A multiauthored portrait of the Swiss open-air museum documenting centuries of historic homes and the enchanting details of vernacular architecture Founded in 1978, Ballenberg is a legendary Swiss open-air architectural museum that gathers more than 100 residential and agricultural buildings from the 14th to the 19th centuries, from almost all of the cantons of Switzerland, which have been transported to the museum from their original sites. Together these buildings show how architecture, furnishings and tools expressed the needs of everyday life in their design and execution. Traditional handicrafts such as basket-weaving, forging, braiding, spinning, weaving and carving are also kept alive in Ballenberg's on-site workshops. Edited by Rolf Fehlbaum, entrepreneur and long-time driving force behind Vitra, this beautiful publication is an invitation to discover and explore the world of things with fresh eyes. A Way of Life compiles photographs, observations and discoveries made at Ballenberg by the acclaimed designers Jasper Morrison and David Saik and the architect Tsuyoshi Tane, who all share a fascination with the simple, the practical and the functionally beautiful. In concise, elegant writing, Morrison, Saik and Tane comment on the design ingenuities in various features of the buildings. The book's superb photography celebrates the traces of wear and tear on door handles, benches, columns, brick tile floors and other architectural details that testify to a bygone ethos of enduring utility and economic common sense. A Way of Life serves as an encouragement to designers and consumers alike to resist trends and fads, and to critically evaluate the objects of everyday use in terms of utility and aesthetics.

Presented in this oversize publication are 146 aerospace-related toys from the collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra's chairman emeritus and the founder of Vitra Design Museum. Toys related to space exploration-rockets, robots and astronaut figurines-exploded in popularity in the 1930s with the success of space opera comic strips such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, which portrayed postwar fantasies of untold technological possibilities. From there, sci-fi only gained a wider audience as the Soviet/American space race began and people of all ages turned their gazes skywards to wonder about what marvels may exist beyond Earth's orbit. The toys in this volume are shown at their original size with the available packaging, organised into ten categories and arranged in chronological order by their manufacture dates. Some of the toys depict amusing conjectures for the future of aeronautical exploration such as space dogs, space elephants and even a space whale, while others are more realistic replicas of rockets in miniature. Infused with an undeniable nostalgia, this collection maintains the childlike wonder of the toys' initial audiences and invites present-day readers to both reflect on the era's technological advancements and look to the future for what discoveries may still be on the horizon.

This new publication is dedicated to the Baranger Motion Displays of the R. F. Collection housed at the Vitra Design Museum. Motion Displays were conceived as eye-catching and novel moving objects, which - primarily in the US - were used in jewellers' shop-window displays to attract customers. The Baranger Motion Displays were produced by Baranger Studios in Pasadena, CA between 1937 and 1957 and were lent to thousands of jewellers' shops over the years. Primarily during the 1990s, Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra Chairman Emeritus and founder of the Vitra Design Museum, worked to assemble a carefully selected a comprehensive collection of these objects in Weil am Rhein. With large-scale illustrations of the different Motion Displays and an atmospheric photo essay featuring black-and-white details of the objects, the book provides an unprecedented and in-depth view into this collection. In an accompanying essay, Bill Shaffer traces the success story of the displays and sheds light on the significance of the red cases in which they were delivered to the jewellers. Along with Robots 1:1 and Space Fantasies 1:1, Baranger Motion Displays is the third publication to focus on the R. F. Collection. Visitors can view the collection of Motion Displays at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein as part of the "Wunderkammer" (cabinet of curiosities), which also presents other parts of Rolf Fehlbaum's wide-ranging collection. In order for readers to be able to experience the wonders of these moving objects for themselves, each Motion Display has been given a QR Code in the book which links to an entertaining video clip of the display in action.

A charming tale for little and big design enthusiasts with wonderful illustrations by the renowned artist Maira Kalman is a fun and engaging way for children to learn about some of the masterpieces of design. When a set of eight classic old No. 14 Thonet chairs are threatened with certain doom, their ingenuity saves the day! Together they discover not only a way to escape but a world of the most wonderful and imaginative chairs from around the globe. The Thonets discover, too, that they have a talent for the stage! This charming tale by Rolf Fehlbaum, with delightful illustrations by Maria Kalman, is accompanied by a brief and informative glossary of twenty-two of the most innovative chairs created in 150 years.

The catalogue of a unique collection, ROBOTS 1:2 presents the space-themed toys in the R. F. Robot Collection held by the Vitra Design Museum. "Small kinetic sculptures of great originality": that is how Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra and founder of the Vitra Design Museum, describes the objects in his collection. In many years of careful research, he compiled a rare Wunderkammer of toy robots made mainly in Japan between 1937 and 1973. The term robot was coined in 1921 by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R. U. R., which foreshadowed some of the impact robots have had on human lives - from relieving us of hard, dangerous, or unpleasant tasks to taking over our jobs, from small everyday dependencies to shifts in social power dynamics. While the large-format predecessor to this book presented the exhibits in their original size, ROBOTS 1:2 shows the space toys on a 1:2 scale. The largest robot determines the size of the book: this conveys a sense of the uncanny ambivalence that clings to even the most playful representatives of their kind. The fantastic pictures on the original packaging often displayed alongside the figurines vividly illustrate an image of the future that by this time is itself part of our past. QR codes give access to short films showing a number of robots in action. The R. F. Robot Collection, housed in the "Wunderkammer" on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, can be visited as part of a guided tour.For more information please go to www.design-museum.de.