WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY

The Vitra Design Museum was the first building Frank Gehry completed in Europe, finished in 1989. It sits at the entrance of the Vitra Campus — a remarkable concentration of architecture by some of the most significant architects of the late twentieth century — alongside buildings by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, and SANAA. The museum building reads as a collision of geometric fragments: cubes, cylinders, ramps, and planes pushed against each other and frozen mid-movement. The white rendered surfaces catch light differently at every angle. From a distance it looks almost chaotic; up close the forms reveal a tightly controlled spatial logic — each fragment corresponds to a distinct interior space, and the complexity outside prepares you for the compressed, varied sequence of galleries within. The collection focuses on furniture and product design from the Industrial Revolution to the present: over 20,000 objects by designers including Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton, Jean Prouvé, and Isamu Noguchi. The permanent collection is shown selectively alongside rotating thematic exhibitions. The campus visit is as much about the landscape between buildings as the buildings themselves. The Hadid Fire Station (1993) — her first built work — is a short walk. The Ando Conference Pavilion and the Prouvé petrol station reassembled on site add further register. Allow half a day for the campus; the museum alone takes an hour.

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