served as a model for the VSI, it lasted there until 1958. Although attempts had been made in the early 1950s, they were in the early years Design of furniture in the foreground. Despite a first revision in 1965, this order could not prevail. 1974/75 with a revision of 1979 a new fee schedule was put in place, but it is still difficult to record the actual costs. With the support of the SIA, tables with K values (cost value for calculating a fixed fee) were created in 1996 and were replaced by Z values (time value for calculating the time required) in 2000. Although these calculations are not always sufficient with the increasing shift from construction to project planning (Z values), this deficiency can be remedied through improved performance descriptions.
Partnerships
If international contacts were not mentioned in the first statutes, there was a close relationship with the Schweizerischer Werkbund SWB and the Bund Schweizer Architekten BSA from the start. Nonetheless, in the early 1950s these three organizations shared the goal of establishing a good international reputation. As early as 1949, Willy Guhl put in contact with the International Competition for low-cost furniture at the Museum of Modern Art . From 1952 there were contacts with the Swedish Interior Design Association SIMS, today Svenska inredningsarkitekters riksförbund (SIR) and the Association of German Interior Architects BDIA. The VSI was primarily interested in “nuances in taste” that ran counter to its own ideas. A VSI foreign commission was set up, which, for example, dealt with the Danish fee schedule for Switzerland from 1954 and, together with the BDIA, planned an interior design exhibition for the Munich trade fair in 1957, where the first European delegates' conference took place. In addition to Switzerland and Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and France were represented there.
In 1964, the VSI took part in the founding event of the International Federation of Interior Architects / Designers (IFI), which emerged from the UIAI, which had been founded two years earlier. Erich Bächtold , who headed the VSI foreign commission from 1954 until his death in 1969, became its first president. A trusting and productive working relationship quickly developed, especially between the German-speaking countries and the Netherlands. In 1992 the European Council of Interior Architects (ECIA) was founded as an offshoot of the IFI , which Switzerland joined in 1995 in Barcelona.
Since the early 1970s, a partnership with interior designers emerged in the French-speaking Switzerland , which based on the VSI statutes adopt its own constitution and in 1975 named Association Genevois des Architectes d'intérieur (AGAI) organized society. A changed building code in the canton of Geneva , the so-called building submission authorization, made this organizational step necessary, but rapprochement or merger with the VSI was always planned. This step was achieved in 1992, when it was 50 years old. The association is now officially called the Association of Swiss Interior Architects, Association Suisse des Architectes d'intérieur (VSI.ASAI). In addition, in order to be better noticed by the next generation, a sponsorship award has been awarded to graduates since this year.
For the time up to the centenary in 2042, the President of the VSI, Thomas Wachter, calls for a deeper understanding of the needs of the market and to actively deal with the future of interior design when he says , the Wikipedia entry on interior design 2080 would read:
“Interior design was a movement of extremely talented artisans, decorators and interior designers that formed and manifested itself at the beginning of the 20th century. After a heyday around the turn of the millennium, the last interior designer resigned around 2025. The discipline had not managed to meet the changing issues in the area of living space design, which had shifted sharply at the beginning of the new millennium due to the economic and social crises in Central Europe. It was also missed to promote appropriate training that would have adequately prepared young people for the tasks of the discipline. "
Individual evidence
- ^ Foundation of the Swiss Register of Experts in the Areas of Engineering, Architecture and the Environment
- ↑ a b State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI. Evaluation REG. Final report, July 2, 2015 . Econcept (pdf, 1.2 MB)
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j 75 years of interior design VSI.ASAI. 1942-2017 . Association of Swiss Interior Architects.
- ^ Dorothee Huber: New building. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . September 7, 2010 , accessed May 21, 2020 .
- ^ Eva Gerber: Design. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . March 20, 2015 , accessed May 21, 2020 .
- ^ Alfred Hablützel , Verena Huber : Interior architecture in Switzerland. 1942-1992.
- ↑ Films on the housing issue . In: Archplus, No. 32, p. 35.
- ↑ a b Sunday matinée The green children. S5 city. Agglomeration in the center. ETH Wohnforum.
- ↑ a b Documentary “The Green Children” by Kurt Gloor . SRF Medienportal, July 9, 1972
- ^ Poster "The Green Children" . Swiss Social Archives, F 5038-Pa-0012
- ↑ About the SDA: The professional association for design - since 1966. Website of the SDA
literature
- Alfred Hablützel , Verena Huber : Interior architecture in Switzerland. 1942-1992 . Niggli , Zollikon 1993, ISBN 978-3721202762