Corporate motto: "See things in perspective. Be careful. Ask, "are phrases by company has guided and today belongs to a leading German manufacturer.
27. 1. 2015
Unlike virtually any other manufacturer in the office furniture industry, Wilkhahn stands worldwide for design made in Germany. It offers high-quality office and dynamic conference furniture which are benchmarks for the entire industry. Some 60 years ago, the company made better utility value, long-lasting design and durability its goals. Milestones like classic office chair FS-Line (1980), Confair folding conference table (1994), office chair Modus (1994) or skid-base chair Aline (2004) have shaped the way offices have evolved. The latest examples of pioneering innovations are the multi-purpose chair Chassis, the conference range Graph, or three-dimensional ON and IN which leading experts currently consider the world’s best office chairs.
Wilkhahn also sets new standards in terms of its socio-ecological approach. As winner of the German Environmental Prize, the company has worked with architects Frei Otto and Thomas Herzog and has actively been practising environmental responsibility for over 20 years. In addition to a number of international accolades, office chair ON has also received the Federal Ecodesign Award.
An alarming number of people live and work in buildings to which they do not relate at all. How can harmonious, user-friendly products be made in an alienated, inhuman environment? A factory building can be more that merely a machine covered in corrugated iron. We were able to retain two excellent architects for our corporate architecture in the form of -Frei Otto and Thomas Herzog.
Factory of Wilkhahn
Friedrich Hahne and Christian Wilkening founded a chair-making factory in Eimbeckhausen near Hanover. The name of the two founders was later used to create the company name of Wilk-hahn. High quality, solid beech chairs were made from wood from nearby forests. The manufacturing plant did not differ greatly from the other 100 or so small and medium-sized chair manufactures in the area.
Business ran well, but the two were not satisfied with just that. They looked for new design paths and took up contact with Walter Heyn, the director of Deutche Werkstätten, and with designers such as Georg Leowald and Herbert Hirche whose work was influence by the Bauhaus movement and the Werkund. At that time no one sensed that their fascination with experimantation would later pay off. The secret of the advance from craft business to a company with international operations.
In the 1950s the company succeeded in the retaining excellent designers such as Herbert Hirche, Georg Leowld, Roland Rainer, Jupp Ernst and Helmut Lohmeier. Wilkhahn became a pieneer of German industrial design, experimented with new materials and evolved its own distinct design language. This resulted in purist furniture, the form of which was developed in strict adherence to function. Some of them were to go down in design history.
Truly revolutionary products were developed in close collaboration with the Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung (Ulm Academy of Design. The avant- gardists of industrial design plumbed the depths of the political dimensions of design. Consumerism and the "ad libitum" attitude to design was set against the social responsibility of designers and the "moral of things". Wilkhahn adopted one of the maxims from the founding manifesto of the Ulm designers: "Our aim is to develop sustainable products, to increase their utility value and to reduce waste".
Seventies dominated chair 232 by Wilhelm Ritz which has become a design icon and is today still desired. In 1980s came on the market Modus chair with ease of use that replaced the complex mechanism. To date, they sold 2,000,000 chairs of that line. With an emphasis on ecology Wilkhahn made Picto chair, which won environmental awards (Dutch Milieukeur Foundation). With the approaching millenium Wilkhahn reassess the necessary of administrative and came up with and Confair and Conrack that flexibly responds to the needs of the user. In the 2007 came after long research and development Trimension and ON, revolutionary chair.
Source: www.wilkhahn.com
