When was the vitra design museum built

The Vitra Design Museum — A vibrant building sculpture Founded as an independent foundation, the Vitra Design Museum is dedicated to researching and disseminating design and architecture.

With its white plastered walls, the Museum is like a sculpture. The idea behind it was to showcase the works of art but keep the exhibition architecture in the background, avoiding an interaction between the two. Its main source of light is a cross-shaped skylight, easily identifiable from the outside as a central element of the museum.

Visitors can find inspiration for their own private interior design here. Stacked up to five storeys, the gables hover in the air at a height of up to 15 metres and look almost like a confused heap of houses.

A lift takes visitors to the fourth floor of the 21 metre-high building, where their circuit through the exhibitions begins. Its special Perspex cladding gives it its fluid form.

The panels are heated to corrugate them. Its oval form accommodates over employees and goods and provides incoming trucks with enough room to drive in and turn around in.

Located in the German village of Weil am Rhein, across the border from the city of Basel, Switzerland, the building boasts a modest white plaster facade, zinc roof and a volumetric structure composed of various geometric shapes. It is a fine example of the immaculate fusion of form and function.

Architecture lovers find, in Vitra, the ideal place to review and study the history of design. Inside, there are four large exhibition halls of approximately square feet in area, whose main source of illumination is a skylight in the form of a cross, visible from the outside.

Rolf Fehlbaum , the founder of the Swiss firm Vitra, manufacturers of high-end furniture, created the museum, in Simultaneously, the company also organized traveling exhibitions and created its own product line to help finance a program of cultural activities.

Since then, Vitra has established an independent publishing firm, a second exhibition space—the Vitra Design Museum Gallery—and online collections to be viewed on their website.

The Vitra, considered one of the most important design museums in the world , is devoted to architecture, interior design and the art of creative furnishings. Two major exhibitions are presented each year in the main building.

Since the s, the Vitra company has erected buildings in collaboration with world-renowned architects. In reference to the Vitra Campus, the architectural critic Philip Johnson wrote: »Since the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in , there has not been a gathering in a single place of a group of buildings designed by the most distinguished architects in the Western world.

They reflect a corporate philosophy that does not strive for a uniform image, but presents a variety of positions within the context of an open project. The displayed furnishings and objects can be tested, ordered and purchased on site.

Please note that visitors can experience many of the buildings exclusively as part of the Architecture Tour. The Vitra Campus comprises a public and a private area. The private area, where the production facilities are located, can only be accessed as part of an architectural tour. Out of these almost classical-seeming elements, he created a dynamic sculpture in which the individual structures appear to break up into fragments and begin to move. In the interior, the Vitra Design Museum has four large exhibition galleries with uniform white walls and approximately square metres of exhibition space.

Also prominent on the exterior are the diagonal structures housing the stairways. The expressive exterior forms of the building are thus very much determined by their function and reflect the requirements of a complex museum building.

With the Vitra Design Museum, Gehry succeeded in combining two fundamentally different types of museum architecture. From the outside, however, it is conceived as a pictographic architectural sculpture that helped the Vitra Design Museum gain international renown. Along with the Vitra Design Museum, Frank Gehry created a gatehouse in with adjoining office space located at the entrance to the Vitra Campus.

In , this complex was expanded to the rear with an addition near the entrance of the Vitra Design Museum. It houses the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in which current, often experimental exhibitions are shown that complement the main exhibitions in the museum. Parallel to his work on the Vitra Design Museum, Frank Gehry produced a large factory hall in , which is located directly behind the museum on the Vitra Campus. The reduced basic form of this building corresponds to its function as an assembly hall.

The most striking element of the building is the arched bridge-like roof construction connecting the hall with the adjacent building by Nicholas Grimshaw. When it rains, the bridge automatically descends to provide a sheltered passage to the Grimshaw building. In , a fire destroyed the majority of the conventional production facilities used by Vitra up to that point. The resulting reconstruction provided an opportunity to produce various buildings with renowned architects, which accumulated over time to form the current Vitra Campus.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Nicholas Grimshaw was chosen in as the first architect to create a building on the Campus. As the insurance funds only covered a six-month interruption in production, Grimshaw designed a factory constructed from simple prefabricated metal elements. In , Grimshaw created a second factory hall that is nearly identical to the first. Both buildings are still used for production today.

The first building additionally houses the Citizen Office, an innovative open-plan office conceived in by the interior designer Sevil Peach. After a major fire destroyed much of the premises in and made it necessary to reconstruct the factory compound, Vitra resolved to build its own fire station. She created a building housing a garage for fire engines along with another wing containing locker rooms, showers and common areas.

The sharp-angled sculptural forms of the Fire Station were cast in situ using a complex shell construction method and contrast with the orthogonal order of the adjacent factory buildings. Today the building is used for exhibitions and special events. The centrepiece of the building consists of a sunken courtyard that seems to conceal the surrounding environment and lends the building an almost monastic tranquillity and intimacy. From here, a series of narrow, carefully proportioned corridors and ramps lead to an assortment of conference rooms.

The meticulously finished exposed concrete and wood surfaces reinforce the atmosphere of calm and concentration exuded by the building. They attest to the inspiration Ando takes from such architects as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn while simultaneously evincing his roots in traditional Japanese architecture.