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/ Rolf Fehlbaum

Project Vitra commenced in Basel and Weil am Rhein in the year 1957, when the company’s founders, Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, began to produce furniture by Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson. Today we continue to manufacture these furniture classics, and we are still at home in the metropolitan region of Basel. Yet over the years the Vitra project has come to embrace many more things.

The reason we call it a project is because everyone involved regards it as much more than just a matter of business. Obviously economic success was, and will remain, the foundation of the Vitra company. However, our work is based on the conviction that everyday life holds great potential for inspiration and aesthetic enjoyment, and that design can discover and develop this potential. The Vitra project serves this purpose as an enrichment of everyday life and manifests itself accordingly on different levels: in the company’s products and interior concepts, in its architecture, collections, museum, methods of communication and, finally, in its approach to both designers and users. These manifestations are the subject of “Collage”.

Charles Eames had the most enduring influence on the Vitra project. He viewed the primary condition of design as the ‘recognition of need’ and warned against stylistic excesses: the designer should practice self-restraint and devote himself completely to the task of problem solving. Yet design is still, ultimately, a matter of individual authorship – of creative people developing solutions based on their analysis of a problem’s criteria and parameters. For this reason, Vitra always works with designers who possess the capability of authorship – that is to say, who not only have creative skills, but who invest their work with a personal world view. Their designs bear a message that goes far beyond the impulse of merely trying to please.

The diversity of Project Vitra can seem almost confusing at times. That has never bothered us. The architectural park on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein defines us as readily as the chairs and office furniture that we produce; the Vitra Design Museum with its collections, archives and miniatures belongs as much to the project as the twentieth-century classics and collages for interior living that we have developed during the past years. We are convinced that the design and arrangement, development and modification of the spaces in which we live and work is best achieved with as few boundaries as possible.