With its proud engineering heritage and a production site boasting buildings by the architects Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, Vitra is renowned as the epitome of high modernism in design. The Swiss furniture maker has an equally proud tradition of imposing its rigorous product development process on modernist designers, from Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s to Jasper Morrison today.
Why then has Vitra added what looks like a home-made sofa with mismatched cushions in different sizes and colours embellished by hand-sewn cross stitches to its collection of impeccably engineered furniture? And why is it planning to launch more pieces in a similarly eccentric style by the same designer, Hella Jongerius, at next month’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan?
The reason is that Vitra understands design is changing. Like every other area of contemporary culture, design undergoes a cycle every few years to reflect the spirit of the time. After the earthy minimalism of the early 1990s, the ebullient futurism of the second half of that decade – remember those brightly coloured blobs – and the ornate romanticism of the early 2000s, we are now at the start of a new cycle.
The new spirit of design is raw, surreal and idiosyncratic. You will see it in lots of the new products to be unveiled in Milan next month. And you could glimpse it there last year, not only in Jongerius’s sofa, but in the eerie work of her fellow Dutch designers: the bulbous Mummy chair developed by Peter Traag for Edra in Italy and the Smoke chair that was made – or, literally, burnt into shape – by Maarten Baas.
At first sight all of these objects appear odd – ungainly and often unfinished – but the longer you look at them the more sophisticated they seem. Soon you realise that the eccentricity of Jongerius’s haphazard upholstery and
the bandaging around Traag’s chair imbues those pieces with greater complexity and meaning than conventional furniture – in other words, with more character.
And character is what we want from design right now. In our spoilt, saturated consumer culture, we have become bored by the sleek, over-styled interiors we see in television makeover programmes and car commercials. And in a deflationary era, when most of us are still guilty of buying too many things we neither need nor really want – and of throwing them out rather than bothering to repair them – we long for objects that are distinctive enough to mean something. At the same time we have become accustomed to personalising the way we consume things in other areas of daily life. Take information. Once, we absorbed information in print by reading a newspaper article or book from the beginning to the end. Now we are just as likely to find it on screen by plotting our own path around the internet. We dart from website to website, taking unexpected detours along the way. It is the same when we listen to music. Rather than play an album from start to finish, we set out iPods to shuffle, and enjoy the random passage from track to track.
We want the objects that fill our lives to feel equally personal. If you are rich enough, you can achieve that by buying one-off or limited-edition furniture at auction or from a dealer such as Galerie Kreo in Paris or the British design manufacturer Established & Sons.
The contemporary design market will move to a new level – and to even higher prices – next autumn when Larry Gagosian, the world’s most powerful contemporary art dealer, stages his first design exhibition, new work by Marc Newson, at his West 24th Street gallery in New York.
Luckily for those of us with smaller budgets, technology can now imbue mass-manufactured objects with the individuality we crave. After decades of being used to making multiple versions of the same product at the same quality, technology has become so advanced that it can personalise industrially produced objects.
That is why Vitra is working with Hella Jongerius. By adding unexpected details to her Polder sofa – and to the new club chair to be unveiled in Milan next month – Jongerius evokes the flaws that lend character to handcrafted one-offs and favourite antiques. When you first see her sofa you notice its oddities. Look at it again and you focus on the engineering. This is Vitra’s way of reassuring us that we are buying a piece of furniture which, despite its idiosyncracies, is as thoroughly modern and as rigorously engineered as Apple’s chic new iPod Hi-Fi.
Other designers and manufacturers are also deploying technology to create products with “character” or, at least, with the illusion of it. Peter Traag worked with Edra’s engineers to introduce random elements to the manufacturing of his Mummy chair. The final shape is determined by chance, making each piece unique. The Israeli-born designer Assa Ashuach achieved a similar effect for his OMI.mgx lights using a rapid prototyping production process developed by the Belgian company Materialise. The process is so precise that it creates a single piece of plastic in such an intricate shape that it could not be produced from conventional techniques. Ashuach’s lights look less like three-dimensional objects than the digital ripples on computer screens. The plastic is so flexible and can be twisted into so many different shapes that every light looks different.
Some designers have taken a lower-tech path. Maarten Baas is one. The surreally charred silhouette of his Smoke chair is every bit as relevant to design today as Jongerius’s experiments with Vitra’s engineers, yet Baas honed that darkly beautiful form just with an old-fashioned blow torch.
