BERLIN, GERMANY.- The exhibition "Take a Seat!" is the first presentation of the Vitra Design Museum’s extensive collection in Berlin. Together with its parent museum in Weil am Rhein, built by Frank Gehry in 1989, the Vitra Design Museum Berlin can draw upon one of the most important collections of industrial furniture design in the world, using it as a basis for the organization of alternating exhibitions on design and architecture. Since the collection is not normally accessible to the public, the exhibition "Take a Seat!" displays a selection of approximately 260 pieces of seating furniture from 1800 to the present, complemented by extensive documentation in the form of films, photographs, brochures and drawings from the archive of the Museum. As a result, "Take a Seat!" is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions on the history of modern furniture design ever to be seen in Berlin.

The history of modern furniture has been characterized by a striving for the unity of form, function, and material. In addition, the requirements of industrial production came to be regarded as a prerequisite for good and inexpensive furniture design. Technical innovations were often the catalyst for new forms, as was the case with the early Windsor chairs, the first designs by Jean-Joseph Chapuis and Samuel Gragg around 1800, and the early bentwood creations of Michael Thonet. Between 1830 and 1860, Thonet developed a method which made it possible to manufacture seating furniture out of solid bent wood. He thus paved the way for the industrial mass production of inexpensive yet robust furniture for everyday use. Thonet’s bentwood chairs became the model for a type of furniture design that was rigorously based upon the demands of industry. Their simplified forms correspond to structural necessity. At the end of the 19th century, modernist architects in Vienna (incl. Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner) became aware of bentwood furniture and viewed it as an answer to the rampant Revivalism of the time. They countered unrestrained eclecticism with an aesthetic purity based upon the clean lines of the classic bentwood chair. In parallel to this, art nouveau blossomed throughout Europe, with exponents such as Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Belgian Henry Van de Velde.

At the end of World War I, the Dutch group De Stijl inspired a new design program based upon abstraction as the ideal of art. For architecture this meant that load-bearing skeletons of concrete and steel were combined with glass walls, thereby creating unobstructed interiors flooded with natural light. Gerrit T. Rietveld transferred this new concept for interiors to the chair, reducing it, with his "Roodblauwe Stoel", to a geometric system consisting of planes and struts. Due to the spatial transparency of the skeleton-like construction, it is no longer a volume, but part of a continuously flowing interior space. 

The Bauhaus in Weimar, founded by Walter Gropius at the beginning of 1919, initiated a new phase in furniture design: Form should develop strictly out of the analysis of function. In 1925, working within the intellectual climate of this new school, Marcel Breuer designed the first piece of seating furniture made with seamless, cold-drawn precision steel tubing, the armchair B3, known as »Wassily«. Its visible structure and severe geometry evoke a pure, functionalist aesthetic stance. In the following years, tubular steel gained favor as the primary means of _expression among avant-garde designers. In 1926, Mart Stam developed a completely new type of chair without back legs, the so-called cantilevered chair. In order to counteract the instability of the frame, Stam reinforced the tubing at critical angles, which yielded a stable, but rigid and inflexible structure. Then in 1927, Mies van der Rohe utilized the elasticity of tubular steel as a constructive principle, creating the first flexible cantilevered chair in the history of design. Soon representatives of the avant-garde in France, like Le Corbusier, René Herbst and Robert Mallet-Stevens, expressed an interest in this new material. However, in contrast to the stringent stylistic vocabulary of German and Dutch designers, they combined the formal severity of tubular steel furniture with gracefully curving lines, thereby lending it a new elegance. 

During the 1930s, Scandinavian design became less subordinate to traditional craftsmanship and showed the increasing influence of Functionalist principles. Nevertheless, it retained its individuality. The preference for natural materials and organic forms borrowed from nature was coupled with a yearning for new technical solutions, as can be observed in the designs of Alvar Aalto and Bruno Mathsson. Aalto’s experiments with laminated wood introduced new structural possibilities to the realm of design and led to the development in 1931 of the first cantilevered chair made of wood.

Under the influence of the European avant-garde, which emigrated to the United States at the end of the thirties, American design advanced to the forefront of the international scene following World War II. Charles and Ray Eames figured amongst the most prominent individuals in the postwar era. The concept of a three- dimensionally molded seating shell took a central place in their work. The first attempt to make the shell out of plywood was unsuccessful and led to the articulation of the seat and back as separate, individual elements connected by means of the base. Not until the advent of fiberglass technology was Eames able to realize his idea for a multi-functional seating shell. Shortly afterward, he began to apply the principle of stretching materials across a frame instead of molding them. Parallel to the Eames, Eero Saarinen, George Nelson and Harry Bertoia, who all worked in the United States, in Europe the design of the fifties was largely influenced by designers like Carlo Mollino, Gio Ponti and the Castiglioni brothers in Italy, Arne Jacobsen and Poul Kjaerholm in Denmark and Jean Prouvé in France.

