Frank Gehry - Vitra Museum (one of the first buildings of the complex, and the first building outside USA of the american architect)
Tadao Ando - Vitra Conference Pavilion ( first building outside Asia of the architect)
SAANA - Vitra factory ( first factory designed by the group of architects)
Alvaro Siza - Vitra Factory (first factory designed by the architect)
Zaha Hadid - Vitra Fire Station ( first building EVER designed by Zaha)
Richard Buckminster Fuller - Geodesic Tent (one of the 3 existent in the world, all original pieces)
Hertzog & DeMeuron - Vitra Haus ( Vitra Shop and exhibit area)
If you are passionate about architecture, interior design or design in general Vitra Museum should be on TO SEE list.
Vitra produces, for those of you that don't know yet, designer furniture and has the license to produce furniture from Le Corbusier, Schinkel, Rietveld, Wright, Mies van der Rohe and many, many others. As you already know, every great architect designed at least one chair ( and other pieces of furniture) - well, this is the place when you can buy it, because it is produced after their original sketches with the original methods ( and it is one of the few places in the world that produces these pieces of furniture with license, and for some pieces the only place where you can find them)
The Vitra Campus is kind of the Heaven on Earth for architects - i think there are a few places in the world where so many great buildings designed by famous architects can be found on such a small area - maybe the other place it's Novartis Campus. When we arrived i didn't know where to look first and what to study and photograph sooner; i was running from building to building like a mad person. Sure, in the end the most photogenic building was Ghery's Old Vitra Museum -i'm not a fan of his work, but this one took my breath away- i was mesmerized of it's sculptural from, different perspectives and of how the building changes as you walk around it. Of course, when i visited the interior it seemed small, and kind of boring comparing to the exterior of the building.
The building that says nothing with the exterior but touches your heart with the interior it's Tadao's concrete pavilion also known as the House of silence -in there you achieve such interior peace and you disconnect with the world although it is next to a very circulated street.
Zaha's Fire Station was kind of interesting, but i got seasick in the bathroom - a very small and high space with no straight walls, all were inclined in another direction- not even the door was rectangular....there were no 90 degrees- just awful.
Alvaro Siza's factory and SAANA's had very interesting details that were worth studying - for example Siza's Bridge and SAANA's exterior finish.
But the most extravagant-with-a-reason building was actually the shop. Designed by Hertzog and DeMeuron, Vitra Haus it's actually composed from a series of stacked pitched-roof boxes - a house on top of another house. the reason is that the architects wanted each house to be oriented towards a different place: the countries France, Germany, Switzerland (because Vitra it's at the border between this 3) and of course the different buildings surrounding it.
Needless to say the furniture exhibition from Vitra Haus was amazing, and i wanted to go home with every single piece of very expensive furniture from there, so i let the few picture i selected speak for themselves.