In 1885, Ulrich Schärer founded an ironworks and locksmith's workshop in Münsingen near Bern, Switzerland - the first step towards the international design company USM. In 1961, Paul Schärer joined the company and commissioned local architect Fritz Haller to build new factory and administrative buildings: a commission which resulted in the formation of the modular furniture system USM Haller in 1963. Initially intended only for the administrative building in Münsingen, in 1969, the USM Haller furniture entered series production and the marketing and distribution of the furniture system began - something accompanied by the first large commission, the furniture of the Rothschild bank in Paris. In 1975, USM & Schärer Söhne GmbH was founded in Bühl, Germany, where today the 4th generation of Schärers lead the company in the person of Alexander Schärer. The USM Haller modular furniture system entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001. Today, USM has showrooms all over the world, including Tokyo, London, Paris, and Hamburg.
Fritz Haller
...USM Haller A Fritz; A Ball; A System Within the diaries of Heidi, those central documents in the re-telling of the earliest (hi)story of the contemporary Switzerland, it is recorded that one of the oldest examples of vernacular Swiss furniture is the modular metal storage system of the Usm...
...Developed in the mid-1960s as an office furniture system, the inherent flexibility and variability of USM Haller's modular system has allowed it to naturally evolve alongside office practices and realities; for example, alongside the shift in recent decades from rigid to more flexible office scenographies, alongside the rise in recent decades of home working, or, most recently, with the USM Security Screen which naturally, and quickly, allows any existing USM reception desk to be effortlessly updated and reinvented for our Corona age... A landscape USM Haller quickly inhabited and where over the decades the inherent flexibility and variability of its modular system has seen it naturally adapt to the ever evolving realities of domestic life: the domestic life of both the private individual with all its personal fluctuations, high, lows and unpredictability, but also of communal society and, for example, its ever increasing collective networked, digital structure...
...With the showcase USM Haller HomeWork smow Cologne consider responses to such evolutions with the assistance of the USM Haller modular furniture system... For all that USM Haller is a modular furniture system it is fundamentally a modular architecture system...
...Staged under the title "Ambassadors of Creative Innovation" the Swiss Embassy 3daysofdesign 2019 showcase presented works from established Swiss brands such as Vitra, USM Haller, Création Baumann, Caran d'Ache or Laufen, who presented their new SAVE urine directing toilet concept realised in conjunction with Vienna based studio EOOS and Eawag, the aquatic research institute at the ETH Zürich; younger brands such as Viu eyewear or Zürich based Qwstion with their bags crafted from Bananatex, a textile made from, well, banana plants, not yet Zürcher Bananas, but if we're not all careful it may only be a matter of time, and no-one wants that; and students from the Architecture and Wood & Civil Engineering departments at the Berner Fachhochschule, who, in inter-disciplinary teams of two, considered under the title "Furniture for a Pop-up Embassy", representative, temporary, variable, momentary furniture...
...To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fritz Haller and Paul Schärer's USM Haller modular furniture system USM instigated a series of masterclasses in which students at seven international design schools were paired with a mentor and asked to "Rethink the Modular" and for all to "consider the significance of modularity in architecture and design" and so "exploit the idea of modularity for contemporary design"... In addition to presenting some truly magnificent works from the likes of Volker Albus, Ettore Sottsass or Hans Hollein Relation also featured a more detailed exploration of Fritz Haller's oeuvre than you are likely to find outwith a dedicated Haller exhibition: and a showcase which delightfully elucidated how much more Fritz Haller is and was than his modular furniture system, makes as such perfectly clear what a travesty it is that he is largely only known for his modular furniture system and so by extrapolation underscores why Rethink the Modular is as much a tribute to Fritz Haller as a celebration of system USM Haller: modular is a way of thinking...
