Rolf Fehlbaum

The fire had struck on the 12th of July in 1981, sparked by lightning during a summer storm, and it had swept through a significant portion of the Vitra factory complex in Weil am Rhein with a speed that left almost nothing salvageable.

For the company's chairman, Rolf Fehlbaum, the disaster became almost immediately an opportunity disguised in ash.

Vitra had spent years cultivating a relationship with design that went beyond the furniture on its production lines.

Fehlbaum himself thought of architecture as a discipline that could think alongside the objects a company made, not merely enclose the machines that produce them.