Germany | Vitra House | Herzog & de Meuron’s

[lllARKlll]

Herzog & de Meuron’s Vitra Haus showrooms Germany

26 February 2010

By Ellis Woodman

Herzog & de Meuron’s showrooms for chair manufacturer Vitra puts domestic forms to unsettling use.

At 7.30 on the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in the White House, triggering a momentous event in Lower Manhattan, some 200 miles to the north. At a stroke, all 58 storeys of Cass Gilbert’s newly completed Woolworth Building burst into light. Brilliant white floodlights illuminated the gargoyles and flying buttresses that encrusted its elevations, while a beacon of alternating red and white pronounced the peak of what was now the tallest building in the world. City Hall Park, the little pocket of green that the tower addresses, heaved with onlookers.
Presented with such a spectacle, few can have so much as noticed the ageing, 20-storey structure that stood behind them. However, in its day, George Browne Post’s 1890 headquarters building for the World newspaper had also been the world’s tallest. It had been the first structure to surpass the spire of New York’s Trinity Church, so one could make a strong case for it being the building that sparked the battle for supremacy of the city’s skyline that had raged ever since.
In fact, what no one in the crowd that night could have guessed was that they were witnessing the finale of that drama. The economic impact of the First World War would soon put an end to New York’s first great era of skyscraper construction. It would be 17 years before another building would trump the Woolworth’s height.
What a poignant image this is: two buildings, the bookends of a whole era of economic boom and architectural adventure, gazing back at each other over the space of just a couple of hundred metres.
Well, last week, I found myself in what felt spookily like a contemporary remake of this tableau. The setting was the Vitra furniture factory, in the German town of Weil-am-Rhein. It is the site of several celebrated buildings, but none more famous than Frank Gehry’s rambunctious chair museum. When it was completed in 1989, this building radically shifted expectations about architecture’s formal possibilities and, no less significantly, its capacity to generate publicity. If the arms race of spectacle that has characterised architectural production over the past two decades can be said to have had an opening gambit, this was it.
I arrived at Vitra with a busload of other design journalists, but as we pulled up outside the chair museum, few gave the building a second glance: it looked every bit as harmless as the World Building must have done by 1913. All attention was monopolised by the vision that presented itself across a short expanse of lawn to the north — the latest addition to the campus and the object of our pilgrimage, the truly jaw-dropping, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Vitra Haus.



Credit: Iwan Baan

Vitra Haus takes its place beside Gehry’s 1989 chair museum.

I don’t think I can quite claim the Vitra Haus as the last iconic building — just a couple of days later many of these same journalists would be attending the opening of Sanaa’s Lausanne project. However, I will venture that when the history of the architecture of the recent boom comes to be written, Vitra Haus will be judged the last building to have essayed a truly novel form language. As an exercise in the kind of spectacle that Gehry’s building pioneered, this is — for the foreseeable future — the last word.
Vitra Haus comes billed as a unique combination of furniture museum and showroom, although strictly speaking the ratio in which those parts are combined is somewhere in the region of one to ten. Save for a room that has been given over to the display of classic chairs, it is almost entirely populated by Vitra products — specifically, items from its collection of furniture designed for domestic use. Launched in 2004, the Vitra Home Collection includes re-editions of design classics by the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Isamu Noguchi, as well as products the company has developed with contemporary designers such as the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius and Jasper Morrison.
There is a small shop at the Vitra Haus but no one is going to be walking out the door with a Maarten van Severen recliner under their arm. The point of the place is rather to offer the 100,000 people that visit the Vitra plant each year the chance to experience at first hand the kind of domestic environment the company’s products might allow them to cultivate. To that end, the exhibits have been choreographed to present a series of pseudo-living spaces that, Goldilocks-like, we are free to try on for size.
A network of computer terminals is on hand to help us assemble a priced shopping list that we can then present to our local dealership, but a trip to Vitra Haus is by no means a hard-sell experience. Indeed, if the notion of the building as a museum is a little difficult to swallow, that is not to say that the objects on display are of anything less than museum quality. There is a fantastic amount to enjoy here even if you aren’t planning to make a purchase.
The central, startling conceit on which Herzog & de Meuron’s design is predicated is the idea that the building is composed as a casually stacked pile of like objects. While this may be the first time the practice has been able to realise that notion in built form, the ambition has been there for some time, informing such projects as its first proposal for the extension of Tate Modern and the residential tower it is building at 56 Leonard Street in New York.



Credit: Iwan Baan

The courtyard at the heart of the scheme.

