Exhibit at Milan Design Week 2018 – The Highlights of Vitra’s “Typecasting”

Apr

Exhibit at Milan Design Week 2018 – The Highlights of Vitra’s “Typecasting”

Vitra is family-owned furniture company with headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland. The Swiss company is dedicated to improving the quality of homes, offices and public spaces through the power of design.

Exhibit at Milan Design Week 2018 Highlights of Vitra’s “Typecasting” ⇒ In conjunction with Milan Design Week 2018, Vitra presented the exhibition ‘Typecasting’ in the former sports arena, La Pelota. The designer Robert Stadler, who curated and staged the exhibition, has created an expansive panorama of some 200 objects, drawing on the extensive Vitra archives to juxtapose current products with classics, prototypes, special editions and future visions. The remarkable exhibition was mainly centered around the social function of furniture in nowadays society.

The exhibition ‘Typecasting’ offered a new view of Vitra. In the spacious Pelota arena, a panoramic display of around 200 objects portrayed the past, present and future of ‘Project Vitra’. Robert Stadler, who curated and designed the show, emphasises the social role of furniture – and of chairs in particular – as a key theme. Along with their obvious practical use as seating, chairs have historically always had an additional representative function: the selection of a specific chair is also a personal act of image cultivation.

The installation reflects this by presenting the furnishings as personalities with various attitudes. Stadler has selected pieces from both current production and the company’s archives, complementing them with design studies and grouping them into nine communities’ based on specific characteristics. Stadler looks at the objects outside the context of conventional furniture categories, which are usually linked to their functional uses or historical origins. By contrast, his groupings are defined according to common stereotypes in everyday media: such as the “Spartans”, who make do with the bare essentials, or the dynamic, hardened Athletes’, or the perfectly styled ‘Beauty Contestants’, or the transformable ‘Slashers’.

The exhibition playfully demonstrates that design is much more than the mere creation of industrial products. It underscores the role of design as a means of self-representation, of identifying with a specific group and establishing boundaries towards others. With a touch of poetic irony, the show treats furnishings as if they were props on the stage of self-portrayal. Thus Zaha Hadid’s Mesa Table (2007) becomes an ‘Athlete’, while the reductive form of Maarten van Severen’s MVS Chaise (2000) is identified as a ‘Spartan’, and Verner Panton’s vertical seating object Living Tower (1969) finds a place among the ‘Communals’.

The ‘Communals’ form the centrepiece of the installation. This category comprises furnishings that were designed for the purpose of shared use. The topic of communal living was showcased in the Vitra Design Museum’s 2017 exhibition ‘Together! The New Architecture of the Collective’. The traditional family dwelling is losing its relevance, leading to the emergence of new models for communal living. The sofa is moving from the private living room to a shared space, where it becomes the central stage for living and PRESS INFO working together. This transfer alters its character. The new seating typology of the ‘communal sofa’ is exemplified in the Pelota show by six design studies that Vitra has developed in collaboration with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin Grcic, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, Robert Stadler, and Commonplace Studio. New designs by Hella Jongerius, Front, and Maria Jeglinska are displayed in other categories of the installation.

The changing perspective demonstrated by the exhibition is highlighted on a digital level by video collages. Three large screens will show live feeds of the installation at La Pelota.