Carsten Höller's new Vitra Slide Tower.IMAGE Vitra

Industrial parks and theme parks sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. The former are places of work and adulthood; dreary places of industry and toil. The latter are carefree and childlike. They're playgrounds acted out on a vast scale, with bubblegum aesthetics that play out across clashing coloured, neon-signed, loop-the-loop thrill rides.

Within design, there is a hoary old trope to describe the Vitra Campus as a fusion of these two extremes. Built in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the campus is a production centre for the Swiss furniture brand, but one that is infused with a certain celebrity. In 1981 the site was a traditional industrial park, although this changed when a fire destroyed the existing production facilities. Nicholas Grimshaw was commissioned to build a new factory for the site and, Post-Grimshaw, Vitra’s chairman Rolf Fehlbaum continued this trend of inviting famous architects (principally Pritzker Prize winners) to build structures on the site.

There is Zaha Hadid’s Lovecraftian-angled Fire Station; Frank Gehry’s thoroughly Gehry-esque deconstructed design museum; SANAA’s near-circular factory building with a white ripple facade; and Herzog & de Meuron’s stacked gingerbread VitraHaus. Not to mention further contributions from Tadao Ando, Álvaro Siza, Jasper Morrison and Renzo Piano.

Zaha Hadid's 1993 Fire Station

It has all mounted up to a reputation of the campus as an “architectural theme park”; an idea that arose long before the opening last week of a new promenade by Álvaro Siza and a slide by Belgian artist Carsten Höller on the site. Vitra has offered tours of its facility for some time and it now welcomes around 300,000 visitors a year.....Continue Reading

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