
‘A kit of parts’ is how Vitsoe managing director Mark Adams describes Dieter Rams’s 620 chair programme
Everything changes, so they say. But should it? What about decades-old, often iconic designs? Should they be preserved, as it were, their contemporary production remaining ‘true’ in every respect to the ‘original’? Or ought manufacturers be free to modify them – materially, technically, even formally – in the name of contemporary market appeal. And what about the thorny issue of authorship? Architonic investigates. (by Simon Keane-Cowell)