Characterised by a disquieting mix of nonchalance and bombast — the former clearly offered as a foil for the latter — this has always struck me as one of the practice’s less fruitful lines of enquiry. Indeed, at Vitra, the outrageousness of the proposition is exacerbated a good deal by the nature of the element from which the pile is assembled — an in-situ concrete tube which looks like an extruded Monopoly house. There are 12 such tubes, piled on top of one another with apparent abandon to a height of five storeys.
The form is abstracted not only by its unlikely levitation but also by its material articulation: the tubes’ ends are fully glazed; their walls, soffits and roofs are finished uniformly in charcoal render.

At the press conference for the building’s launch, one local journalist asked Vitra president Rolf Fehlbaum whether there might perhaps be some parodic intent behind all of this. Fehlbaum assured him in no uncertain terms that there was not, begging the question: who is he trying to kid? Whatever else the building is, it is surely, at some level, a joke.
Indeed, one suspects that it is at that level that it will principally be experienced — as a freakish landmark, viewed at speed from the adjacent motorway, or as an oddball image demanding attention in the pages of a newspaper.
And yet to dismiss the thing as a mere publicity stunt would not be altogether fair. Flash and voguish it may be, but Vitra Haus is nonetheless a building that responds with real intelligence both to its physical setting and to the requirements of a very particular brief.



Credit: Iwan Baan

The glazed gables precisely frame the landscape.

It occupies a strip of land that lies between the main road and the factory proper, a territory that it shares with the chair museum and a Claes Oldenburg sculpture composed from a gigantic screwdriver, hammer and a pair of pliers. The jaunty ad-hocery of these structures serves as an effective alibi for Vitra Haus’s formal mannerisms. What in other circumstances might have been unbearably arch, appears here as an almost contextual response.
The existing Vitra campus is composed of one and two-storey structures and there was no practical reason why the latest addition couldn’t have been accommodated within another low-lying structure. However, the decision to build high feels sound, giving the project a presence that allows it to deal with the scale of the agricultural landscape that lies beyond the campus gates.
The choice also serves to maintain an area of open ground between it and the Gehry building — land that has been planted as an orchard. Crossing this space, we discover that the seemingly casual accumulation of house-forms in fact frames a delicately judged courtyard. Its floor is formed from timber boards while large decorative pendant lights of the architect’s design hang from above — features that conjure a surprising sense of domesticity.



Credit: Iwan Baan

The classic chair collection has been given its own gallery space on the ground floor.

On entering, we are invited to take a lift to the top of the building and then to travel by foot back to the ground. As we arrive at the top, what might previously have seemed a painfully whimsical compositional strategy reveals itself as being rooted in a curious but undeniable logic.
The building has been conceived as a device for taking us on a picturesque journey — one in which we find ourselves constantly walking towards another alluring stage set, laid out in front of a very precisely framed landscape. The experience is discombobulating, but fun, the hard edits enforced by each sharp change of direction serving to keep any sense of museum fatigue at bay.
The scale of the galleries is palatial but their cross-section proves highly effective in maintaining the idea they have something in common with the average visitor’s living room. It also serves to generate a high level of spatial complexity at those points where the house-forms crash into one another. At some of these moments the architect has been faced with the additional challenge of how to introduce vertical circulation. Its response has been to employ an autonomous language of leisurely spiral staircases — features that generate yet more baroque complication as they worm their way from floor to floor.
As we make our way down to the ground we find ourselves repeatedly presented with unexpected, vertiginous views from one gallery to the next. The kind of spatial preoccupations that were at play in the foyer of Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Centre, have here been allowed free reign throughout a very substantial interior.
The building saves perhaps its best trick for dusk when its black shell recedes from view and the little domestic scene presented behind each glazed gable appears as a richly illuminated picture floating in the sky. It is an act of showmanship to which even Frank Woolworth would have to tip his hat.

“Make it 50 feet taller than the Metropolitan Tower!” was how he instructed his architect. What can Rolf Fehlbaum possibly have said to his? One thing is for sure — it is going to be some time before any architect is afforded such a license again.

Original print headline - Are you sitting comfortably?
project team

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Client Vitra Verwaltungs, Architect Herzog & de Meuron, Construction architect Mayer Baehrle Freie, Structural engineer ZPF, Landscape design August Künzel, Construction management/M&E Krebser & Freyler Planungsbüro, Acoustics Horstmann & Berger, Lighting Ansorg, Interior fitting Visplay International, Graphics Graphic Thought Facility

Fonte: Bdonline

[tg_azevedo]

lo0l, a intersecção de "casinhas" está o máximo. não é de todo apelativo mas vale pelo conceito e esforço

[Sérgio Barbosa]

Por acaso tive a oportunidade de lá ir, ainda em construção e a obra está interessante, como de resto a obra de Herzog e Meuron. Mas a visita vale mais pelo restante complexo da Vitra. Não é todos os dias que se vê num curto espaço obras de Zaha Hadid, Siza Vieira, Herzog Meuron, Ghery, Tadao Ando, entre outros.