Visiona 2, 1970

Visiona 2 was an exhibition by the textile division of the chemical company Bayer, which was held as part of the Cologne furniture fair by the Danish Designer Verner Panton It was designed on a Rhine steamer. Bayer commissioned the architect for the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1970 and Designer Verner Panton, using fibers developed by Bayer, furnished a passenger ship which was moored at the dock near the Cologne Trade Fair during the Cologne Furniture Fair. To this day, this exhibition is known as Visiona 2, a holistic living experience reveling in color and form in the expressive interior design style of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the furniture and lighting used at that time are still in use today., Carpets in the TAGWERC Design STORE available.

Bottomless and colorful

„"Barbarella" in the cinema and the moon landing on the television news. There was a time when the future seemed so close you could practically snuggle into it. "Living space" was the magic word that, in the Swinging Sixties and Seventies of the 20th century, promised a sensual lifestyle free from all conventions. Polyurethane, polyester, polypropylene were the all-rounders from the chemical laboratory that gave technological progress, economic growth, and social change a completely new design perspective: boundless and colorful.

Space Age style

One would need pages to even begin to summarize, in point form, everything that happened—not to say, sped through—in the decade of the "children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola," between the May events in Paris and the moon landing, between Carnaby Street and Woodstock. With boundless creative energy, everyday culture was elevated to the status of an alternative and avant-garde leading medium. Thanks to unbridled technological euphoria, a small dose of design utopia even found its way into everyone's home: in the form of Sputnik-inspired, spherical radios, alarm clocks, and lamps; or as armchairs and sofas whose seat height approached that of a student dormitory, subverting bourgeois seating habits with their casual lounging.

Advertising platform Visiona

The design era reached its spectacular peak with the Visiona exhibitions, which caused a sensation for Bayer AG in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Originally, the chemical giant had only chartered the Rhine riverboat "Loreley" to promote its bi-elastic synthetic fiber Dralon with a home textiles exhibition right next to the Cologne furniture fair. But after the Dane Verner Panton (1926–1998) was commissioned to design the exhibition for 1968, the perspective changed dramatically: with the introduction of futuristic interior design displays that truly lived up to their name, 'Visiona'.

Fantastic living space

Above all, the Visiona 2, designed by Panton in 1970, became an unconventional interior design icon of that era. The well-known photograph of a living space rendered in warm and cool tones resembles a cave, full of soft, organically shaped protrusions and projections of floor, wall, and ceiling. Boundaries blur, and the interior resembles a hallucinogenic excess, a cave where sitting becomes an experiment. Phantasy Landscape, a fantastical living space that completely dissolves floor, ceiling, and walls—classic elements of space.

Revisiting the Future

In an interview with form editor-in-chief Gerrit Terstiege, Marianne Panton, the designer's widow, dismissed any suggestion of drug use as nonsense. Her husband simply wanted to engage all the senses. Kitchens and bathrooms didn't seem to be of particular importance to Panton, as these spaces were not considered in Visiona 2, nor in any of his later designs. As is so often the case in design history, no original relics from the Visiona 2 exhibition have survived to the present day – at least not in the possession of the widow, who manages his estate. Thus, for the exhibition 'Visiona 2 – Revisiting the Future', which ran from February 7 to June 1, 2014, at the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in Weil am Rhein, reconstructed elements, including Phantasy Landscape.

Four-dimensional lounge explosion

The Pop Art installation is certainly one of the most unusual relics of contemporary design from the 1960s and 70s. Once immersed in the boldly mixed explosion of warm and cool tones, saying goodbye can be quite difficult for some. Therefore, the design specialist TAGWERC offers all those captivated by Visona 2 and Phantasy Landscape a scaled-down version for their own homes: the Living Tower. The living room-friendly version of the Visiona 2 classic offers four seating positions and can be expanded as desired. So: shoes off, eyes and ears open, and step right into Verner Panton's four-dimensional lounge explosion, the Visiona 2.