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Destinations · Europe · germany · Weil am Rhein · Architecture ·

Only a couple of kilometres from Basel, where the borders of Germany Switzerland and France meet - you'll find Weil am Rhein. A small industrial city, it has achieved the status of a veritable mecca for those travellers devoted to design. Weil am Rhein is the home of the well-known furniture manufacturer Vitra and its Vitra Campus, already legendary in the global media as a unique concentration of structures by most every star in the world's architectural firmament. In this nearly unbelievable "designland", you'll find a compact area containing works by Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Jean Prouve, SANAA, Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron... the list goes on, and six of the architects represented here have already been awarded the Pritzker Prize.

Vitra was founded in 1950 by Willy Fehlbaum, then the owner of a small furniture store. The company's fortunes underwent a radical shift when Fehlbaum acquired production licenses for furniture designed by the 20th-century luminaries Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson. Developing by leaps and bounds, Vitra constructed ample workshops and warehouses in Weil am Rhein. In 1981, however, the complex was almost entirely destroyed in a fire. By that time the company was led by Rolf Fehlbaum, who came up with the idea for the Vitra Campus. Instead of replacing the ruins with temporary, utilitarian structures, Vitra decided to create a fresh aesthetic environment that would not only be a pleasant place to work but also serve as a sort of trademark for the company and become a destination in itself because of its design. The harbinger of what is now a complex consisting of 14 structures was the 1981 furniture factory by the British architect Nicholas Grimshaw. A second building was built in 1986. In the early 1980s, Fehlbaum decided to document Vitra's history by acquiring furniture created by those designers who had made a significant impact on the development of the company, including Alvar Aalto, Charles & Ray Eames, Jean Prouve and other stellar designers. With the growth of this collection, a need obviously arose for additional space in which to exhibit the furniture. Thus, in 1989, the Vitra Design Museum opened its doors. The project's author was the well-known American architect of Canadian descent, Frank Gehry. It was the first building he designed in Europe.

 

The Vitra Design Museum collection has become one of the premier architectural and furnishings collections focused on modern industrial design in the world. It includes representative work from every period and style, from the 19th century to our own era.

There are separate expositions of early factory-produced bentwood furniture, Viennese architectural design from the late 19th and early 20th century, the Dutch designer Gerrit Reitveld's experimental designs, tubular steel furniture from the 1920s and 1930s, and the most significant developments in modern Scandinavian design, Italian design, etc. There are also thematic special exhibitions thrice annually. In 1989, the same year the Vitra Design Museum was opened, a factory building designed by Frank Gehry, and in 2003 a museum gallery was added - the structures form an inviting, expressive triangle.

Gehry is not the only architect from outside Europe to lay his first cornerstone on the continent here - so did the renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando, whose 1993 Conference Pavilion was opened in the Vitra complex in 1993. It's quite close to the Vitra Design Museum, but instead of the Gehry buildings' rather provocative extravagance, Ando's design seemingly evokes a silent prayer. In its grounded minimalism, the structure of grey concrete and steel calls forth the austere beauty of a nun's habit. Its location at this site seems wholly organic, as though it had simply sprouted from the ground.

There is yet another remarkable building in the Vitra Campus - the fire station, dating to 1993. It was the first project by the Iraqi-born Londoner Zaha Hadid, the famous conceptualist and a winner of the Pritzker Prize. 1993 also saw the unveiling of a factory building designed by Alvaro Siza. In 2000, the futuristic Dome by the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller was added to the complex - it was first erected in 1978 in Detroit and currently serves as space for varied exhibitions, expositions and presentations. In 2006, Jasper Morrison's bus depot was added, and in 2010 the distribution centre designed by SANAA became part of the Campus.

 

The most striking edifice in Weil am Rhein, however, is doubtless the most recent addition to the Campus - Vitra House, designed by the well-known Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, whose head office is in nearby Basel. Opening its doors in February 2010, the building is a playful sculpture and an architectural adventure, as well as an unbelievable concentration of positive emotions. To look upon it without smiling is simply impossible. It's also quite noticeable that in contrast to the somehow architecturally polite explosion of a tin can that is the nearby museum by Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron's Vitra House is muted and more subtle even in its playfulness.

