Vitra

Vitra GmbH, Germany

Project Vitra began in 1957 when the company started producing the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson in Basel, Switzerland, and neighboring Weil am Rhein, Germany. In the years since then, the company, now known as Vitra, has grown significantly. Vitra continues to build and further develop classic furniture designs that influence the entire industry. It employs renowned designers to create entirely new furniture concepts, and its interior design department produces furniture for complete working and living environments. Today, Vitra has a global presence and is known for its products as well as its cultural initiatives, which manifest themselves in the Vitra Design Museum, the VitraHaus, as well as in the company’s own unique architecture.

The teams at Vitra depend on software to help them visualize functional office spaces and even entire ergonomically adapted work environments while still in the planning phase, keeping costs and expenses under control at all times. They also use graphic libraries of their entire furniture collection extensively. 

After years of using various CAD applications and watching its partners do the same, Vitra realized the necessity of finding a uniform platform that could provide graphically attractive drawings and interior design plans. “Some of our work could be realized by means of the previously employed software, but much of it could not,” remembers Toni Piskac, Head of Interior Design Services at Vitra. The often very technical programs required long training periods, had problems interfacing with databases and libraries, and produced unsatisfactory output.

Vitra’s interior design customers expect to receive a plan that allows them to concretely visualize how the interior design—including furniture, upgrades, lighting, and acoustics—would look in a room or building. This step occurs even before designers answer the questions of whether the envisaged design components would all fit together and if people would feel comfortable in such an environment. Vectorworks software and CINEMA 4D proved to be suitable for realizing all these requirements.

Originally appeared in Modus News 1