(smow) blog compact design tourism special: Weil am Rhein – City of Chairs

Any self-respecting modern conurbation needs a moniker. An evocative tag line on which to hang its city marketing strategy and attract tourists.

Paris is of course the City of Love, Rome the Eternal City, Prague the City of a Hundred Spires while Edinburgh, whether advisable or not, regails as simply Auld Reekie.

In 1998 the southern German town of Weil am Rhein re-christened itself “City of Chairs”

If we’re honest the reason why escapes us, for aside from Vitra there is, as far as we are aware, no further chair manufacturer in the town.

Nor can Weil am Rhein by any stretch of the imagination be considered the cradle of contemporary chair design.

But then when did facts play a part in such naming decisions. The Polish city of Wrocław calls itself the City of Hundred Bridges when it has, at most, forty; Tel Aviv likes to be known as The City That Never Stops, a patent lie as anyone who has visited over Yom Kippur can testify; while in these pages we have often highlighted the, let’s say curiosities, associated Chemnitz’s claim to be the City of Modernism.

And so, why not Weil am Rhein – City of Chairs. With the Vitra Design Museum Weil am Rhein can at least rightly claim to host one of the most complete documentations of contemporary chair design to be found anywhere.

By way of visualising, and cementing, Weil am Rhein’s claim in 1999 the town’s marketing authority started positioning over-sized models of important and interesting examples of chair designs around the town. Each of the so-called Maxiaturen are produced in a scale ranging from 1.5:1 up to 8:1 and have all been realised in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum – thus ensuring that just as with the Vitra Design Museum miniatures collection the Maxiaturen remain true to the originals.

Each Maxiaturen is sponsored by a local business or institution and from an initial collection of nine chairs has now grown to 21, and extended geographically beyond the towns boundaries to neighbouring communities.

And so one can enjoy, for example, Jasper Morrison‘s Wingnut Chair on Lindenplatz in Altweil, the Zig Zag chair by Gerrit T. Rietveld on Weil am Rhein Hauptstrasse or 3:1 copy of Michael Thonet’s Chair Nr. 14 in the nearby village of Ötlingen. Further Maxiaturen present works by designers as varied as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mart Stam, Michele de Lucchi, Ron Arad or Shiro Kuramata, in addition to two copies of Robert Mallet-Stevens’ 1920s stacking tubular steel chair. One big. And one even bigger.

Although each chair is accompanied by a plaque saying what it is, by whom it is and who paid for it, there is, sadly, no further information available to help the viewer place the work in a historical or creative context. However that aside, the presence of the chairs does make a stroll though and round Weil am Rhein a little more entertaining than would otherwise be the case. But much more allows one a moment of calm to consider both the development of chair design over the decades and also the state of contemporary chair design and the role of the contemporary chair designer. As such should you visit the Vitra Campus do try to find a bit of time to discover the Maxiaturen. And should you decide to photograph any of them – try not to look too much as if you might be from the police, customs and excise, immigration, social work or any similar official body.

Full details on the location of all chairs can be found at: www.w-wt.de

We’ve still not found all 21, but here a few impressions of those we have…..