With the Vitra Design Museum, Gehry succeeded in combining two fundamentally different types of museum architecture. The Vitra Campus currently attracts over 350,000 visitors each year. Balancing Tools / Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen The Vitra Campus comprises a public and a private area. The Vitra Campus is located not far from Basel and you can reach it from Milan with a 4 hours drive. Aside from its work as a furniture manufacturer, this company embodies the ideals and curiosities necessary to continually push the design world forward through ideas, atmospheres, and sometimes, yes, chairs. The aesthetic of the Vitra Design Museum was instrumental in the emergence of the stylistic concept of “Deconstructivism” and marked a new phase in Gehry’s oeuvre that he continued to develop in major projects over the following years (such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 1996).In the interior, the Vitra Design Museum has four large exhibition galleries with uniform white walls and approximately 700 square metres of exhibition space. RRP refers to the Recommended Retail Price as set out by the original publisher at time of release.

The platform is the starting point for the 38-metre-long corkscrew tube slide. This roughly oval shape optimizes logistical operations by providing adequate space for the circulation of lorries. While the renowned Vitra Design Museum presents alternating exhibitions, the newly built Schaudepot gives visitors an insight into parts of the museum's extensive collection. Design enthusiasts and connoisseurs of architecture are invited to take a tour of the Campus and discover 21 buildings by some of the world’s most renowned architects. It was originally situated at the “Relais des Sangliers” service area in the department of Haute-Loire in France. In 2000, the building was installed on the Vitra Campus where it serves as a space for events.Jean Prouvé was an important engineer, architect and designer of the post-war era. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Nicholas Grimshaw was chosen in 1981 as the first architect to create a building on the Campus. The private area, where the production facilities are located, can only be accessed as part of an architectural tour.
With roughly 200 illustrations, The Vitra Campus offers an overview of Vitra architecture, its daily use, the evolution of the Campus and the biographies of the architects. The Vitra Campus is worth a day-trip and vast enough to warrant a week-long visit. In touring the various spaces, the building offers an ever-changing variety of moods and views – from the interior of the space as well as into the surrounding landscape, with the idyllic vineyards in the east and the industrial zones of Basel to the west. With its multi-layered concept, the VitraHaus is like an architectural expression of the pluralistic corporate culture that defines Vitra in all it does.Designed by the Japanese architectural office SANAA, the Vitrashop Factory Building was completed in 2012. Reminiscent of anonymous nineteenth-century factory architecture, the large simple brick structure by Álvaro Siza concedes to the needs of the other buildings on the grounds. As one of three surviving examples of this type, it was reconstructed on the Vitra Campus in 2003. The VitraHaus is Vitra’s flagship store: Here, visitors are offered inspirational ideas for their own homes and invited to explore their own taste in design. The Vitra Campus currently attracts over 350,000 visitors each year.

Since the 1980s, Vitra has enlisted some of the world’s leading architects to design buildings for its campus, including Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, SANAA, Álvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw and Herzog & … The construction is vertically accessed via a double-flight staircase fitted into the slanted columns with intermediate landings. Please note that visitors can experience many of the buildings exclusively as part of the Architecture Tour. In addition, during their time on the Campus, visitors can take part in a guided tour of the architecture or a workshop, enjoy the view from the Vitra Slide Tower and afterwards slide down the 37-metre-long slide, experience furniture classics and new products from the Vitra Home Collection in the VitraHaus as well as savour the offers of the shops and cafes.