Secret pioneers: The Vitra Design Museum shows women in design – culture

The video “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, which the American artist Martha Rosler produced in 1975, lasts six minutes. Anyone who has ever seen the film will look at every kitchen from now on with different eyes. As in a dark and evil version of “Sesame Street”, Rosler put on an apron (A for “Apron”) and spelled out a kitchen alphabet up to T (for “Tenderizer”). The artist presents various kitchen utensils with a cool gesture. Whether fork, knife, ladle or a hamburger press – in your hands they suddenly look like combat instruments. Department: cutting and stabbing weapons. The underlying message is clear: there is no emancipation without struggle. No revolution without women.

Rosler’s work of art can be found roughly after the first half of the tour in the exhibition “Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today” in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. Between the overwhelming variety of design objects and historical documents, the black and white video acts like a contrast medium on the small screen, which helps to focus the theme of this exhibition curated by Viviane Stappmanns, Nina Steinmüller and Susanne Graner. With works by around eighty female designers spanning 120 years, the extensive show advocates a more inclusive form of design historiography and aims to provide a “determination of the position on a socially highly topical topic”.

There is no emancipation without struggle. No revolution without women

The historical arc of the show begins with the graphic for the Western European women’s rights movement, which fought for women’s suffrage around 1900, and ends with the famous “Women’s March on Washington” of 2017, when many of the demonstrators wore so-called pink “pussy hats”, based on the initiative of Jayna Zweiman and Krista Suh, an architect and screenwriter from Los Angeles. Current discourses on material issues and ecology, surveillance capitalism and collective design practice are illustrated in selected projects. In between it is about emancipation and education, modernity, minimalism and luxury or the design in socialism. For example about the Russian architect Galina Balaschowa, born in 1931, who practically single-handedly designed the interiors of the Soviet spaceships in the sixties and seventies and who dedicated a show to the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt in 2015.

In general, the desire to experiment and a latent futurism run like an underground thematic thread through the excellent exhibition. When, for example, the Berlin-Parisian design collective Bless, consisting of Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, presented a series of work sports equipment around 2016, no one could have guessed how radical living, work, family and sport in one’s own four walls would be inevitable in the wake of the pandemic would be lashed together. The hybrid objects of furniture and exercise bikes from the Bless “Worker’s Delight” series seem so visionary today because they anticipated our present and probably the near future.

A separate room is dedicated to the western, in some cases firmly canonized, pioneers of modernism from the twenties to the fifties: Here, for example, there is the elegant, minimalist dressing-room cabinet that the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976) once had for her own Villa Tempe a Pailla on the Côte d’Azur.

Open detailed view

The Finn Aino Marsio-Aalto (1894-1949), in turn, was one of the founding members of the furniture company Artek in 1935, which she also headed as chief designer and manager. The robust and inexpensive glass tableware series “Bölgeblick”, which was designed by Aalto in the early thirties, is made from partly colored pressed glass and is still in production today. The name of the American entrepreneur, designer and architect Florence Knoll Basset (1917-2019) was synonymous with tasteful furnishing culture at the beginning of the sixties. Even the Hamburg news magazine The mirror dedicated a cover story to the entrepreneur in April 1960.

Open detailed view

Furniture designer and interior designer Clara Porset (1895-1981) was born in Cuba and studied at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina in her mid-thirties. She settled in Mexico for political reasons. In her designs, Porset turned against a “sterile formalism” and reinterpreted a traditional Mexican type of chair, the “butaque”, with a sloping backrest and a low seat.

Open detailed view

Beauty and humor also exude the famous seat sculpture “La Chaise”, which the American designer couple Ray (1912-1988) and Charles Eames (1907-1978) developed in the late forties, alluding to a sculpture by the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. In 1948 the Eames submitted a prototype for a design award for low-cost design advertised by the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The museum later sent a press release in which only Charles Eames was mentioned as the author and extensively acknowledged.

What women achieve in design and architecture is often kept secret or swept under the carpet to this day

A look at the statistics of the Pritzker Prize, which was founded in 1979 and endowed with 100,000 dollars and which was awarded exclusively to men in its first 25 years, shows that discriminatory concealment and belittling about the achievements of women in design and architecture actually extends into the present day was awarded. With Zaha Hadid (1950-2016), a woman was honored for the first time in 2004. When Robert Venturi received the award in 1991, his office partner and wife Denise Scott Brown were denied recognition for the work they had done together. The committee owes her “a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” said Scott Brown in 2013. “Let’s appreciate the idea of ​​collaborative creativity.” The architect recently celebrated her 90th birthday.

Open detailed view

Designers like the Italians Cini Boeri (1924-2020) or Gae Aulenti (1927-2012) who were successful in the sixties, seventies and eighties, who both graduated from the influential engineering Politecnico di Milano in the early fifties, “don’t necessarily have objects and Spaces specially designed for women “, writes the British architect and author Jane Hall in the introduction to the picture anthology” Woman Made “, which she wrote and which has just been published by Phaidon-Verlag in London. According to Hall, “they were not interested in defending the singular (and often male) design genius”. Sometimes there is criticism of female designers that their male colleagues never have to listen to. Because Cini Boeri, who is represented in the exhibition with her spectacular “ghost” chair, which she developed together with Tomu Katayanagi, bent from just one continuous, 12 millimeter thick piece of glass, always has an additional standard in the houses she designed Zimmer planned as a “room for individual reflection”, she was attacked, for example, as a “marriage destroyer”. Boeri always reacted calmly to such accusations and defended the independence she had built into the architecture: “It was important for me to be able to choose and not be forced to be together.”

A critical review of one’s own collection practice takes place in the open depot of the Vitra Design Museum. There, in the permanent presentation, the proportion of objects that were designed by women or women were involved in the design was increased. This happens within the framework of a thematic focus of the year, which is intended to advance the discussion of the role of women in furniture design. Otherwise, the following applies: Even very well-designed pots and trowels are not only suitable for cooking or for design exhibitions. They are also great to take with you to the next demonstration as a noisemaker.

“Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today”, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein. Until March 6, 2022, information at design-museum.de. Jane Hall’s anthology “Woman Made. Great Woman Designers” has been published by Phaidon Verlag in London (approx. 50 euros).