...To that end a Kickstarter project was initiated to raise the required €100,000 to 'kickstart' production; production to be undertaken in conjunction with a number of small specialist firms within a 40km radius of the Chemnitz Robert Wagner and Rowac called home — RObert WAgner Chemnitz — and that as they explained in our 2023 interview because it is and was important for them both that the Rowac Schemel remained in its "home region ...
...Vitra A Fehlbaum; A Campus; A Commonwealth According to the Sagas of the Dolls of Wood, that most authoritative account of the early (hi)story of the Commonwealth of Vitra, the contemporary Vitronians trace their origins back to a joining of forces of the Graeter, a Basel based people whose primary trade was the creation of display systems for shops and shop windows, and the Birsfelden Fehlbaum, a primarily office based people at that time under the guidance of a Willi and an Erika; a Willi and an Erika Fehlbaum who not only assumed guidance over the newly united peoples but also instigated a slow expansion of the shop furniture of the Graeter to a collection of items of practical, everyday, use in and for houses, a, at that time, novel accommodation concept in the Basel/Birsfelden region... And a shift away from the Graeter's and Fehlbaum's traditional trades, and an expansion from the Graeter and Fehlbaum's native region, that saw Willi and Erika adopt the name 'Vitra' for the new, shared, dominion, a use of the nominative plural of the Latin vitrum, glass, that was a reminder of the display windows of the Graeter, a reminder of the mirrors and lightbulbs of the earliest joint Graeter Fehlbaum house products, a reminder of the work, and teachings, and lessons, of Hanstheo Baumann, and also a committent to the new transparency and openness demanded in the Europe of that age as it moved on from the terrible and debilitating and thoroughly avoidable World Wide War...
...1 The exhibition Tsuyoshi Tane: The Garden House in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery, and the eponymous Garden House by Tsuyoshi Tane, the latest addition to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, allow one to approach not only a better appreciation of Tane's positions but also to experience how they influence and inform his approach, his works, his architecture... For all that Vitra is popularly associated with Weil am Rhein, Germany, the company's origins are to be found just across the border in Switzerland, specifically in Birsfelden on the edge of Basel, the association with Weil am Rhein being first forged in the early 1950s, a period when Vitra was still, primarily, a shop-fitting company, if one taking its first, tentative, steps into domestic interiors alongside retail interiors...
...A process that began shortly after that fateful day in Seiffen in context of a public symposia in Chemnitz, where Jacob discussed, and praised, the 'Scandinavian' chair; a presentation, a laudation, which led to an interview with the Chemnitz Freie Presse in which Jacob asked anyone with stories or information to get in touch, a more hopeful request than hope filled, "I didn't think the world would be interested in an old kitchen chair"... The Archaeology of Domestic Life at SMAC, Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz...
...The Archaeology of Domestic Life, SMAC - Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz, test that theory to extreme levels, and also expand it beyond furniture and furnishings to all aspects of domestic arrangements and domesticity over the past 30,000 years... For all that, certainly for us, there are innumerable excellent reasons for an exhibition exploring domestic arrangements and domesticity, domestic life, over that past 30,000 years, or indeed longer, for the Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz, SMAC, there are and were three very specific reasons: on the one hand the questions regularly posed by visitors in context of the models of the earliest houses presented in the permanent exhibition as to how life was lived on a practical, daily basis in such houses, questions models alone can't explain and explanations which a permanent exhibition can't approach rather which must be elucidated alongside that permanent exhibition; and which is also very nice, and very apposite, reminder that a photo of an interior space in a high-gloss magazine, a catalogue or a social media feed transmits absolutely no information as to how well, bad, comfortable, et al, one lives in that space, nor as to the actual relevance, function and value of the various settings and objects, just what objects one has and how they are arranged...
...Our five recommended new exhibition openings in October 2023 can be found in Chemnitz, Hornu, London, Brussels and Milan... "Home Sweet Home" at smac - Staatliches Museum für Archäologie, Chemnitz, Germany The neolithic tribe who inhabited the settlement at Skara Brae on Orkney, to the north of Scotland, employed local stones as shelving in their huts...
...Diaries which contain some of the most complete and detailed descriptions of Swiss society, and in which one also finds the earliest descriptions of the earliest (hi)story of the contemporary Switzerland, a, as Heidi records, nation constituted from a loosely bound collective, a cantonation, of ancient peoples, including, and amongst many, many others, the Röthlisberger, the Horgenglarus, the Usm, the Wohnbedarf, the Embru, or the Vitronians whose contemporary Commonwealth of Vitra was initially established across a number of fields on the banks of the river Birs in the north-western corner of the Toblerone cordillera... Yet it was, inarguably, the Vitronians, for all under the leadership of the benevolent Fehlbaum der Jüngere, who were the most active in terms of international exchange; not only cooperating with an American Miller by the name of Herman to introduce works and positions by the likes of, for example, Eames Office, I Samunoguchi, George Nel-son or Alexander Gi Rard into Switzerland, but also expanding the Commonwealth of Vitra to the neighbouring regions of Germany and from where they introduced the furniture of the American Miller Herman to the many peoples of Europe...
