Vitra

Willi and Erika Fehlbaum founded Vitra in Switzerland in 1950. On a 1953 visit to New York they saw the furniture Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson were designing for Herman Miller, and in 1957 Vitra began making those designs for Europe. That deal explains why Vitra keeps turning up in our design stories. It is the authorized maker of the Eames Lounge Chair and ottoman for Europe and the Middle East, building it with methods that date back to the 1950s, and it added the taller size alongside Herman Miller in 2008. Vitra holds the rights to Isamu Noguchi's coffee table outside North America and handles his Akari light sculptures in Europe, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, while the paper and bamboo are still worked by hand at the Ozeki workshop in Gifu. Its own catalog grew from there. Verner Panton's chair, introduced in 1967, was the first cantilevered chair made from plastic. The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, works as an architecture park, with Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum from 1989, Tadao Ando's conference pavilion from 1993 and the VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron from 2010. The Fehlbaum family still owns the company. Zaha Hadid's fire station on the campus, finished in 1993, was one of her first completed buildings.