Exploring the Vitra Design Museum
Recently I visited the Vitra Design Museum located in Weil am Rhine, a city in Germany near Basel, Switzerland that’s about 40 minutes away from where I live in Freiburg im Breisgau. I first discovered the museum because I heard about its extensive collection of artifacts made by the designers Charles and Ray Eames.
As a did more research online, I was fascinated to see the museum’s campus-like structure with many architecturally significant buildings, exhibits with possible tinkering connections and temporary exhibitions with an emphasis on the intersection of art, design, sustainability and technology.
From my time in the Tinkering Studio, the work of the Eames has been a touchstone of art, science design connections. While I was there, we collaborated with the Eames office to put on an event for the ‘powers of 10’ film, toured the archives and saw elements from the mathematica exhibtion at Boston Science Center and showed the tops flim alongside a building spinners workshop in the Tinkering studio.
It was really cool to see the Vitra Haus as the showroom of Eames products available in Germany along with some really impressive arrangements of plastic chairs. On the bottom floor of the showroom there was even a lounge chair “atelier” where they tested the iconic recliners. Moving over to the Design Museum, there was a exhibit about the Solar-Do-Nothing machine with the excellent quote about the design calling it, “a elaborate and pleasing NOTHING rather than an (inevitably meagre and predicatbly boring) SOMETHING.”
The solar-do-nothing machine was part of a temporary exhibition called “Transform! Designing the Future of Energy” with several interesting elements like a bicycle energy generator, a solar village and a whimsical video with windmill costumes. Many of these prompts suggest possible hands-on tinkering workshops and it would be fun to explore the ideas further in collaboration with the museum.
Another section of the museum that was really interesting told the story of the creation of Tsuyoshi Tane Architects’ creation the garden house, a sustainable building in a natural area of the campus. This display of all the possible materials choices for the walls, door handles, floor tiles and other elements showed how much the design process is tied to “a conversation with materials”. Even the stands for the objects in the gallery were made of rough scrap wood and these choices contributed to an inspiring look at the prototyping process.
It turned out the museum was too big to see all in one visit and next time we take a trip there we need to check out the workshop, the archives and the circular economy store. As well there’s a giant slide that looks like a lot of fun! Looking forward to more chances to get inspired by this museum and hopefully collaborate on a connected tinkering project sometime in the future!