Air design exhibition is so 20th century

One man, at least, had good things to say about flying: artist Andy Warhol. “Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service,” he wrote in his 1977 book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” “my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best employees and the best optimism.”

Given the current state of air travel, I couldn’t say I shared his enthusiasm until I saw “Airworld -- Design and Architecture for Air Travel,” a masterful new exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.

Museum shows about flying tend to focus on science and technology, but the Vitra show looks at the aesthetics of air travel, rekindling the fascination many of us felt when our parents took us to the airport just to watch the planes. Better yet, seeing the exhibition gave me the chance to visit one of Europe’s finely tuned small museums.

Weil am Rhein is just northeast of Basel, Switzerland, in a region where France, Germany and Switzerland converge and many people are as fluent in English as in French and German. Basel has an old center, with winding lanes, clattering trams, Rhine River tour boats, 15th century row houses and rosti, a ubiquitous Swiss dish made of potatoes. I put traditional Switzerland aside; I’d come for 20th century design at the Vitra.

Vitra is a Swiss furniture company founded in 1934 by Willi Fehlbaum, who obtained licenses to manufacture pieces by such renowned modern designers as Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. Fehlbaum’s son, Rolf, took over the company in 1977 and began to collect striking examples of mostly 20th century chairs. One hundred of these are on display at the Vitra, which is often referred to as the “chair museum.”

Vitra’s specialty, though, is mounting traveling exhibitions on modern design, such as Airworld, which will move in March to the Design Museum in Ghent, Belgium.

The museum’s setting is as distinctive as its curatorial approach, I discovered when I arrived here from Basel, a 20-minute cab ride across the German border into the southern fringe of the Black Forest.

It isn’t just that the museum at the entrance to the Vitra complex was Frank Gehry’s first building in Europe. (The architect’s signature geometric shapes erupt out of the foundation, only a little more restrained than L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.) Every building at Vitra was designed by an eminent contemporary architect.

Tours of the campus, given twice a day, pass Gehry’s stark white single-story gatehouse; a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome; a marvelous little metal-and-glass gas station designed by French engineer Jean Prouve and salvaged from a roadside; two factory buildings, connected by a seemingly weightless bridge, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw and Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza.

The highlight of the tour was Zaha Hadid’s sleek 1993 firehouse, shaped a little like a cutting implement, now showcasing the Vitra chairs. They hang in chronological order, against a massive wall in what was a garage for firetrucks, and include Charles and Ray Eames’ welded wire “DKR” chair from 1951, Eero Saarinen’s 1947 orange-cushioned “Womb Chair” and others that left me amazed by how much more there is to see in a chair than I’d ever realized.

Then I toured the Airworld exhibit with curator Jochen Eisenbrand, who had taken time from his family leave to meet me with his 1 1/2 -year-old son, Neils, who was fast asleep. The exhibition isn’t large, but it fits nicely into the Gehry building, each chosen object representing the best of its kind, beginning with a room on the pioneering age of the airline industry. There I saw models of a TWA Tri-Motor aircraft made by the Ford automobile company and the German Junkers Ju 52, both used in the 1930s to take brave passengers aloft in cabins created by such renowned modern industrial designers as Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague and Norman Bel Geddes.

Another display documents Bel Geddes’ designs for the futuristic “Airliner No. 4,” huge enough to contain tennis courts and a concert hall.

“At the time,” Eisenbrand told me, “the world of aviation was very exciting to designers.”

Next come photos and models of airports such as the TWA terminal at New York’s JFK by Saarinen, designed to meet the needs and match the style of the Jet Age, which arrived around 1958 with the Boeing 707. With it came traditional commercial airline seating, different classes of service, passenger service units with lights and call buttons, the standardized, packaged airline meal and flight attendants in designer clothes.

The exhibit features every in-flight table setting used by Lufthansa since 1955 -- china and plastic -- and short, tight, Pop Art-inspired stewardess uniforms designed by Emilio Pucci for Braniff International.

The show ends with hints about the future of airline design: airplanes with wings and fuselages in one seamless unit, which look uncannily like Bel Geddes’ “Airliner No. 4.” When we stopped under a model, Neils awoke and looked up with an expression of wonder. And for a moment, I, too, saw the world of air travel through his big, round, amazed eyes.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes .com/susanspano.