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/ Luis Fernández-Galiano

The Vitra Campus is a playing field – but for serious games. An industrial park in the heart of Europe does not at first sight appear to be the appropriate place for risk architecture; however, both technical innovation and artistic exploration are aspects of a desire to experiment that has resulted in an amazing collection of signature architecture in Weil am Rhein. From the dynamic forms of the Vitra Design Museum by the Californian Frank Gehry or the rushing forms of the Fire Station by the Anglo-Iraqi architect, Zaha Hadid, to the latest projects by the Japanese Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, or the Swiss Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, major world architects have helped to turn the dream of the entrepreneur and collector, Rolf Fehlbaum, into reality by creating a site near Basel that is committed to experimentation and artistic excellence.

In Sydney Pollack’s documentary on Frank Gehry, musician Bob Geldof, lost in thought, talks about being thunderstruck by the fleeting glimpses of the dancing forms of the Design Museum, his vision groggy with tiredness and the steamed-up glass of his tour bus, and this sensation of sudden discovery has struck visitors to the Campus ever since Gehry completed his most emblematic work in 1989. The year in which the Berlin Wall fell was also the year Vitra entered the history of architecture: this was the year in which “Arquitectura Viva” first dealt with the Campus, and the year in which I first heard admiring reports of the most forward-thinking pioneers who were on a pilgrimage to Weil am Rhein, while I was living in Los Angeles as a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Center.

Philip Johnson, whom I had got to know through Frank Gehry, was even then an enthusiastic follower of the Santa Monica architect, one of the seven artists included in his ‘deconstructivist’ exhibition at the MoMA the year before, but Johnson’s trip to Basel did not come until a decade later. When at last he visited Basel and Weil in 1999, he wrote: “The Vitra collection of architecture by the great architects of the present day is unique in the world. Since the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1927, there has not been a gathering in a single place of a group of buildings designed by the most distinguished architects in the Western world.”

It was inevitable that the New York master was reminded of his own farm in Connecticut, where he had rounded off his career with a series of small structures in a similar way to the way in which Vitra brings together international architecture on its campus, with a mixture of personal ambition and openness to the general public – another point of contact between the two concepts at Weil and New Canaan. In the spring of 2007, eighteen months after Johnson’s death at ninety-eight in January 2006, his property at New Canaan, which he donated to the American National Trust, was opened to the public. Everyone who comes here to see the legendary Glass House which the American built in 1949 as a homage to his mentor, Mies van der Rohe, has to go through the sculpted Gatehouse built by Johnson as a homage to Gehry almost half a century later.