Vitra

Thirty years separate Alberto Meda’s 1996 Meda chair from the Bascule lounge chair that Studio Œ unveiled at Vitra’s Nordhavn showroom this week. Read in sequence, Vitra lounge soft seating chairs trace a single arc: from the soft-net ergonomic engineering Meda imported into the office in the mid-1990s to the recyclable V-Foam upholstery Lisa Ertel and Anne-Sophie Oberkrome wrapped around Bascule like a loosely tailored jacket. In between sit Antonio Citterio’s ID Chair Concept of 2010, Konstantin Grcic’s pendulum-suspended Citizen of 2020, Panter & Tourron’s disassemblable Anagram sofa of 2024, and Stephan Hurlemann’s Reset chair from Salone this April. Six projects, six designers, one consistent question: how soft should a working chair be, and what should it be made of? ...

The half-century of architect-designed task chairs runs on a single commercial premise: that a named author — usually trained as an architect or an engineer, occasionally as both — can move an ergonomic office chair from the procurement page into the design press. The lineage begins on 1 January 1976, when Herman Miller shipped Bill Stumpf’s Ergon, the first mass-market task chair marketed on the basis of medical research. It closes, for the moment, in June 2026, when Foster + Partners premiered the Muku for the Japanese manufacturer Okamura — fifty years and four months later, an architect’s office attaching its signature to a recycled-aluminium structure with a mesh upholstery woven from discarded fishing nets. Between those two endpoints, the architect-designed task chair has been the most reliable category in office furniture by which a manufacturer purchases legitimacy. This piece catalogues every named-author chair in that window: nine principal projects, four manufacturers, eight credited designers, and one consistent commercial argument. ...

Herman Miller’s 2026 Aeron — the first full redesign of Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick’s 1994 task chair, announced on 2 June 2026 at $2,285 — closes a 30-year run of nine million units sold and reopens the ergonomic office chair lineage that Knoll, Vitra and Steelcase have been ranged against since the Eameses’ 1958 Aluminum Group. The new Aeron lands at Fulton Market Design Days in Chicago, 8–10 June 2026, and is the clearest reset of the category since the original Aeron entered the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in 1994, before it had even reached retail floors. Read backwards from that date, the lineage gathers four manufacturers — Herman Miller (founded 1905 in Zeeland, Michigan as Star Furniture Co.), Knoll, Vitra and Steelcase (founded 1912 in Grand Rapids) — and roughly a dozen designers who fixed what a seated body could expect from an office. ...

When Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby announced on 20 May 2026 that their London studio would close after 30 years, they ended a partnership that put one product into the hands of 8,000 Olympic torchbearers and another under millions of office workers. The question this piece sets out to answer is the simplest one anybody asks after such an announcement: what, exactly, did Barber Osgerby make between 1996 and 2026? The answer is roughly four dozen products of consequence, spread across a tight roster of manufacturers — Vitra, Flos, Cappellini, B&B Italia, Established & Sons, Knoll, Hermès, Isokon Plus, Mutina, Fredericia and Emeco — plus one Olympic torch, one circulating coin, and two sister practices that outlived the founding studio in different corporate hands. What follows is that catalogue, in order. ...

Frank gehry furniture is a single 54-year argument that any material — corrugated cardboard, ColorCore plastic laminate, bentwood maple, mirror-polished stainless steel, ColorCore again, then bronze and copper — can be made to behave like architecture. The argument opens in 1972 at the Easy Edges workshop on Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, and it closes, posthumously, on 14 May 2026 in the back room of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Larry Gagosian and the Gehry family have hung Fish on Fire — the last fish Frank Gehry executed in copper — beside a 2014 bear and a 2023 ColorCore crocodile under ten ink-and-watercolour drawings of fish in motion. Between those two dates sit the Wiggle Chair, the Fish Lamps, the Snake Lamps, the Knoll bentwood collection led by Cross Check, the Alessi Pito kettle, the 2006 Tiffany & Co. jewellery, the 2012 Gagosian fish revival, and the 2023 Louis Vuitton Capucines handbags. The 2026 show, organised six months after Gehry’s death and designed by his own studio, is also the prologue to “O Século de Gehry” at Fundação de Serralves in Porto, opening June 2026 and running until January 2027. ...

Barber Osgerby designs span thirty years and ten manufacturers, and on 20 May 2026 Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby confirmed in interviews to mark the closure of their London studio that the catalogue is now closed. The partnership that began in 1996 with a bent-plywood low table for Isokon Plus ends in the same week that their Triennale Milano retrospective, Alphabet, comes down — a roster that runs through the Loop Table, the Tab Light for Flos, the Iris Table for Established & Sons, the Tip Ton chair for Vitra, and the London 2012 Olympic Torch. The Barber Osgerby designs that defined the last three decades of British industrial design are not being withdrawn; the practice is. The majority of the pieces shown at the Triennale remain in production, which is the answer to most of the questions readers will ask first. ...

Frank Gehry’s first posthumous exhibition opens on 14 May 2026 at Gagosian Beverly Hills, six months after his death at 96, and it is — pointedly — not a building show. The four sculptures and ten fish drawings hung at 456 North Camden Drive collapse fifty-four years of Frank Gehry object design, from 1972’s Easy Edges cardboard chairs to 2023’s copper Fish on Fire, into one room. Titled simply “Frank Gehry” and running until 27 June 2026, the show was organised by Gagosian with the Gehry family and designed by his own studio in the months before his death. ...

Vitra in 2026 placed two answers to the same brand question on opposite ends of the Vitra Campus 2026 brief: Junya Ishigami’s 280-square-metre transparent pavilion held up by 47 needle-thin steel columns of 16–31 millimetre diameter, and Konstantin Grcic’s Scout, a five-piece modular workplace family launched on 19–20 March 2026 from a tubular-steel kit assembled by hand. One is architecture-as-statement, sited in Weil am Rhein and engineered with Jun Sato Structural Engineers; the other is product-as-statement, a workspace system shipped in flat-pack pieces and tightened with mechanical tilts and no firmware. Read together, they describe how Vitra now wants to be understood — as a company that argues with both buildings and chairs, and that no longer treats one of those as the warm-up act for the other. ...

The Vitra Campus has, since the late 1980s, functioned as an open-air collection of contemporary architecture. Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum, Tadao Ando’s conference pavilion, Zaha Hadid’s fire station, Herzog & de Meuron’s VitraHaus, and SANAA’s factory building have made the site, in Weil-am-Rhein on the Swiss-German border, into one of the few places where significant work by major architects can be experienced in concentration. It is a campus that has, over four decades, accumulated Pritzker laureates the way most institutions accumulate furniture. ...