This is the 61-acre production campus of Vitra, a high-end furniture company that resembles a European Herman Miller. Vitra has been manufacturing its products in Weil am Rhein, Germany, since 1950, but in recent years the industrial park has become a Disneyland for the kind of people who watch “Mad Men” primarily for the sets.
Forty-five minutes by tram from Basel, Switzerland, the campus attracts approximately 350,000 visitors per year. Its emergence as a tourist attraction coincided with a growing interest in design, particularly in the sleek mid-century style that inspired a number of Vitra pieces. “It’s no longer a niche,” says Isidora Rudolph, spokesperson for Basel Tourism.
“Knowing design has become important social capital,” says Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Design Museum. “It is also a tool for building identity. And I think social media has really increased that, because on social media you now have the platform to show yourself.
You know you’re going in the right direction when you see the little chairs. Models of designer seats rotate on the platforms that line the path from the Weil am Rhein tram station to the Vitra campus. There is of course an Eames lounge chair, but also an Eero Aarnio Ball chair and an MR20 designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the distance, a clock tower designed by artist Carsten Höller marks the campus. As you get closer, you’ll notice the tower’s other defining feature: a 125-foot spiral slide that transports visitors from an observation deck to the ground.
In 15 minutes you’ll reach the campus, which includes five factory buildings, two museums and VitraHaus, the model house and store that is essentially Xanadu for aesthetes. Between all these buildings, Eames side chairs dot thick lawns where wild leeks and dandelions grow. Exploring the grounds is free, while an entrance fee of 21 euros covers entry to both museums. You can walk alone or take a tour, as I did one morning in mid-March.
The campus is a showcase of the work of famous architects. “We have a lot of firsts here,” explained my guide Christiane Spiegelhalder, as we passed the debuts of big names such as British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Its first completed building was the campus fire station, completed in 1993. This angular creation now hosts events, since the surrounding municipality took over the fire services. Revered Japanese modernist Tadao Ando’s first building outside his home country is the campus’s minimalist conference center. SANAA, the Japanese company known for otherworldly buildings such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, has its first industrial building there: a gigantic factory where workers carry out the final assembly of Vitra furniture. (Though with its rounded shape and practically glowing white facade, it looks more like a slab of white sky fallen to earth.)
Famous Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry’s first buildings in Europe are also here, including the Design Museum, a swooping structure that resembles “a sculpture in the landscape,” as Spiegelhalder described it. It hosts rotating exhibitions on all aspects of design, while the campus’s second museum houses an extensive collection of notable furniture.
My tour ended at VitraHaus. The building, designed by Basel firm Herzog & de Meuron, resembles a stack of smaller buildings that each evoke a child’s drawing of a house – a square topped by a triangle.
Walking through the model rooms inside is like visiting a life of excellent taste and an even more excellent bank account. All are of course furnished with Vitra furniture and flooded with sunlight. There’s a floor of home offices, several living rooms and a kitchen that looks like the set of a sci-fi movie directed by Nancy Meyers. Photo opportunities abound: a deflated disco ball looms above a twisting staircase; a reel of shiny plastic Eames chairs twirls in one of the bay windows; next to another window you can take selfies in an Ultrafragola mirror. The library invites you to take a break around a long study table and browse monographs on artists such as Maarten van Severen and Álvaro Siza. Upstairs, you can admire the Lounge Chair Atelier, where workers guide shoppers through the process of customizing and building Eames’ iconic chair.
Part of the joy of visiting VitraHaus is the lack of pressure to buy anything. Guests can lounge on an $11,000 Polder sofa or a $28,000 Panton “living tower,” kids slide down railings, all without a salesperson in sight. I saw someone knock over a potted succulent, then gently put the soil and shards of clay in a pile and continue looking at a George Nelson drawing.
Although the prices can be eye-popping, Vitra furniture is designed to last a lifetime. To protect your investment, the company offers repairs; I met a couple from Munich who were looking for paint to touch up a chair they bought years ago. For the more budget-conscious visitors, Vitra has opened a second store on campus called Circle Store, where it sells display pieces at a discount.
Creating a modernist Disneyland wasn’t always the plan. After a fire destroyed much of the campus in 1981, Vitra worked with architect Nicholas Grimshaw to reimagine the entire venue in his high-tech British style, characterized by the use of prefabricated parts and technical advanced manufacturing. Grimshaw completed two clever factories clad in corrugated aluminum, but the rest of his plan would never come to fruition.
In 1984, Vitra’s CEO met Frank Gehry, who was then working primarily in California, and eventually hired him to design another factory, as well as the Design Museum and a gatehouse. As the campus grew, the firm abandoned Grimshaw’s vision and brought in more architects. They also imported buildings, adding among others a geodesic dome from Detroit and a Prouvé gas station from France.
The Design Museum opened in 1989, marking the beginning of Vitra as a destination for foreigners. It was a new idea, not only for the city, but for the world. “There had been design departments at MoMA, there had been a design department at the Center Pompidou [in Paris] since the late 1960s, but other than that the typology of a design museum didn’t really exist,” says Kries, pointing out that the London Design Museum opened the same year.
Kries says the museum’s exhibits have become more detailed over the years to cater to an increasingly design-conscious audience. During my visit, there was an exhibition on the intersection of energy and design. Exhibits included a wind-powered street light, solar cars and a room where guests pedaled bicycles to generate energy. Next, Kries plans a show focused on Nike and another on American Shaker furniture.
Since the campus became a tourist attraction, other companies have tried the same thing, building parks around their manufacturing centers to attract visitors. Vitra, Kries says, “has become a kind of model.” For example, Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany, is a Vitra-like park for Volkswagen (they also have a slide tower).
Sitting on the terrace of the VitraHaus café, as children play on Panton chairs near an old Airstream trailer, Kries says all attempts at a corporate tourism park have failed to achieve the “charm of this site “. The decision to abandon Grimshaw’s master plan and let architects like Gehry and Hadid remodel the campus gave Vitra a looser, more fanciful feeling. “Each building has a very individual and sometimes unforeseen story,” explains Kries.
The campus serves as an excellent advertisement not only for Vitra furniture, but also for the lifestyle and philosophy that goes with it. It invites you to dream of a stunning living room, of every chair and building being a work of art, of a world where everything is comfortable and pretty too.
This even continues until the release. At the bus stop in front of the Vitra campus, the seats are made of wood rather than wire Eames chairs.
Gabe Bullard is a writer who covers culture and technology.
