The new Vitra Schaudepot
In Weil am Rhein, architects Herzog & de Meuron have built an extraordinarily simple design museum on the Vitra Campus.
The first impression: simple. A brick building with a gabled roof and a door. The second impression: fascinating. The split clinker bricks, whose broken surface faces outwards, lend the red building a certain attraction. The third impression: overwhelming. In the 900-square-metre, windowless exhibition space, 400 objects on three levels of shelves present the evolution of furniture design from 1800 to the present day. The exhibits range from the first bentwood furniture of the 19th century to the tubular steel cantilever chairs of the 1920s and colourful plastic furniture of the 1960s and 1970s to today’s 3D-printed objects. They are all part of the Vitra Design Museum collection previously inaccessible to the public.
First focal point: Radical Design
The Vitra Design Museum was established in 1989 by Rolf Fehlbaum, owner of the furniture manufacturer Vitra. Originally conceived as a private collector’s museum, today it is among the leading design museums worldwide. The museum stages two major temporary shows a year in the main building designed by Frank O. Gehry. The new Schaudepot by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, whose designs include the Tate Modern in London, the Bird’s Nest in Beijing and the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, is to show parts of the continually growing collection. The latter’s core comprises an inventory of some 7,000 items of furniture. A second focus of the collection is luminaires; it boasts over 1,000 objects. The first temporary exhibition at the Schaudepot is devoted to Radical Design, a trend that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy and is considered one of the most important avant-garde movements in design history. Using unconventional formal language and utopian design concepts, the representatives of Radical Design protested against functionalism and established tastes. It influenced many of the current design trends such as Critical Design, Social Design and Participatory Design.
