Artists/Makers/Factories
ETTORE SOTTSASS (1917-2007)
Medium
laminated wood & perspex
Signed/Inscribed/Dated
Manufactures label. Stamped mark RZ896
Dimensions
56.00cm wide
83.00cm high
44.00cm deep
(22.05 inches wide 32.68 inches high 17.32 inches deep)
Exhibition History
Retrospective Exhibitions; Los Angeles, 2006. London Design Museum ,2007.
Permanent collections; Centre George’s Pompidou, Paris. Museum of Modern Art, NY. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Condition
Very good condition, small restauration
Description / Expertise
A rare “Teodora” Chair by ETTORE SOTTSASS for Vitra
Designed 1987.
Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007), was born in Austria but moved with his family to Italy. He is considered one of the most significant counter forces to modernism in the history of design. His remarkable career produced a body of work involving architecture, furniture, ceramics and glass. He was ver effected by the new materials and technologies introduced in his life time. Colour and form played a large part and he embraced them with a radical approach. He used colour to determine shape.
Vitra was founded in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 1950 by Willi Fehlbaum, the owner of a furniture shop in nearby Basel, Switzerland. In the following years, Fehlbaum acquired licences for the designs of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson.
After a major fire destroyed the Vitra facilities in 1981, British architect Nicholas Grimshaw was commissioned to design a new factory building. The aluminium factory hall, ready for production in only six months after the fire, was complemented by another production building by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza in 1986. In 1989, it was followed by a factory building by Frank O. Gehry. Gehry also constructed the Vitra Design Museum building, which was originally intended to house the private furniture collection of Vitra's owner Rolf Fehlbaum.
In 1993, Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid added a fire station – her first completed building – to the premises. The fire station now houses the Design Museum's international collection of designer chairs. In the same year, a conference pavilion of Japanese architect Tadao Ando was also constructed on the Vitra grounds. It was Ando's first work outside Japan.
In 1994, the Vitra administrative staff moved from Weil to the company's new headquarters (also designed by Frank O. Gehry) in nearby Birsfelden, Switzerland, while Álvaro Siza added a design shop building to the Weil factory. A 1960s geodesic dome by U.S. architect Buckminster Fuller was set up at Weil in 2000, to serve as a meeting hall, and in 2003, a petrol station by the French designer Jean Prouvé was also moved in.
FOR SALE
