VitraHaus
Edited by The Fashion Web
I have always loved buildings – as I grew up playing with Legos and wood building blocks and my father is in commercial real estate – but recently, I have grown in my passion to learn more about modern architecture and study the work of famous architects. My newest find is the VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein, a suburb of the Swiss city of Basel in Switzerland.
The VitraHaus is a beautiful example of Jacques Herzog’s and Pierre de Meuron’s ability to take the ubiquitous stacked-houses concept and make it look new, exciting and inviting. The twelve separate houses reach five
stories in height and bring design-aware consumers who appreciate not only the Vitra products inside but also the building which houses them.
Vitra House is the latest addition to the expanding Vitra Campus, which began as an industrial park with the manufacturing facilities. The Vitra Design Museum – Frank Gehry’s first European building opened in 1989 – the Conference Pavilion by Tadao Ando (1993) and the Fire Station by Zaha Hadid (1993) already provide magnificent visual attraction. VitraHaus and a new circular manufacturing facility by Kazuyo Sejima/SANAA are this year’s entrants to the site.
Herzog and de Meuron are known for their prominent international commissions – including the Beijing Olympics’ Bird’s Nest.