The sixties saw the heyday of plastic furniture. No other material has had a greater impact on furniture design. Its malleability made it possible to adapt seating furniture completely to the shape of the human body. The unlimited malleability of plastic and the development of new kinds of foam freed furniture from the limitations of traditional construction and allowed designers to play creatively with the forms and colors inspired by Pop Art. Verner Panton, for example, developed the first cantilevered chair in the history of design made out of a single piece of plastic. Plastic became the expressive mode of an unconstrained lifestyle that rebelled against the confining conventions of established modes of living.

Alongside Panton, exponents of this period include Joe Colombo and Vico Magistretti in Italy, Eero Aarnio in Finland or Pierre Paulin and Olivier Mourgue in France. In the seventies, design became mired in a deep-seated crisis. Critics decried a formalism devoid of substance, the result of an excessively close connection between design, industry, and the consumer. The center of protest crystallized around the Radical Design movement in Italy. Leading proponents of the movement included groups like Archizoom, Studio 65 and Gaetano Pesce, as well as Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass. In answer to the moralizing pathos of modernism, they developed a banal aesthetic which introduced a positive form of barbarism to design. Liberated from the dogma of »good form«, furniture acquired an icon-like significance. Form, material and decor were no longer subordinated to the principle of function, but joined together to form a complex system of signs. 

As the movement climaxed in Italy at the beginning of the eighties with the founding of Alchimia and Memphis, the spark of protest leapt to other parts of the world and became commercial. New leitmotifs such as »anything goes« appealed to the subversive play of fantasy in order to escape the uniformity of material things. The striving for individuality and plurality produced an unprecedented variety of styles. With designers like Gaetano Pesce, Philippe Starck, Ron Arad and Shiro Kuramata, the experimentation of the eighties altered the foundations of design and also opened up new markets to industry.

Finally, contemporary design is represented in the collection by Jasper Morrison, Ron Arad, Werner Aisslinger, the Campana brothers and Tokujin Yoshioka. Their designs, with gel cushioning, beehive constructions from paper, or Kevlar-reinforced netting, demonstrate a new trend toward innovative materials, often combined with a consciously unpretentious and functional appearance. 

The overview offers a representative cross-section of all the key innovative manufacturers and materials: from the first Windsor and Chiavari chairs produced using semi-industrial methods, through bentwood furniture made by the first industrial corporations such as Thonet and Jacob & Josef Kohn, the tubular steel furniture produced by Thonet or Standard, designs by the Swiss company Wohnbedarf, basket armchairs for the Murmann company, or Lloyds Loom armchairs for Lusty & Sons, via cardboard furniture and the many plastic designs, above all for Italian manufacturers such as Kartell, Zanotta, Artemide, or Gufram, not to mention the chairs and armchairs for Herman Miller, Vitra, Knoll, or Cassina.

The exhibition also illustrates that the Vitra Design Museum has successfully collected not only industrial products - above all examples of the respectively earliest series products - but also those unique items made using crafts that moved key technological and formal developments forwards. These include furniture by Carlo Mollino, Pierre Chareau, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Kiesler, Franco Albini, Luigi Colani, Rudolf M. Schindler, Frank O. Gehry, and many others. The comprehensive survey of the collection will be complemented by a selection of documents including not only furniture brochures from the 19th century, original patents from the 1920s, historical photographs and posters, but also original drawings by the likes of Ron Arad and Alessandro Mendini.

Complementing the presentation of this extensive collection, the exhibition "Take a Seat!" also introduces the innovative concept of the Vitra Design Museum, an initiative of the office furniture manufacturer Vitra that has engendered a largely self-financed museum of international stature. Since 1989, with monographic exhibitions on e.g. Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton, Frank Lloyd Wright, Issey Miyake, Mies van der Rohe as well as numerous thematic exhibitions, the Vitra Design Museum has contributed to the fact that architecture, design and everyday culture are prominent and popular topics in today’s museums. In addition to its two locations in Weil am Rhein and Berlin, ten to twelve shows organized by the Vitra Design Museum are on display at partner museums around the world.

In conjunction with all of its exhibitions, the Museum produces and publishes comprehensive catalogues that are marketed worldwide in design stores and museum shops along with a series of miniature chairs (scale 1:6) and full-scale re-editions of design classics.

A catalogue and a CD-ROM entitled "100 Masterpieces from the Collection of the Vitra Design Museum" are available for purchase in conjunction with the exhibition. The series of furniture miniatures comprising key designs from the collection will be augmented with several new models, including Marcel Breuer’s "Lattenstuhl," Jean Prouvé’s "Standard" chair and the Ulm Stool by Max Bill. A series of special events and guided tours complete the début of the Vitra Design Museum Collection in Berlin and its simultaneous introduction to the fascinating history of furniture design. In the museum café, visitors can try out new editions of several of the most important chair designs shown in the exhibition: Take a Seat!