Vitra

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Vitra AG

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1950
Seat Birsfelden , Switzerland
management Nora Fehlbaum ( CEO )
Rolf Fehlbaum ( Chairman of the Board of Directors )
Number of employees 671
sales € 299.6 million (2017)
Branch Furniture
Website www.vitra.com

Vitra headquarters in Birsfelden near Basel

The Vitra AG is a Swiss company manufacturing and trading of residential and office furniture with headquarters in Birsfelden at Basel . The group of companies has independent branches in 14 countries. The Vitra Design Museum has been located at the German location in Weil am Rhein since 1989 and the almost 30-meter-high Vitra Slide Tower since 2014 .

The company is divided into the segments of shop fitting and home furniture. Shopfitting includes u. a. the companies Ansorg AG and Siza Factory GmbH. The German company Contura GmbH in Neuchâtel am Rhein belongs to the home segment (chairs, tables, cupboards, accessories) . Modo GmbH, Vitra Factory GmbH, Vitra IT GmbH, Vitra HR Services GmbH and others at the Weil am Rhein location . The lighting company Belux AG was sold at the beginning of 2016. The separate companies Vitra Shop and Vitra AG have also been operating under the common name Vitra AG since 2016.

Furniture design

At the age of 20 Willi Fehlbaum (* 1914) took over a shop fitting business in Birsfelden near Basel, which he and his wife Erika continuously expanded into a furniture construction company. After the war ended, he relocated the production facilities to Weil am Rhein in Germany, also near Basel, in 1950 , and named his company Vitra. On a trip to the USA in 1953, Fehlbaum discovered the exhibits of the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames . He spontaneously applied for the distribution licenses and received the rights from Herman Miller , whose furniture was already well respected in the USA at that time. The contract included the designs of the Eames and George Nelsons . The seating and reclining furniture by Charles and Ray Eames is still one of the company's most successful products today. A large part of the non-written estate of the two furniture designers has been in the possession of Vitra since 1988.

The Panton Chair by Danish designer Verner Panton , which went into series production at Vitra in 1967, made design history . In 1976 Vitra's first self-developed office chair, the "Vitramat", came onto the market.

In 1977 Rolf Fehlbaum took over the management of the company, his brother Raymond also took on a management position and continued to run the Vizona shopfitting business in Muttenz .

Designs by well-known designers and architects such as Antonio Citterio , Alberto Meda , Mario Bellini , Maarten van Severen, Jasper Morrison , Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Hella Jongerius and Konstantin Grcic are produced at Vitra. Bellini's velvet blue swivel chair “ Figura ” was selected for the plenary hall of the German Bundestag .

At the turn of the millennium, Vitra relied on the idea of ​​the open, mobile open-plan office. The globalization increases the mobility of employees, so that correspondingly flexible office modules departure should facilitate the permanent job. Half a decade later, the thesis of a general dissolution of work structures was modified and put into perspective and brought to the term "Net 'n' Nest". According to this, the office is a center of communication (“Net”), but it should also offer the possibility of retreat (“Nest”).

Vitra Campus architecture park

The term “Vitra Campus” refers to the architectural ensemble on the company premises of the furniture manufacturer Vitra in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Since September 2015, a sculpture path with 12 works by the sculptor Tobias Rehberger has been connecting the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen ( Canton Basel-Stadt , Switzerland ) with the architecture park . Another 12 sculptures were added in June 2016. The project is called 24 Stops .

General characterization

The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein includes the company's manufacturing, logistics and administrative buildings as well as the Vitra Design Museum, other buildings used primarily for cultural purposes and the VitraHaus, which is designed as a showroom and visitor center. Gathered in a small space can be found here a variety of contemporary architectures that gradually since 1981, by architects such as Nicholas Grimshaw , Frank O. Gehry , Zaha Hadid , Tadao Ando , Alvaro Siza , Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA were built .

