Our Visit to Vitra in Switzerland with Be Original Americas

Now that summer is officially over, I can officially declare that the best part about this past season was my visit to Vitra with Be Original Americas, an organization we’ve shared before whose mission is dedicated to educating and promoting the importance of original design. (You might have caught the whole trip on Instagram Story if you’re following us over on @designmilk!) Vitra is a tremendous supporter of the program so I got to tag along with the 2017 Be Original Americas Fellows, Tom Groom and Irene Lee, to learn firsthand from Vitra about what it means to be an original design and how do fakes and copies measure up to the originals (spoiler alert: they don’t and never will).

It was hard narrowing down my 700+ photos but read on to see a small snapshot of what we saw, where we visited, and what we learned…

View of the Rhine River in Basel, Germany

There’s a corner in Switzerland where, in 10 miles in each direction, you can be in France, Germany or Switzerland. During our trip, we visited the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany and the Vitra headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland.

If you didn’t already know, the Vitra Campus is home to some of most incredible architecture and design: the VitraHaus designed by Herzod & de Meuron, the Vitra Design Museum designed by Frank Gehry, the Fire Station designed by Zaha Hadid, and so much more. An interesting take away I got from the trip is that Vitra is not just as a brand but a continuing project, like that of Apple or Google, in that it is constantly looking for new, innovative ways to spotlight good design, discover emerging talent, celebrate design with the community, and create conversation about the significance of originality.

Project Vitra installation

Inside Project Vitra

Inside the Fire Station designed by Zaha Hadid

Architecture tour with Be Original Americas Fellow, Irene Lee and Tom Groom

Inside the Conference Pavilion designed by Tadao Ando

Like Be Original Americas, Vitra holds steadfast to the belief that good design can only be celebrated through the original, which is why counterfeits can never stand up next the originals. Counterfeits lack the story and soul behind the design and while they may be cheaper, it’s because they lack the quality materials and innovative production techniques that make the originals superior for decades. An imitation is, and always will be, a stolen idea and that is something that’s not worth displaying in your home.

The Vitra Schaudepot designed by Herzog & de Meuron

Inside the Schaudepot

“Every Vitra product is an original, and every original has a story.” Vitra is committed to telling those stories because it gives us a tangible reason why the originals are important. The reason why classic designs like the Eames Lounge Chair or the Panton Chair are still revered is because they broke new ground at the time of their creation. Years later, these designs are able to sustain their allure because their revolutionary ideas and techniques still influence design today, more than 60 years later. I learned that over the years, Vitra worked (and still works) closely with original designers or their descendants to enhance these original designs (for example, to incorporate new color schemes or modify dimensions because people have gotten taller since the 1950s).

Eames through the years

Inside the Factory Building designed by Nicholas Grimshaw

L-R: Irene and Tom with Vitra’s Head of Marketing, Adrian Parra, and Chief Design Officer, Eckart Maise, at Vitra headquarters

Office of Vitra’s CEO Nora Fehlbaum

Design at every corner (and corner office)

Slide Tower designed by Carsten Höller

Inside the VitraHaus

India Mahdavi’s Alice in Wonderland installation inside the VitraHaus

The visit to Vitra reignited my appreciation for good design because it gave me a deeper understanding of the creative thinking, process, innovative production, manufacturing, and stories that are instilled in each Vitra product. If you ever find yourself in this part of Germany, I highly recommend a visit to the Vitra Campus and clear your entire day (or even weekend!) for it.

If you’re interested in applying to be the next Be Original Americas fellows, be sure to follow Be Original Americas on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to find out when the next round of application opens. You can also get a recap of the 2017 program through Tom and Irene’s own words on the Be Original Americas website or Tom’s website.

All photos by Vy Yang.

from Design MilkDesign Milk http://design-milk.com/visit-vitra-switzerland-original-americas/

The New Work Project by The New Design Project

We’ve seen a lot of co-working spaces pop up in the last few years. While some are designed solely for getting work done and are equipped with the bare essentials (desks, chairs, wifi), others like The New Work Project in Brooklyn, New York are more design-led, with an interior design approach that its creative members would appreciate.

