Design: Limited editions, without the usual limits

Design: Limited editions, without the usual limits
By Alice Rawsthorn Published: July 1, 2007


BASEL, Switzerland: All of the chairs are identical in size and shape, but there's one important difference between them. Each chair is made from a different material. One's marble. Another's redwood. The others are in concrete, acrylic, wickerwork, attaché-case metal, polyurethane foam, felt and even hay.

The result is intriguing. Each material transforms the appearance of the chair, creating what seems like an optical illusion. The transparent acrylic chair seems to melt away to nothingness. The marble one looks chunkier, and the redwood chair chunkier still. That's exactly what their designer, Naoto Fukasawa, wanted to happen when he hit upon the idea of creating a series of chairs to illustrate the impact of a single design decision - the choice of material.

Fukasawa's nine chairs are part of Vitra Editions, a collection of 15 limited edition objects commissioned by Vitra, the Swiss furniture company, from a gilded group of architects, including Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid; and designers, such as Jasper Morrison, Hella Jongerius, and the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. All of the Editions are being exhibited, until July 22, inside a geodesic dome, one of the emergency shelters designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, the American humanitarian designer, at Vitra's production complex in Weil-am-Rhein on the border of Germany and Switzerland. Some of them will be sold later this year for between €5,000 and €100,000 each.

Perhaps predictably, the Vitra Editions are a mixed bag, yet together they present a compelling picture of contemporary design. Few companies have more clout in the design world than Vitra, which has been one of Europe's most important design patrons since the late 1950s, when it started to manufacture furniture by the American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Vitra now works with designers on furniture and objects, and commissions architects to contribute to its architectural treasure chest at Weil-am-Rhein, which already has a conference center by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, a design museum by Gehry and a fire station by Hadid. Many of them have been persuaded to join the Editions project, which also includes designers new to the company, like Jurgen Bey, Konstantin Grcic and Jerszy Seymour.

Vitra gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wished, the only stipulation being that it had to be something they couldn't do within the constraints of price, volume and durability imposed on mass-manufactured objects. So what did they do?


Some of the Editions are formal exercises, like Naoto Fukasawa's beautifully nuanced Chairs, and variations on familiar themes for their designers. Jasper Morrison continued his work with cork - and scored sustainability points - by carving a chair from a single block of recycled wine corks. Zaha Hadid created another of her extreme digital shapes for the Mesa Table, and Ron Arad produced a sleekly engineered version of the Rover Chair, an early 1980s piece made from an abandoned car seat and scaffolding.

Other designers used the project as a chance to experiment with the changing role that furniture plays in our lives, a theme that some have also explored in MyHome, the latest exhibition at the neighboring Vitra Design Museum.

The most radical of the Editions is Slow Car, a mobile shelter devised by the Dutch designer Jurgen Bey as a compact space where you can work or rest. The hut-shaped Slow Car can be driven around at up to 40 kilometers per hour, or 25 miles per hour, to be used as a mobile workspace in different locations, or as a private space for use by various people in crowded places like airports and offices.

The Bouroullecs have used their Edition to develop a versatile way of breaking up open-plan living and working spaces. Made from cardboard covered in bookbinding linen, their craggy Roc screen is substantial enough to divide a room, but light enough to be carried easily from place to place. The Dutch designer Hella Jongerius's mobile Office Pets could fulfill a similar function, but only in a pinch. They are really intended to be wheeled around the office to personalize it - like a plant - rather than to serve a practical purpose.

Equally experimental is Landen, a rugged jungle gym-style bench conceived by the German designer Konstantin Grcic to encourage people to communicate in public spaces. Virtually indestructible, Landen is as wide as a Hummer and so heavy that it has to be moved by crane, but feels surprisingly intimate once you've clambered up inside the circular bench, which is sheltered from its surroundings by the forbidding steel structure.

The brutality of Grcic's piece and the playfulness of Jongerius's could be interpreted as poking fun at the concept of limited edition furniture, which has become increasingly fashionable - and contentious - in the last year or so. The original limited editions were pieces by avant-garde early-20th-century designers, like Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer, which were deemed too radical to be made in large quantities. Their rarity was accidental. Designers continued to produce them coincidentally in order to work flexibly, free from constraints of mass production - just as Vitra wanted them to in these Editions.

As the value of limited editions have soared - a late 1980s cabinet by the Australian designer Marc Newson sold at Christie's for a record $1.05 million in May - they are increasingly being produced specifically for sale to collectors. Design purists complain that these pieces are mere commodities, and that the news media coverage of them fuels the popular (mis)perception of design as being dominated by expensive, uncomfortable furniture.

Vitra's industrial pedigree is so strong that it can easily rebuff such criticism, and one of its Editions, the New Order chair by the Berlin-based designer Jerszy Seymour, does so rather eloquently. New Order is a customized monobloc, one of those ubiquitous white plastic chairs made in the millions. Cheap and efficient, the monobloc is the polar opposite of an expensively impractical limited edition. Yet there it stands in Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome - the white plastic literally erupting with polyurethane foam.