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april 27, 2020 - Vitra Design Museum

#VDMHomeStories - Digital Initiative during Vitra Design Museum’s Temporary Closure

#VDMHomeStories

Digital Initiative during Vitra #design Museum’s Temporary Closure

Home Stories
100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors
8 February – 23 August 2020, Vitra #design Museum 

Our homes are an expression of the way we live, they shape our everyday routines and fundamentally affect our well-being. With the major exhibition »Home Stories: 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors« the #vitradesignmuseum aims to reopen the conversation about the contemporary private interior and its evolution. In a captivating narrative leading visitors backwards in time, the exhibition will highlight important societal, political, urban, and technical shifts that have shaped the #design and the use of the Western interior over the last 100 years. From current issues facing the domestic domain – such as the efficient use of dwindling urban space to the blurring of work-life boundaries – the journey includes our fascination with loft-living in the 1970s, the shift from formal to informal dwelling in the 1960s, the rise of household appliances in the 1950s, and the introduction of open-space planning in the 1920s. The exhibition is organized around 20 iconic interiors by architects such as Adolf Loos, Finn Juhl, Lina Bo Bardi, and Assemble; artists like Andy Warhol or Cecil Beaton, as well as interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. 

Today, #interiordesign for the home sustains a giant, global economy of furniture, textiles, decoration, and lifestyle accessories. Both past and present trends from the world of domestic interiors feed an entire branch of the media, including magazines, television programming, blogs, and social media channels. However, while the question of housing has become the topic of lively public debates, the domestic interior is found to be increasingly lacking in serious discourse. This is even more surprising since interiors reflect some of the most pressing issues of our time. It is time to review the #interiordesign of our homes. 

In presenting iconic interiors as well as examples that are not necessarily universally known, the exhibition »Home Stories« wants to reignite the fundamental discourse about the discipline of #interiordesign. With works by outstanding designers, architects, and artists, »Home Stories« will reflect on how #interiordesign has always been inspired, enriched, and shaped by other disciplines, including not only architecture and product #design, but also the fine arts and stage #design. Contrasting the repetitive DIY - and Instagram-inspired look of modern Western living that often includes the same #design icons, colour palettes, and furniture arrangements, the exhibition constitutes a compelling sensorial journey through the recent history of the domestic sphere, including models, drawings, furniture, films, and other media. 

Space, Economy and Atmosphere: 2000 – Today 

The exhibiton starts with a look at a few selected contemporary interiors which reflect the radical shifts in private interiors that we are currently experiencing. As an answer to rising property prices and the resulting shortage of affordable living space, micro-housing #design utilizes built-in and convertible furniture. This can be seen in »Yojigen Poketto« (which translates to 4D pocket), an apartment designed by the architecture studio Elii in Madrid (2017). At the same time, innovative conversion projects, such as Arno Brandlhuber’s »Antivilla« near Berlin (2014) – which uses textiles as movable space dividers – offer strategies for efficiently optimizing space and reflect a new definition of comfort and luxury which is based on simplicity and the language of material. Another societal change which is reflected in #interiordesign is the increasing relevance of the sharing economy. One example for this is the project »Granby Four Streets Community Housing« in Liverpool (2013 – 17) initiated by the multidisciplinary collective Assemble. In close collaboration with the prospective inhabitants, Assemble saved a Victorian terrace of houses from urban decay, gutted and redesigned the interiors for contemporary needs, and helped establish a workshop that reuses building materials to create furnishings for the new spaces. 

Internet platforms like Airbnb, Instragram, and Pinterest have all fuelled the perception of the private interior as a commodity that can be displayed and capitalized at any moment. However, the imagery and display strategies in many private interiors today can still be traced back to pre-modern or even vernacular dwelling traditions. This can be seen in a slide show by Jasper Morrison exclusively commissioned for the exhibition, which explores how the arrangement of objects fundamentally affects the character and the atmopshere of a private space. 

#VDMHomeStories

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