Garden Futures: Designing with Nature
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature
25.03.2023 – 03.10.2023
Vitra Design Museum
An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Nieuwe Instituut
Gardens reflect identities, dreams, and visions. Deeply rooted in their culture, they can unfold immense symbolic potential. The recent revival of horticulture has focused less on the garden as a romantic refuge than as a place where concepts of social justice, biodiversity, and sustainability can be tried and tested. Gardens have become places of the avantgarde. The exhibition »Garden Futures« at the Vitra Design Museum is the first to explore the history and future of modern gardens. Where do today’s garden ideals come from? Will gardens help us achieve a liveable future for everyone? The exhibition addresses these questions using a broad range of examples from design, everyday culture, and landscape architecture – from deckchairs to vertical urban farms, from contemporary community gardens to living buildings to gardens by designers and artists including Roberto Burle Marx, Mien Ruys, and Derek Jarman. The exhibition architecture will be designed by the Italian design duo Formafantasma.
Image: © Vitra Design Museum, Illustration: Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss; based on the photo: Les Jardins de Marqueyssac, Dordogne, France, © Laugery
Colour Rush! An Installation by Sabine Marcelis
Colour Rush! An Installation by Sabine Marcelis
Vitra Schaudepot
The new focus topic of the Vitra Schaudepot, which will be on display from May 2022 to May 2024, is wholly devoted to colour. Following an invitation from the Vitra Design Museum, Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis has transformed the Schaudepot in one simple, sweeping gesture by sorting its roughly four hundred exhibits by colour. The installation shows the collection from new perspectives and produces fascinating cross-references between periods and styles, at the same time providing visitors with an overwhelming immersive experience. The presentation is complemented by historical and contemporary objects and documents from the museum archives that illustrate how designers from different eras approached the subject.
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Photo: Bettina Matthiessen
Barragán Gallery
Barragán Gallery
Vitra Schaudepot
Luis Barragán (1902–1988) is widely regarded as the most important Mexican architect of the twentieth century. Since 1996, the architect’s professional estate has been in the care of the Barragan Foundation, located in Birsfelden, near Basel in Switzerland. Over the past two decades, a small team of researchers under the leadership of architectural historian Federica Zanco has systematically evaluated and catalogued the archival documents. As part of a newly established partnership between the Barragan Foundation and the Vitra Design Museum, this material has moved to new premises on the Vitra Campus. The Barragán Archive is now located in close proximity to the Vitra Schaudepot. This includes a state-of-the-art repository for the documents, a study room for visiting researchers, and the Barragán Gallery, a thematic exhibition space. The gallery show presents drawings, photographs and other material from the Barragán Archive, together with biographical details and an illustrated chronology of modern architecture in Mexico. This ensemble of documents and supplementary information illuminates Barragán’s life and work in a larger context.
Image: Rooftop terrace of Luis Barragán’s residence at 14 Calle Francisco Ramírez (Mexico City, 1948), photograph taken by Armando Salas Portugal in the 1960s. © Barragan Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Wunderkammer
Wunderkammer
Visitors can experience the Wunderkammer exclusively as part of a public guided tour. Registration here.
Another attraction on the Vitra Campus, the »Wunderkammer« presents spellbinding mise-en-scènes featuring more than one thousand action figures from the collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra. This includes robots, space toys, comic book characters, folk art, and advertising, often created by anonymous artists and designers. The majority of these objects were made after the Second World War and bear all the marks of their period’s optimistic faith in the future. All of them are products of a pop culture that still fascinates millions of children and grown-ups today.
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Image: Objects from the Rolf Fehlbaum collection at the Wunderkammer,
photo: Bettina Matthiessen
