textile and furniture designer, studio in Wuppertal / North Rhine-Westphalia

 

Around 1960 the native Berliner studied at the Werkkunstschule (School of Arts & Crafts) in Hanover, a city that was redeveloped after the war with a rationally planned grid of streets through which wafted the spirit of the second wave of Modernism .Afterwards she worked in the Vorwerk carpet studio as designer and pattern drawer. In the late 1960s she gathered experience as an adviser for Bayer AG, one of her key tasks being to plan various exhibitions. Among them was the series called Visiona, a name typical for the times, for which the Leverkusen chemical company engaged high-calibre international designers around 1970 during the Cologne Furniture Fair. There, the young Sigrid Wylach presented carpet designs that she was soon manufacturing in her own workshop. Numerous orders from banks, hotels, embassies and industrial enterprises followed. One order stood out from all the rest: the project to develop a new carpet collection for an existing furniturecollection, an unusual concept. Because it was for Knoll International – ever since the 1950s a byword for modern interior design in the rational “International Style” – the project carried great significance. Wylach found herself developing carpets to complement important furniture classics like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s cantilevered chair, Eero Saarinen’s famous Tulip chair and Warren Plattner’s impressive wire furniture. Their aesthetic dialogue with the giants of Modernism is still convincing even today. At the same time, the carpets (which are today sold by Markanto) can exist quite independently from Knoll International, which uses them worldwide in its various branches.