The Vitra Campus has been one of the tourist highlights in the Basel region since the 1990s and is now visited by around three hundred thousand visitors from all over the world. Individual buildings on the campus, in particular the Vitra Design Museum (Frank O. Gehry, 1989) and the fire station (Zaha Hadid, 1993), are considered to be milestones in recent architectural history.

The name Vitra Campus refers to the coexistence or coexistence of different architectural styles and concepts as well as the different purposes of the individual buildings.

development

Vitra has had a production site in Weil am Rhein since the early 1950s. The real history of the Vitra Campus began in 1981 when a major fire destroyed essential areas of the existing production facilities and forced the company to build new factory buildings in a very short time. Rolf Fehlbaum, who had taken over the management of the company four years earlier, recognized the opportunity to combine the necessary construction work with an architectural reorientation. After the architect Nicholas Grimshaw had built a factory building within just six months, he was asked to draw up a master plan for the further development of the area. The idea was that other buildings of the same type would be built in the future and thus support a technically oriented corporate identity.

On the occasion of the 70th birthday of Vitra founder Willi Fehlbaum, a large sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen was erected on the Vitra site in 1984 . With the sculpture called “Balancing Tools”, a new element that expanded the world of industrial production came into play. In the course of this project, Rolf Fehlbaum met Frank Gehry. As a result of the discussions held with him, Rolf Fehlbaum moved away from the idea of ​​building according to uniform, recognizable design principles in the late 1980s. Instead, he has since followed a pluralistic approach that enabled the area to be further developed in the sense of an equal coexistence of different architectural languages ​​and concepts.

With Frank O. Gehry , who had not yet built anything in Europe, Fehlbaum initially planned a factory hall. A small building for a furniture collection should be placed in front of it. This became the deconstructivist Vitra Design Museum , which opened in 1989 . Next to it is the gate building, which marks the boundary between the publicly accessible and the predominantly operational parts of the campus. The next project on the Vitra Campus was no less conspicuous than Gehry's museum building: the fire station designed by Zaha Hadid and built between 1989 and 1993. For Zaha Hadid, who had achieved a certain level of notoriety in specialist circles with her bold architectural visions, it was the first design realized according to her ideas. The fire station, which, contrary to some statements, was functional, was abandoned when Vitra switched from its own company fire service to the public fire service. Today the building is used for exhibitions and events.

The conference pavilion planned by the Japanese architect Tadao Andō and also completed in 1993 can almost be read as an antithesis to the expressive architectural sculptures by Gehry and Hadid . This emphatically calm building based on clear geometric shapes, which Andō integrated into a cherry tree meadow directly adjacent to the Vitra Design Museum, was Andō's first design outside of Japan.

The end of the construction activities on the Vitra Campus in the 1990s was set by the Portuguese architect and Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza Vieira with a production hall he designed and completed in 1994. The sober building, which with its red clinker cladding refers to the old factory buildings of the area, forms a neutral background against which the dynamism of the neighboring fire station unfolds. In contrast, the bridge-like roof construction, also designed by Siza, appears imposing and spans the path between his and the production hall opposite. A lowerable roof is attached to its steel girders, which lies deep when it rains and thus offers protection for factory traffic. When the weather is nice, it automatically rises to allow a clear view of Hadid's fire station.

After the completion of Siza's projects, there were no new buildings on the Vitra Campus for almost a decade and a half, apart from the two small bus stops that Jasper Morrison realized in 2006 on Charles-Eames-Strasse in front of the Vitra site.

There are also two structures on the Vitra Campus that were not originally commissioned by Vitra, but have found permanent residence here. On the one hand, there is a “dome” that was developed according to the principles of the American inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller. This dome-shaped lightweight construction, which was realized by Thomas C. Howard at Charter Industries in 1975, has been in Weil since 2000 and has been used for presentations and events ever since. On the other hand, there is a modular prefabricated gas station house created in 1953 by the French constructor and designer Jean Prouvé , which was installed on the campus in 2003 after a thorough renovation.

