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Vitra Centrepoint Tour Highlights
The tour offered a close look at how Vitra’s campus combines industrial function, architectural experimentation and design history in one compact setting. Our visit to the began on a very hot August day beside the red Schaudepot, where our members gathered under Vitra’s white umbrellas.
Sophie, our guide, provided insight into the architectural design of each building. She began with a brief history of the Swiss family behind Vitra and the company’s beginnings in Birsfelden, where its headquarters remain today. In 1950 Erika Fehlbaum inaugurated the manufacturing facility in the neighboring town of Weil am Rhein, just across the Swiss-German border and close to the campus we toured. The new company name was a play on the German word “Vitrine”, which means “display case” in English.
The buildings we experienced, some from the inside, included:
- Vitra Schaudepot by Herzog & de Meuron (2016)
- Fire Station by Zaha Hadid (1993), where we could feel the sense of wavy movement
- Factory Building by Álvaro Siza (1994), with its beautifully framed rain cover
- SANAA Factory Building (2012), with Plexiglas panels and a shape that is deliberately “not perfectly round”.
- Two Factory Buildings by Nicholas Grimshaw (1983), one of which was built in just six months after a fire and formed part of the original plan.
- Conference Pavilion by Tadao Ando (1993), with its smooth concrete and carefully balanced symmetry.
- Factory Building by Frank Gehry (1989), which helped justify the creation of the Vitra Design Museum, also by Gehry, to house Rolf Fehlbaum’s collection. The museum disrupted the original plan and became his first work in Europe as well as his first industrial commission all based on a crumpled-up piece of paper.
- Balancing Tools sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1984), which helped lure Gehry into the new plan and building the Vitra Design Museum.
One of the highlights of the tour was experiencing how Siza used the moveable bridge roof to create a “frame” to look through highlighting the other buildings nearby including the Firehouse.
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