Talk at 1014: Vitra Design Museum presents “Plastic. Remaking our world.”

1014 invited Jochen Eisenbrand, Chief Curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, to present the museum’s current exhibition Plastic: Remaking Our World during the NYCxDESIGN Festival in New York City. After an introduction of the exhibition topics, the curator will discuss the rise and fall of a material that has been elemental to the design world and become a symbol of modernity as well as its shortcomings. Followed by a reception.

Plastics have shaped our daily lives like no other material: from packaging to footwear, from household goods to furniture, from automobiles to architecture. A symbol of carefree consumerism and revolutionary innovation, plastics have spurred the imagination of designers and architects for decades. Today, the dramatic consequences of the plastic boom have become obvious and plastics have lost their utopian appeal.

The exhibition Plastic: Remaking Our World at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein examines the history and future of this controversial material: from its meteoric rise in the twentieth century to its environmental impact and to cutting-edge solutions for a more sustainable use of plastic. Topics include rarities from the dawn of the plastic age and objects of the pop era as well as numerous contemporary designs and projects ranging from efforts to clean up rivers and oceans to smart concepts for waste reduction and recycling through to bioplastics made from algae and mycelium.

The exhibition is created by the Vitra Design Museum, V&A Dundee, and maat, Lisbon. The program in New Yok City is a collaboration by 1014, the Vitra Design Museum, and NYCxDESIGN.

Biography: Jochen Eisenbrand
Jochen Eisenbrand is Chief Curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. Having completed a master’s degree in Cultural Studies in 1998, he received his doctorate in Design History in 2013 with a thesis on George Nelson’s work for the United States Information Agency during the Cold War. At the Vitra Design Museum, Jochen has been in charge of a number of exhibition projects, such as Airworld – Design and Architecture for Air Travel (2004), Hidden Heroes – The Genius of Everyday Things (2010), Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today (2018) and most recently, Home Stories: 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors (2020). He also curated retrospectives on George Nelson (2008), Louis Kahn (with Stanislaus von Moos, 2012), Alvar Aalto (2014), and Alexander Girard (2016). Jochen has co-edited several exhibition catalogues and the Atlas of Furniture Design (2019).

More information about the Vitra Design Museum: https://www.design-museum.de/en/information.html