Following on the heels of its remarkable showing at Milan, Swiss design company Vitra has big plans for Chicago and NeoCon 2016. The trend for the biggest names at the Milan Furniture Fair (Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano, or just “Salone” to aficionados) is to exhibit at both the official fair on the outskirts of Milan and then complement that with a space downtown, often a company’s permanent showroom. This expansion of design-related events to include downtown venues along with Salone is now known as “Fuorisalone.”
This year Vitra went all out, hosting a space at the fair and two Fuorisalone spaces. In one of those typically fabulous spaces in Milan – this one the site of Antonio Citterio’s former studio – Vitra installed CasaVitra.
There was much to be seen at CasaVitra, but the main attraction was a series of huge ceiling mounted color wheels demonstrating how various colors and material in the Vitra product lines can work together. The moving color wheels were one part of a library of color and materials that has been the culmination of 10 years of work by Hella Jongerius, Vitra’s art director for Colors and Materials. For a bit of inspiration and just under five minutes of your billable time, check out this video and save my writing thousands of hard to follow words: Casa Vitra at Fuorisalone 2016
Then, next door to CasaVitra on Via Maroncelli, its second Fuorisalone installation was a pop-up shop selling a variety of Vitra design objects with accessories curated to complement them. Meanwhile, at its huge stand back at the Salone itself, Vitra showcased its many products, including new ones by Jasper Morrison and the Bouroullec brothers.
It is primarily these new products and a continuation of the ambitious approach to multiple locations that Vitra is working to bring to Chicago, just five weeks from now. For starters, some form of Hella Jongerius’ material library will be available for the NeoCon crowd to experience, hopefully including her new book.
Starting with its foundational work with Ray and Charles Eames, Vitra has been a company that has kept a rather rigid stance regarding the sanctity of the product designer’s original intent for each product. Sometimes this attitude has meant losing projects because the project designer wanted certain modifications that fell outside Vitra’s sense of where the boundary of creative adaptability fell.
In an attempt to maintain its standards but become more open to such creative adaptability, at NeoCon Vitra will announce a new program whereby it will attempt to optimize collaboration with client project teams – providing direct dialogue and unprecedented access to Vitra’s top industrial design talent to custom-develop radically new product applications on an organizational scale.
In terms of new products in the more typical sense, the company will be officially launching Konstantin Grcic’s Hack “disruptive” workstation system that we first saw as a concept at Orgatec 2014 and at NeoCon last year. This year, Hack has matured into a standard product line ready for order entry and normal production leadtimes.
You may (or may not) recall that Hack represents the work of Grcic in collaboration with an un-named Silicon Valley startup where the primary driver is flexibility. Thus it is available on heavy “industrial grade” casters, it folds up for easy moving or storage, and the basic rectangular footprint with panels on three sides can be converted into sofas and beds and sundry other atypical applications – perfect for those upstart start-ups. What you’ll see at NeoCon is some product refinements that bring Hack into the realm of a specifiable product, even if remaining in a small market niche.
officeinsight subscribers have clicked on the ad for the Belleville Chair at a record pace, and NeoCon attendees will be able to experience it in person. In addition to the chair, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have designed an approach to a table leg that can be applied to a whole series of tables from a simple bistro table to full-on conference or worktable, to say nothing of a dining table. Chairs and tables are available in a range of materials from plastic to wood, and the chairs can be upholstered in fabric or leather as well. My homerun spotter instinct kicked in the second I saw the ad, and I’m looking forward to seeing the family in person.
Vitra now owns Artek, and apparently one of its first acts as the new owner of that historic company was to put the Bouroullec brothers on the design of a new system of wall-mounted shelving. Based for support on a simple, yet elegant steel loop, the resulting product is called Kaari, and once the Bouroullecs arrived at the design for the support loop, they saw it could also be applied to a table system. This simple, elegant design strikes me as completely consistent with the Artek Manifesto of 1936 [see officeinsight: Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World].
Vitra fans know that it has had two subsidiary companies, Visplay specializing in modular shop-fitting systems for retail establishments, and Vizona, for the project management and production of custom fixtures for (mostly) high-end “branded” retail spaces. Now these two subsidiaries have been merged into the new Vitra Retail.
Two product lines of Vitra Retail, Kado and Invisible Wall System will be shown in an off-site, by-invitation demonstration space where both retail applications and office adaptations will be on display. Dubbed “Transversal Elements by Vitra Retail” comprises wall-mounted and freestanding architectural elements, including media walls, phone booths, office storage products, column wraps and space dividers.
It’s an aggressive agenda and should offer NeoCon attendees something out of the ordinary – with a definite European slant. Don’t be surprised if you bump into me there.