A Hundred Years - A Hundred Chairs

The Vitra Design Museum has one of the biggest and most important collections of modern furniture design.

The exhibition A hundred years - A hundred chairs provides us with the opportunity to contemplate the museum's most beautiful pieces.

The aim of this exhibition is to offer a view of the different periods of industrial furniture design in this century.

It all began in the latter half of the 19 th century with curved wooden furniture which lent itself to mass-production.

Design played a significant role in cultural at development at the beginning of the century.

Gerrit Rietveld designed furniture with simple lines, while Marcel Breuer created the first tubular steel chairs.

This lightness in shape was subsequently a source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, who was the first to use plywood, and for Jean Prouvé, who started to use techniques and materials which had previously only been used by the aeronautical industry.

Following the Second World War, American designers began to collaborate closely with industry.

Designers like Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia came up with designs which would be used for the mass production of furniture for American homes.

Design became a key element of daily life.

At that time in Europe, furniture design was developing mainly in Italy and Scandinavia