The VitraHaus , which serves as a visitor center for the campus, was opened in early 2010 . The building designed by the Basel architects Herzog & de Meuron - composed of elongated gabled houses that seem to be playfully stacked on top of one another - is the tallest building on the Vitra Campus, which can be seen from afar. In front of the Vitra plant is a randomly arranged complex of twelve black-gray pitched roof houses on five floors. The VitraHaus houses a public showroom for the company, as well as a store, a café, a “Lounge Chair Atelier”, where visitors can watch the craftsmanship of the “Lounge Chair” by Charles and Ray Eames, and a business lounge that can be used for events .

In the course of 2012, a production hall designed by the Japanese architectural firm SANAA was completed.

On 18./19. In June 2014, the almost 31-meter-high Vitra slide tower by Belgian artist Carsten Höller was opened.

In June 2016, the exhibition depot of the Basel architects Herzog & de Meuron was opened. It offers space for around 7,000 pieces of furniture, 1,300 lamps and legacies from Ray and Charles Eames, Verner Panton and Alexander Girard .

The Schaudepot is the purist archetype of a house that consists only of bright red windowless brick walls and a flat gable roof. It rises on a platform also made of bricks. This raised forecourt becomes a piazza for the catering trade thanks to the low side wing, which includes the fire station of Zaha Hadid opposite. The actual museum consists of a single room with an open roof. The walls are white, the floor light gray, and fluorescent tubes from the ceiling provide uniform light. Around 400 chairs from two centuries are presented on three levels on high shelves. The fact that the new building is a warehouse and museum at the same time is made clear by the wall opening on the right-hand side, which allows a view into the basement of the viewing depot. Thousands of other design classics are stored there in storage rooms behind glass doors.

literature

Web links

Commons : Vitra  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Consolidated annual financial statements 2017 of December 21, 2018, accessed via the E-Bundesanzeiger
  2. ^ Badische Zeitung: "Everything is now called Vitra again" - Weil am Rhein - Badische Zeitung. Retrieved November 11, 2019 .
  3. ^ "Vitra Design Museum. The secret Mecca of furniture design ” , Die Welt , August 14, 2009
  4. ^ "Flying visit to Vitra" , Welt am Sonntag , March 11, 2001 and Vitra company brochure
  5. ↑ "Net 'n' Nest - the refined open- plan office " , baulinks.de, November 24, 2006
  6. ^ "Hanns-Peter Cohn - Net 'n' Nest" , Designline, October 5, 2006
  7. ^ Ulrich Senf: Weil am Rhein: Art sets the region in motion. Badische Zeitung, September 28, 2015, accessed on May 5, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Jochen Fillisch: Weil am Rhein: Schaudepot should bring new visitors to Vitra. Badische Zeitung, January 14, 2016, accessed on May 5, 2016 .
  9. ^ Rehberger-Weg. Retrieved May 5, 2016 .
  10. ^ Rehberger-Weg between Vitra Campus and Fondation Beyeler , Stefan Tolksdorf, Badische Zeitung, June 11, 2016, accessed June 12, 2016
  11. ^ Roswitha Frey: Exhibitions: Art in Nature: Rehberger's "24 Stops" from the Vitra Campus to the Fondation Beyeler. Badische Zeitung, June 14, 2016, accessed on June 14, 2016 .
  12. ^ Christian Gänshirt: Vitra Furniture Factory. In: Álvaro Siza , 1986–1995 . Edited by Luiz Trigueiros. Editorial Blau, Lisbon 1995, pp. 182–190.
  13. ↑ Simon Cowell: “Das neue VitraHaus” , architonic.com, 2010, with a series of pictures
  14. ↑ 360-degree all-round views of the VitraHaus
  15. ^ Michael Baas: Weil am Rhein: Best-of of furniture design: Vitra Design Museum opens its new display depot. Badische Zeitung, June 3, 2016, accessed on June 12, 2016 .
  16. ↑ Ulrich Coenen: Bright red archetype of a house. Badische Latest News, July 26, 2016, accessed on July 27, 2016 .
  17. ↑ Review of “Project Vitra” : “Terrible, these many office disasters!” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 29, 2008, p. 41