Furniture in dialogue
with buildings

These images conduct a continuing dialogue with an exemplary selectionof original furniture – encompassing around 40 exhibits – from the collection of the Vitra Design Museum. Some of these objects are represented in the photographs themselves, while others were designed by architects whose buildings are depicted in these photographs.
Photographed mostly without
complementary human figures, the furniture represents a choreography of interior designthe exhibition isolates them as ‘actors’ illustrating the architectural ideas of their designers, the buildings captured on film thus becoming theatrical stages of a modern design for living.This effect is exemplified by such items as an ensemble by Pierre Chareau (1927/28), a spectacular one-off piece by Carlo Mollino (1953), parts of the original furni-shings from the Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto (1930-31), the famous chaise longue by Corbusier (1929) and a chair from the Casa del Fascio in Como by Giuseppe Terragni. Other exhibits include furniture by Gio Ponti, Gerrit Rietveld, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and further significant original pieces of furniture from the collection of the Vitra Design Museum.

This exhibition offers the unique opportunity of viewing these superlative original photographs which can be shown to the public only very rarely to avoid them being damaged from overexposure to light.

Architectural photographs of the International Modernist Movement

The Imperial Furniture Collection is presenting an exhibition from the Archives de la Construction Moderne der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Lausanne (EPFL) and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
. It will showcase original prints of architectural photographs from the Sartoris Collection in dialogue with furniture and architectural models from the Vitra Design Museum. Between 1932 and 1957, the Italian-Swiss architect Alberto Sartoris (1901-1998) published six comprehensive anthologies on the International Modernist movement that have attained mythic status in reflecting the reception of architecture.

Encompassing the work of major architects such as Le Corbusier, Giuseppe Terragni, Hans Scharoun, Adolf Loos or Luis Barragán, the Sartoris Collection in Lausanne is of internationally pre-eminent documentary value. This exhibition assembles a representative selection of around 160 original photographs from the 1920s to the 1950s which illustrate the complex relationship between architecture and photography. They document the ‘image of modern architecture’ and the role of photography as a ‘perspective on the Modernist movement’.


The exhibition features both
recognised and forgotten buildings, supplemented by contemporary books and journals from the Sartoris Archive



and the Vitra Design Museum as well as by architectural models created especially for this exhibition.