Draft Model
The Vitra Design Museum is an internationally renowned, privately owned museum for design in Weil am Rhein, Germany. As well as Frank Gehry’s building, 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 origins of the Vitra Design Museum dates back to the 1980s with the aim of documenting the history of the Vitra company. Vitra’s CEO Rolf Fehlbaum founded the museum in 1989 as an independent private foundation. He began to collect 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 with its collection, focusing on furniture and interior design with Gehry's building seen as suitable host for the collections. It is one of the world's largest collections of modern furniture design, including pieces representative of all major periods and styles from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.
In addition, the museum produces workshops, publications and museum products, as well as maintaining an archive, a restoration and conservation laboratory, and a research library. It also organises guided tours of the Vitra premises, a major attraction to those interested in modern architecture.
The museum building is an architectural attraction. It was Frank Gehry's first building in Europe. 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 did not opt for his usual mix of materials, but limited himself to white plaster and a titanium-zinc alloy. For the first time, he allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitra_Design_Museum
http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/Germany/Weil%20am%20Rhein/Vitra%20Design%20Museum
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