Designed by Brooklyn-based interior design studio, The New Design Project, The New Work Project is a members-only workspace for those in the creative industries including: advertising, PR, marketing, architecture and design, TV, film and media, fashion, and publishing. Husband and wife duo James Davison and Fanny Abbes wanted to create a place where its members can live, work and play. The result for The New Work Project is a black and white interior design (as in, black and white chairs, wallpaper, wall art, and books). This classic theme is accented by brass fixtures, marble counters, woven textures, and pops of foliage. The furniture is all custom designed by The New Design Project, as well as other local Brooklyn designers such as J.M. Szymanski and Eskayel.

from Design MilkDesign Milk http://design-milk.com/new-work-project-new-design-project/

LDF17: designjunction2017 Expands to Five Sites

2017 saw designjunction return to King’s Cross with five locations: Cubitt House and Cubitt Park, the Canopy, Granary Square and The Crossing. 200 furniture, lighting, accessory, material, and technology brands exhibited alongside pop-up shops, installations, and interactive features. These are a few of our favorite finds – first up, Ham’s mural on the side of the Canopy featuring newly launched designs from the brand, whose founder we interviewed back in August.

Grace Souky’s Domestic Collectables is a series of 12 tableware objects that explore the connections between users and everyday objects, the different ways people interact with things around the ritual of food. “Each element fits in more than one place and serves more than one purpose,” says Grace, “resulting in a fun and playful experience that seeks to engage while exploring all possible combinations.”

Inspired by a Thomas Hardy poem entitled Old Furniture, David Irwin’s oak and ash collection for Another Country references 19th-century British classics such as the Windsor chair with the intention of creating pieces that will last for decades and be handed down for generations.

Ted Jefferis, the craftsman behind TedWood, hand makes bespoke furniture to order. The son of a classic boat builder, he studied furniture design and continues to explore the relationship between furniture and its surrounding interior space.

Victoria is a marble tea set – teapot, a milk jug, sugar bowl, cake stand, teacup and saucer and dessert plate – designed by Bethan Grey for Editions Milano. The collection’s relief pattern is hand-carved from Arrabescato marble by Italian craftsmen and paired with brushed brass.

The latest addition to David Irwin’s Working Girl collection for Deadgood is the Lounge Chair and Sofa, which, according to Deadgood, “adhere to the honest construction methods used throughout this collection and feature a soft seat and back pads supported by exposed webbing over a durable powder coated steel frame.”

Textiles designer Eleanor Pritchard worked with Matt Cockrem to solve the dilemma of how to display fabrics on a trade show stand with this elegant construction. “We were playing with ideas of perception, depth, and composition; with simple fabric shapes suspended in a series of steel frames,” she says. “From the sweet spot, marked with an X the viewer could ‘catch’ a perfect 1 x 1 meter square ‘flat’ composition – then as soon as their viewpoint changed the whole composition splintered into layered disparate geometric shapes. It was great fun to make and wonderful to see how it caught the imagination.”

Granby Workshop’s experiments in homeware continue with the launch of Splatware – born out of a desire to mass-produce one-offs. By combining colored clay sprayed with ceramic oxides, and pressing it into an industrial RAM Press, the designers are able to create consistent forms with unique patterns.

London-based Hampson Woods design and make wooden products made from local trees, often from arborists in and around London who specialize in clearing the fallen trees that would otherwise be chipped.

Loved by stylists the world over, Japanese brand MT Masking Tape made their designjunction debut, with a stand that made it very clear what they were selling.

And last but not least, this stunning installation by Adam Nathaniel Furman was made in collaboration with Turkishceramics. “Ceramics have always been, and continue to be, both the most historic, resonant and traditional, as well as the most fresh, perpetually surprising, delightful and exciting of architectural materials,” says Furman. “There is no other architectural treatment that has remained as fresh and relevant and cool as ceramics has from a thousand years BC, right through into the 21st Century.”

from Design MilkDesign Milk http://design-milk.com/ldf17-designjunction-expands-five-sites/