Vitrahaus, by Herzog and de Meuron

The newly completed Vitrahaus by Herzog & de Meuron on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany – just outside of Basel, Switzerland.The concept of the VitraHaus connects two themes that appear repeatedly in the oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron: the theme of the archetypal house and the theme of stacked volumes.

Due to the proportions and dimensions of the interior spaces – the architects use the term “domestic scale” – the showrooms are reminiscent of familiar residential settings. The individual “houses”, which have the general characteristics of a display space, are conceived as abstract elements. With just a few exceptions, only the gable ends are glazed, and the structural volumes seem to have been shaped with an extrusion press.

Stacked into a total of five stories and breathtakingly cantilevered up to 49 feet in some places, the twelve houses, whose floor slabs intersect the underlying gables, create a three-dimensional assemblage – a pile of houses that, at first glance, has an almost chaotic appearance.

The charcoal color of the exterior stucco skin unifies the structure, ‘earths’ it and connects it to the surrounding landscape. Like a small, vertically layered city, the VitraHaus functions as an entryway to the Campus. A wooden plank floor defines an open central area, around which five buildings are grouped: a conference area, an exhibition space for the chair collection of the Vitra Design Museum and a conglomerate comprising the Vitra Design Museum Shop, the lobby with a reception area and cloakroom, and a café with an outdoor terrace for summer use.

A lift takes visitors to the fourth storey, where the circular tour begins. Upon exiting the lift, the glazed northern end of the room offers a spectacular view of the Tüllinger Hill. The opposite end – where the glass front is recessed to create an exterior terrace – opens to a panorama of Basel with the industrial facilities of the pharmaceutical sector. As one discovers on the path through the VitraHaus, the directional orientation of the houses is hardly arbitrary, but is determined by the views of the surrounding landscape.

The interior space’s complexity not only comes from the angular intersections of each of the individual houses, but from the inclusion of a second geometrical concept. All of the staircases are expansive, winding organic forms, drilling their way through the various levels of the building, sometimes revealing an immense visual relationship between the various houses, while at other times blocking the views.

Vitra
Via [Gizmodo] & [DesignBoom]