Last week I was lucky enough to make the pilgrimage to the campus of Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra, set in the bucolic surroundings of Weil Am Rhein, a short drive from Basel in Switzerland. If you are as addicted to design as me, this is an absolute must-visit; an architectural theme park with work by some of the most well-known architects in the world, such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando. It requires a day, if not two, to see the current exhibition, join an architectural tour, take a ride down Carsten Holler’s new slide, stop for a coffee, and of course, visit the shop.
It all started in 1981 after a major fire destroyed most of the factory buildings built in the 1950s. Since then the site has grown organically, with a fire station by Zaha Hadid (her first built project), a bus stop by Jasper Morrison, factory buildings by SANAA, Alvaro Siza and Nicholas Grimshaw and a petrol station by Jean Prouve, to name a few.
First stop, VitraHaus, a jumble of house shaped blocks designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Here, you can view their beautifully arranged furniture – a colourful feast for the eyes – which include both the great Vitra classics and the latest contemporary designs. You can watch an Eames Lounge Chair being produced, have lunch outside in the cafe or simply look out towards the rest of the campus from one of the four floors. On the top floor, London-based studioilse (run by Ilse Crawford) has transformed the space into the home of a fictitious Finnish-German couple called Harri and Astrid (keep an eye out for another blog post later in the week). He is a musician, she is a set designer and together their home is filled with objects that tell the story of their lives – who they are, what they do and how they live. And boy is it lovely, I left wanting to go home and immediately rearrange everything!
The Eames bird is a popular motif across the campus. Here they look out towards a little playpen for Eames’s Elephants!
I’ll have one in every colour please!
Below is the conference centre by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The calm and restrained concrete structure has a winding footpath inspired by meditation paths in the gardens of Japanese monasteries.
Then onto the Vitra Design Museum by Frank Gehry, a collage of ramps, towers and cubes. They have two exhibitions a year, many of which travel onto other galleries in Europe, most recently the Louis Kahn exhibition to London’s Design Museum. At the moment they have a fantastic exhibition on one of my favourite 20th century architects: Alvar Aalto. Titled Second Nature, it showcases his first wooden cantilevered chair for the Paimio Sanatorium and his laminated plywood chairs, the famous wavy Savoy vase and his buildings such as the library in Viipuri or the Villa Mairea, all alongside some great, atmospheric photographs by Armin Linke.
Renzo Pianos’s Diogene, a living unit named after the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope who is said to have lived in a barrel because he considered worldly luxuries to be superfluous.
The petrol station, below, designed in 1953 by Jean Prouvé and his brother Henry is one of the first serially manufactured petrol stations. Made of modular pieces, it was built in about 1953 for Mobiloil Socony-Vacuum but one was installed here in 2003. There are three in total on the Vitra Campus.
SANAA’s factory building is like a bulbous white cloud in the Swiss landscape. It has been a part of the Vitra Campus since 2010, except for the facade, which was completed in 2012.
And, finally Cartsen Holler’s slide, the latest addition. A viewing tower, slide and art installation in one, it consists of three diagonal columns that meet at the top, with a revolving clock mounted at their point of intersection measuring six metres in diameter. The viewing platform is at a height of 17 metres, with a corkscrew tube slide for the way down.
All Images my own
To read more about the campus architecture and see a map, click here. Find out how to get there here.
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