The Vitra Design Museum is an internationally renowned and privately owned museum for design in Weil am Rhein, Germany.Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum founded the museum in 1989 as an independent private foundation.
The museum, Frank O. Gehry’s first European building, an architectural attraction, is realised in cooperation with the Lörrach architect Günter Pfeifer. Together with the museum, which was originally just designed to house Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the close-by Vitra factory.
Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist style for the museum building, he limited himself to white plaster and a titanium-zinc alloy, not opting for his usual mix of materials. He allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes.
Architecture critic Paul Heyer describes the general impression on the visitor as
“... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display...”
The geometry of the building does not feel contrived, or particularly noticeable, as you go around the exhibitions. From the outside it does feel both those things, but it is at home among the other architectural showpieces that make up the Vitra site.
The inception of the Vitra Design Museum dates back to the early 1980s. With the aim of documenting the history of the Vitra company, Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum began collecting the furniture of designers who had influenced the company's development, such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Alvar Aalto, and Jean Prouvé. The design museum houses temporary exhibitions on themes of furniture design, and Gehry's building makes a suitable host for them - in keeping with the theme, but - once inside - supporting, not competing with, the exhibitions. As well as Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are all represented with separate buildings on the grounds of Vitra, in a cross between an industrial plant and a model village.
The museum, Frank O. Gehry’s first European building, an architectural attraction, is realised in cooperation with the Lörrach architect Günter Pfeifer. Together with the museum, which was originally just designed to house Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the close-by Vitra factory.
Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist style for the museum building, he limited himself to white plaster and a titanium-zinc alloy, not opting for his usual mix of materials. He allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes.
Architecture critic Paul Heyer describes the general impression on the visitor as
“... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display...”
The geometry of the building does not feel contrived, or particularly noticeable, as you go around the exhibitions. From the outside it does feel both those things, but it is at home among the other architectural showpieces that make up the Vitra site.
The inception of the Vitra Design Museum dates back to the early 1980s. With the aim of documenting the history of the Vitra company, Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum began collecting the furniture of designers who had influenced the company's development, such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Alvar Aalto, and Jean Prouvé. The design museum houses temporary exhibitions on themes of furniture design, and Gehry's building makes a suitable host for them - in keeping with the theme, but - once inside - supporting, not competing with, the exhibitions. As well as Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are all represented with separate buildings on the grounds of Vitra, in a cross between an industrial plant and a model village.
References:
http://figure-ground.com/vitra/
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Vitra_Design_Museum.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitra_Design_Museum
http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/vitradesign/index.htm
P.Heyer, American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies, p233-234.
Compiled by: Lachlan Stanton/ Dane Johns/ Sarah Passarelli
Frank Gehry Case Study - The GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain was designed by Canadian/American architect Frank Gehry, who has won the prestigious Pritzker-Prize and is based in Los Angeles. The building is an art museum constructed in an expressionist modern style from a steel frame with titanium sheathing. The style used is signature Gehry, with its curvaceous faces and organic contours. Conceptual ideas for the Guggenheim were launched in February of 1991, and it was decided that the Bay of Biscay in Bilbao would be its location. Construction on the project began in 1994, until the museum was inaugurated on October 19 1997 as part of a revitalisation plan for the city. It has been an important tourist attraction ever since, and is now considered the city’s centrepiece of modern architecture. In the first year more than 1.3 million people walked through its doors and the museum was awarded best design of 1997 by Time Magazine. Ever since the day it opened some of the world’s most important modern and contemporary collections have been displayed within its walls.In reference to the abstract nature of the building, Gehry was quoted as saying, “the randomness of the curves are designed to catch the light”. The overall shape of the museum has been associated with a ship coming into port, and its titanium panels are said to resemble shiny fish scales. The glass atrium within the museum refers to the famous rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim, opened back in the 1950’s. Something that is not often achieved in radical architectural projects such as this is “on-time completion”. However the Guggenheim museum was not only finished on time, but also on budget. Gehry credited this largely to the use of Computer Aided Three Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA). He said it was these computer simulations that made it feasible to achieve his desired outcome.
References:
History of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Bilbao 2007, p1-5.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Guggenheim_Bilbao.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao
http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/secciones/el_museo/la_mision.php?idioma=en
http://www.guggenheim.org/bilbao
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