To enter the Vitra furniture factory here you first have to grasp a few metaphors. The metal door handle, for example, looks abstract but is shaped like Switzerland. A right-hander's palm would rest on Basel, home to the Swiss-based furniture company, which has emerged as one of Europe's leaders in fostering good design, a successor to Braun or Olivetti.
That Vitra is producing furniture in the United States, in the epitome of the Rust Belt, the town Billy Joel lamented in song, and that it has opened a showroom for its wares on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City are the visible symbols of the company's ambition.Vitra's styles are many - those of the designers the company is famous for hiring - but its approach to design is its own. It aims to do nothing less than create a new international style, in Swiss fashion, from the best of individual styles.
Over the last few years, Vitra has quietly become one of the most important patrons of leading designers and architects, an international cast that includes Philippe Starck, Ettore Sottsass, Mario Bellini, Borek Sipek, Ron Arad and Jasper Morrison. Vitra has revived designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Frank Gehry in special editions, and has produced and sold such innovative shapes as Starck's chic WW stool created for the German film director Wim Wenders.
Although Vitra's furniture is in the offices of Coca-Cola in Atlanta and MTV in New York, the furniture maker is tiny compared with its giant competitors, Steelcase, Herman Miller or Knoll.
Vitra's sales growth in this country has been slow despite the fact that the company's original creative inspiration came from the United States.
Vitra's founder, Rolf Fehlbaum, so admired the work of the Eameses that he rescued their own office furniture for display in his private Vitra Museum and kept classic designs by the Eames and other Americans in special-edition lines. He also emulated the approach of Herman Miller and Knoll in hiring the best designers to create furniture for innovative companies like IBM.
The mainstay of production for the company's U.S. affiliate, Vitra Seating, is the Figura office chair. Each is an autograph piece, signed on a plastic strip, by its designer, Mario Bellini, and also signed by the man or woman who assembles it at the Allentown factory. Bellini is known for his work for Olivetti and Yamaha.
Befitting the product, the factory employs skilled artisans, rather than a traditional assembly line. There are seam- stresses, who join fabric or leather into slip-on covers. In a gluing chamber there is a touch of festival color: the workers, mostly Hispanic, wear safety glasses, in oranges and yellows.
The automotive industry has its world car. Vitra, with aspirations to international style, produces a world chair, built of metal cast in Germany, plastic arms molded in Italy; plywood from Europe, shipped to Michigan to have plastic foam molded around it. The leather comes from Scandinavian cattle but is tanned and dyed in North Carolina. Metal fasteners are obtained locally in this area, with its tradition of iron and steel making.
The company has sold 250,000 Figuras worldwide, and among the places where people sit on them are the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz and Germany's new Parliament building. The Figura is also produced at Vitra's factory complex in Weil, Germany, just across the Rhine River from the company's Basel headquarters. The factory buildings there are known as the Schloss, or the castle. They have also been described as an architectural zoo.
Besides the Vitra Museum, which contains chairs Fehlbaum has almost obsessively collected over the years, are factories designed by Gehry and Alberto Siza, and a concrete educational training center, half-fortress, half-Shinto shrine, designed by Tadao Ando of Japan.
Vitra's newest building is the Frank Gehry designed headquarters in Basel, called the "villa," which houses Fehlbaum's office. A stern bespectacled man, Fehlbaum describes his hiring of top architects and designers as nothing less than "a cultural offensive." Although many of the designers are consider post Modernistic, Fehlbaum clings to a Modernist idealism.
"You must have a sense of mission and personal pride to create great design," he said. "Profits must be secondary."
Fehlbaum says that his design ideals were shaped by American companies like IBM, which in the 1950s supported designers like Eames and architects like Eero Saarinen.
Fehlbaum was recently awarded Germany's Lucky Strike Award, named after the cigarette package design of Raymond Loewy, who remains highly regarded in Europe.
But the honor Fehlbaum treasures most is one bestowed recently by the local homeowner association on the company's new headquarters for the careful blending of the building into the community. In the design, Gehry tilted the axis of the complex at a 90 degree angle to the street, making it less dominant on the street.
Fehlbaum described it as possessing "an awkward beauty."
Vitra entered the furniture business in 1957 by bringing Eames designs to Europe, under a license from Herman Miller. By 1960, Fehlbaum had hired his first designer, Verner Panton, who created a plastic chair that is now a classic. In the '60s, he brought in Mario Bellini, the master of Italian modernism who had brought high touch to high tech in products like the Olivetti Divisumma calculator, to rethink Vitra's office systems.
Vitra boomed in the mid-1980s, growing nearly 20 percent a year in sales, and becoming a major force in the European office furniture market.
Fehlbaum not only hired star designers, but he also nourished lesser known talents. One is Antonio Citterio whose designs include the new Manhattan show-room and the Axion chair, which also is being produced in Allentown.