Visiting the Vitra Museum and the Eames Collection

On Oct. 7, 2011, I visited the Vitra Museum in Wiel am Rhein, just north of the German/Swiss border on the outskirts of Basel, to talk to the curator Jochen Eisenbrand and to go on a guided tour of their Charles Eames permanent collection. Their Charles Eames' collection includes physical artifacts and forms of what came out of his office after he passed away. I went to see their collection of Eames' work and to talk about the possibility of getting some of that work back to the US for display.

Why does the Vitra have all of Charles Eames' physical work?
When he died the Eames' family could not get any US museum to take his work (the Library of Congress only wanted his papers), and the Vitra Co. was already licensing and producing his work and wanted his artifacts. Vitra is the largest producer of Eames furniture and the European distributor, whereas Herman Miller is the distributor to the rest of the world.

Eisenbrand was a gracious and knowledgeable host. I visited the archives at Herman Miller last year, and I remember being humbled by the simplicity of Eames' drawings. No flashy airbrush or renderings, just good solid working drawings and simple sketches to solve problems.

It is the same with the physical work that I saw at the Vitra. There is no superfluous or fancy work, just solid three dimensional problem solving prototypes, mould samples and lots of bent ply. They are not experiments in form, but rather in structural analysis or process trials. I saw a lot of experiments with wire and plywood, but there was only one fairly well resolved development model of the Lounge Chair, which was a disappointment.

Vitra is an intriguing place.
The campus is a combination of six factory buildings and a number of other interesting buildings housing museums, a fire station, showrooms and conference facilities. The original plan was laid out by Nicolas Grimshaw in the early 1980s after a fire gutted the factory. However, Vitra's owner, Rolf Fehlbaum, decided not to use the same architect. Instead he chose to use different ones for each building. He has an eye for picking architects who had not broken into the big time yet. There are structures by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Hertzog and de Mueron, Jasper Morrison, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, a Buckminster Fuller dome, Jean Pouve petrol station and an airstream camper!

It is clear that this company has made a serious commitment to design.

When you leave the car park the first building that you come across on the campus is the intriguing VitraHaus designed by Hertzog and de Mueron. In this showroom the Eames collection takes up most of one floor. Yes, they still produce that much of his work. The space is beautiful with incredible views of the rolling hillside just outside of Basel. What is so great about this space is that you can sit and experience every one of the Eames furniture pieces and, yes, I now really want a lounge chair! However, in the bookstore on the ground floor, Vitra has models of all of the chairs they produce. Needless to say, I can't even afford the model at 480 Euro, never mind the real thing at more than ten times that.

In order to get a sense of the enormity of the body of work, just try to imagine products that were produced more than 50 to 60 years ago that still sell today! TVs still looked like tiny fishbowls! Vitra is not shy either. They place the Eames work in a row alongside all of the very latest work from Starck, Morrison, the Bouroullec's, Citerrio, Meda and many more. The work looks as modern as most of the new work because there was no unneeded material. For the most part, their design is striped down to only what was necessary, using just enough material to do the job. The furniture still feels fresh and still feels like the right solution.

It was great to see the work in their collections, such as the wire chairs, the plastic molded chairs, the plywood chairs and the aluminum chair series. It provides an amazing overview of the range of experimentation that Eames covered-unparalleled even today.

If you are a furniture lover, this is the pace to go. Visit the climate controlled warehouse where you can find any piece of furniture you can imagine. From the whole Memphis group to Art Deco and Nouveau! If you are a lover of Eames' work, this is where you will feel the strength and breadth of the range in the showroom and see the process in the collection of his office artifacts. My appreciation for Eames grew, once again.