In a sense, Vitra House is a small, vertical city formed by a pile of twelve separate buildings. The components appear to be chaotically leaning against each other in an effort to grow upward. They almost remind of birdhouses because each of the component buildings ends in a large window that seems to home in on the surroundings like a radar-propelled glass eye. The history of Vitra House extends to 2004, when the company brought forth the Vitra Home Collection, blending classic and contemporary designs. The building was created as a showroom for this collection, but the structure is such a chameleon of self-sufficiency that it can serve as most anything, depending upon the desires of those who visit, offering a museum-like excursion through the history of design, a digest of the latest trends, a place of inspiration, or simply a practical stopping-place for those who want to come up with an interior design. Each of the "birdhouses" is designed to provide the scale of a home and visually reflects a typical house with a classic roofline.

 

Moving about within Vitra House begins not on the first floor but on the fourth - walking through the structure is a descent through countless adventures in design. In a perfect imitation of being in a small city, the building also offers extraordinary views - each of the strategically placed windows opens onto a completely different world. Emerging from the elevator, for example, a "living room" offers a mind-boggling panorama of Tullinger Hill and vast vineyards, whilst the "house" opposite, in the same storey, gives you a glimpse of Basel's gigantic pharmaceutical industry. Around the corner there's a stunning, nearly bird's-eye view of the entire Vitra Campus. Visitors strolling from one part of the building to another apparently aren't guided along any set route, but the spaces themselves dictate their movements. The impression is that of visiting at least five different homes in a matter of minutes. A staircase wends its way through the structure like a fat slug or a worm in an apple, at times seemingly in visual harmony with the surrounding "houses", at other times giving you the feeling that you've arrived in a wholly autonomous world.

 

There's another tangible difference from the museum - in Vitra House you can touch everything, trying out the furniture or even lolling about and inhabiting the various homes. The watchful eyes of a guard won't disturb you, and this compound "city" is so large that your fellow visitors seem to dissolve into its vastness, never intruding on each others' space when wandering the multiple spaces. Each "home" also has a special display you can play with if you like, changing the materials and hues of the objects or furniture in the room. In an improvised hall of mirrors, for example, you can not only select the chair, chaise longue or sofa you felt most comfortable in, but also choose the colours and lighting that suit you best. Vitra House is no less impressive after sunset, when the illuminated windows give the interiors an inward glow, allowing you to peek into this world of design from a completely different perspective. These inner worlds kindle a visceral curiosity when you pass the lighted glass eyes, the furniture and objects within displayed as if they could be in the palm of your hand. Not far from Vitra House, in a green meadow, there's a summer guest - an American Airstream trailer, yet another design classic. The twenty-foot 1968 Globetrotter has sandwiches and ice cream on offer - you can ask for a picnic blanket and enjoy these in the grass. Such simplicity is definitely desirable after a visit to Vitra House, a brief return to nature preventing you from being permanently sucked in to a surfeit of contemporary design. We should add that you should definitely sign up for an architectural tour of Vitra Campus if you've come here; some of the most remarkable structures are part of the manufacturing area and can't be seen without a guide.

 

In 1998, the company and the town of Weil am Rhein started another unusual design project, already adding another dimension to this unique tourist attraction - the city has become a "city of chairs" quite literally. The streets, squares, parks - and even some walls and roofs, not to mention intersections - have become the premises of a strange kind of open-air museum, flaunting twenty-one iconic chairs so far. The scale of these chairs by comparison to their famous real-life ancestors is enormous, varying from 1.5:1 to 8:1. Thanks to advances in technology and ever new materials, chair design has not come to an end, of course, and so the open-air museum continues to add chairs. There's the Danish designer Jorgen Hovelskov's 1963 Harp Chair, perched on the otherwise quite ordinary facade of a residential building at Hauptstrasse 291 and looking like a modernist sculpture. Not far from the corner where you turn to head for the Vitra Campus and another highlight in this mecca of design, Zaha Hadid's 1999 pavilion for the national garden show, now an environmental centre, there's a huge rendering of Alessandro Medini's Lassu chair, created in 1974. This is certainly not a chair, actually - it's a work of art, and its creator found the words for it at the time of its creation: "a monument for spiritual use".

Charles - Eames Str. 1
www.vitra.com
www.design-museum.de

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