Business Class

Hella Jongerius spent a career warning designers not to become merchants. Vitra's own museum just named the room about her corporate work exactly that.

Hella Jongerius graduated Design Academy Eindhoven in 1993 and went straight to work for the newly founded Droog Design, a group built on wrecking industrial polish on purpose. Her own contribution, the 1996 Pushed Washtub, took a machine-molded half-sphere and pushed it inward by hand, holding the dent in place with layered thicknesses of PU rubber — a factory shape damaged on purpose, on the theory that plastic had a real identity underneath its usual smoothness. It's in SFMoMA's permanent collection now, alongside a copy in Droog's own archive in Amsterdam.

By 2012 she was designing KLM's Boeing 747 business class cabin. By February 2015, introducing herself at Design Indaba in Cape Town as "designer of KLM's new business class cabin" (The Drum's own framing that week), she told the room there were two kinds of people in her industry: "In design, there are merchants and pastors. I'm a design pastor. Today I step out of the closet to fight for new industrial values." Her diagnosis: "there is too much shit design; we live in a culture where we shop without any conscience for the world."

Eleven years later, the Vitra Design Museum's "Whispering Things" — the first full retrospective of her career, closing tomorrow, September 6, in Weil am Rhein — opens with a gallery called Dirty Hands, covering the Droog years. It ends in the room covering everything since: three decades of furniture and textiles for Vitra, IKEA, Maharam, Camper. The museum named that room Business Class.