Vitra's villa

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1994 by Catherine Slessor

In this complex for an innovative Swiss furniture manufacturer, Frank Gehry shows how a relatively humdrum programme can be given a touch of magic.

Birsfelden, on the outskirts of Basle, is one of those suburbs, common in Switzerland and Germany, where the turn-of-the-century structure of detached villas in spacious grounds has been altered by the incursion of new functions and new infrastructure -- and progressive densification of the suburb as the large gardens have been built over with small houses and flats.

Back in 1957, the furniture company Vitra built its first factory here, on one of the sites near the railway and the slip road to the autobahn that form the edge of the suburb to the east. Across the tracks is the green and black wall of the protected Hard Forest which is visually part of the site (though it is separated from it by the lower level road and railway). Almost all the suburb edge is now lined with light industry and offices, though the original villa pattern is quite clear a hundred metres back from the road.

The company wanted to concentrate all its administrative operations on the site. Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra International) asked Frank Gehry to make a building that would act as a flexible off ice and showroom space, and as a place that could be identified as the company's centre.

Gehry adopted a version of the strategy he had already used at Vitra's main manufacturing site in Weil am Rhein, across the river in Germany. There, his rather reticent factory building offsets his much smaller and more exuberant Vitra design museum. At Birsfelden, the office and showroom areas are collected into a long, three-storey building set at right angles to the road and railway to reduce exposure to their noise. It is an orderly and almost conventional affair with a regular rhythm of generous rectangular windows penetrating the white plastered blockwork of the walls round the concrete framed structure: a form of construction and expression that can be seen a thousand times over in the suburbs of Basle. Were it not for the rather Constructivist vertical circulation ensembles at each end of the block, it would be just another example of the local decorous and dull business style. Gehry calls it the Rationalist building.

To the south, in complete contrast, is the Villa, an almost separate block where Gehry seems to have saved up all the natural exuberance and joie de wire that he carefully suppressed in the Rationalist block to be exploded in a kind of built fireworks display. The Villa takes its name from the fact that it is not (very) much bigger than the old Jugendstil houses which formed the original suburb. Yet for all their often slightly wild detailing and their changeful massing, they seem very tame in comparison.

Round an understated white rectangular lift tower the volumes twist, bulge, swoop and spin -- almost as if they have been frozen in the middle of an elaborate and wild dance. The surreal caper comes to life as you walk round the building: the silver zinc and orange, yellow and turquoise elements acquire presence and personality, ranging from the metallic visor of some huge medieval casque to waterfalls, waves and clouds.

The Villa is joined to the Rationalist building by the more or less neutral fully glazed walls of the three-storey atrium, which are pierced by zinc covered rectangular tubes containing flying galleries that connect the Villa to the other block. A huge wing-like canopy sails over the join, propped on a large square column at its western (wide) edge and flying free to the east as it tapers. One of the reasons for the wing is that it allows the part of the Rationalist block which faces south in its shade to have full-height wood and glass walls, so ensuring that the floor plates inside do not become rigidly standardised, but have a passage which looks out over the wildness of the Villa and into the volume of the atrium. (Without the shading wing, such a glazed wall would probably have been impossible, because the sensible and strict Swiss building codes forbid air conditioning in new offices.

The wing is also, in a sense, a guide towards the entrance from the visitors' car-park, which is approached from the distributor road to the west. (There is no access from the motorway slip-road in its cutting on the other side of the site.) The entrance cuts through the dance at a moment when the participants seem briefly to have lost contact. It leads to a lobby with a reception desk, stairs and lift -- a fairly ordinary space made mysterious and enticing by suggestions of things happening slightly further on. From the reception desk, the big, well-lit atrium space beckons; further into the lobby, beyond the stairs, the cafeteria begins to open up, with glimpses of the open terrace and forest beyond.

The atrium is the heart of the building, the hub around which traffic between the two parts flows. Above ground floor, two open bridges on each floor fly into the space, then crank and whiz out through the glazed walls before arriving at the office spaces in the Rationalist wing. The bridges are U-shaped steel girders with delicate wood and steel balustrades. In the big space, they are not so far apart that people can't speak to each other from one to another: the arrangement is an attempt to generate the kind of casual contacts that enlightened managements try to foster these days. Down below, there is a space that is good for parties, or just for sitting in front of the fire. (The latter is much more cosy than it appears in photographs, for the bridges give the place a sense of enclosure within the big volume -- yet just by whom and how the fireside will be used in a busy Swiss office is unclear.