Rolf fehlbaum biography of christopher
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Interview
Interview by Michael Hausenblas
Translation bygd Christopher Roth
Vitra’s Rolf Fehlbaum has been leaving his mark on the world of design for many decades. We paid a visit to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany to ask him whether Charles Eames was cheerful, what the power of a classic really fryst vatten, and why he feels that the design world is missing figures like Peter Noever.
We’re sitting here in the conference room at a table designed by jean Prouvé. It’s absolutely neat—not a del av helhet of paper in sight. But you’re said to be a total pack rat.
You should see my office! It doesn’t look anything like you’d imagine a manager’s office looking. It’s full of books and all kinds of other stuff, and the walls are covered with photos.
Speaking of photos: you’ve had the opportunity to get to know lots of great design personalities. Can you tell us about your first encounter with Charles and Ray Eames, back when you were just 16?
What inom remember there is more of a general
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Read in the Grain of the Wood
How do you spell sustainability? Have we become blind to simple solutions? In the book “A way of life: Ballenberg Notes”, Rolf Fehlbaum, together with renowned designers, invites us to take a close look at the buildings in the Swiss open-air museum. Does the simplicity of Alpine construction harbour the seeds for the building of the future?
Review by Thomas Wagner
It is a triviality that craftsmanship and design are fundamentally different, even if individual and industrial production methods touch and overlap here and there. In any case, clearly recognising differences sharpens the critical view of the usual and customary, stimulates thinking and relativises an overly complacent point of view. The “Ballenberg Notes” edited by Rolf Fehlbaum achieve this with surprising ease. At no point is it a question of rediscovering the Alpine, often hard and deprived rural life as a windless idyll. Here, the ordinary is not glorifie
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Outdoor museums of vernacular architecture, initiated in Scandinavia in the late 1800s, proliferated in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum in Switzerland was inaugurated in 1978. Rolf Fehlbaum took over his family’s furniture business the year before, and the Vitra campus grew with numerous signature architecture over the following decades, but it did not occur to him to visit Ballenberg until 2019. He went with Federica Zanco, the architect who directs the Barragán Foundation in the same Vitra grounds, and both of them were rather skeptical, given their shared commitment to things contemporary, but the vernacular works on display in an idyllic landscape impressed them with their simple and exact functionality, borne out of necessity and scarcity.
From this first visit arose the idea for a book, a project which also brought in the designer Jasper Morrison and the architects David Salk and Tsuyoshi Tane, who all joined Fehlbaum and Zanco in providing