“They’re local,” says Fehlbaum, “so they always looked at me and thought: ‘That guy is really strange why doesn’t he build with us?’” In 2006, he relented and commissioned them to design the VitraHaus, a dark grey stack of extruded house profiles, which towers above the other buildings on the site. Herzog & de Meuron – whose headquarters is located in nearby Basel – was a different matter. Now I want to let nature take it back’ … architect Tsuyoshi Tane, left, and Rolf Fehlbaum. ‘We destroyed this natural landscape by building an industrial site. We didn’t manage a chair, but we managed a building!” His Gehry story is similar: it began with a series of cardboard chairs, before a factory, and then the museum, which buckles and writhes with chaotic delight, containing the kernel of his later, computer-aided buildings. For example, I saw Zaha in Blueprint magazine and asked her to design a chair for us, but it wasn’t very good. “We never held competitions or did research. “There was never any guiding plan,” Fehlbaum admits. A big fire in 1981 destroyed half the campus, and Fehlbaum brought in Grimshaw to build a new modular factory at speed, triggering his lust for working with architects. Their parents had established the business in the 1950s, as the European manufacturer of glamorous designs by Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, who Willi had discovered on a trip to the US in 1953, and built a small factory in the bucolic outskirts of Weil am Rhein. Now I want to let nature take it back.” Fehlbaum and his brother, Raymond, inherited the Vitra company from their mother and father, Erika and Willi, in 1977. We destroyed this natural landscape by building an industrial site. Over the years we knew, of course, but we didn’t really care. “It is the first building we have made with full awareness of the climate crisis. “We are now on a completely different trip,” he tells me, looking out at the Tane Garden House, an enigmatic thatched hut raised on little stone legs, designed by the 43-year-old Paris-based Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane. After decades of daring commissions, he has just completed what looks to be his final building on the site – and it couldn’t be further from what has come before. A softly spoken 82-year-old with a low-key, unassuming manner and thick black spectacles, he cuts an improbable figure as a Medici of 21st-century design. The man with the architectural addiction, who took a chance on these sometimes untested names, is Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum. Among them stand works by Álvaro Siza, Renzo Piano, Nicholas Grimshaw, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé, Herzog & de Meuron, Sanaa and more, forming a who’s who of starchitects against the foothills of the Alps. It is where Frank Gehry built his first building outside the US, where Tadao Ando realised his first project outside Japan, and where the late Zaha Hadid completed her first ever building at all, when it looked like her gravity-defying visions might never leave the canvas. Welcome to the Vitra Campus, a fun-filled home to a furniture factory on the edge of Weil am Rhein, at the southern tip of the Black Forest, which has evolved into a curious petting zoo of Pritzker prize-winning architects over the last 40 years. Across another field, there is a gigantic helter-skelter, a jagged concrete fire station and what looks like a teetering stack of supersized Monopoly houses, as well as a number of large industrial sheds that jiggle and jive with their own distinctive architectural ambitions. Nearby the futuristic profile of a geodesic dome rises, along with the folded aluminium shell of a modernist petrol station and the pitched wooden roof of a 1960s Japanese house. A stubbly thatched roof pokes up above a hedge in a field on the outskirts of a small town in south-west Germany, the latest arrival to an unlikely scene of experimental structures dotted around the landscape.
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