Vitra Brings It Home

ANT

It's all round to Vitra's place in Weil am Rhein as the leading design manufacturer opens its striking new VitraHaus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

这是一个在莱茵河畔地区建造的Vitra's展示厅，主要用于展示制造商一些前卫和最新的引人注目的新VitraHaus家居产品。由赫尔佐格&德梅隆设计

ANT

'Most cities look better covered in snow. Here, the snow covers all the beauty. You don't see all the effort that was made.' Jacques Herzog isn't too happy with state of climatic affairs. With the great and the good of international architectural journalism assembled in Weil am Rhein, a stone's throw from Basel, for a press conference to mark the opening of design manufacturer Vitra's new VitraHaus, the more loquacious half of the Priztker Prize-winning architectural duo Herzog & de Meuron is at pains to make sure that we don't leave with any half-baked impressions of the project. It's ironic perhaps that the weather – something beyond our control – should be an issue at an event as professionally managed as this one.

“大多数城市在白雪的装点下会显得更加迷人。而在这里，积雪掩盖了所有的美。你将看不到人们付出的所有努力。”雅克•赫尔佐格对当地的气候状况感到不是很满意。随着大批记者和国际知名的建筑批评家聚集在莱茵河畔，一箭之遥的巴塞尔，参加设计制造商维特拉的新VitraHaus开张庆典，Priztker奖得主赫尔佐格和德梅隆为了要确保我们不会对该项目留下任何不好的印象，显现出更加健谈的一面。但是具有讽刺意味的是，近期天气 - 我们无法控制的事 -也许应作为一个专业管理的问题。

ANT

    Vitra has long been a leading name in design manufacturing, the status of its brand helped in no small way by it cultural engagement, taking the form of the world-famous Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Museum in Weil, its immpecably curated touring design exhibitions and its publishing activity. It is no wonder that the VitraHaus (when will all this orthographical elision end?) has been designed by one of the highest-profile architectural practices around, when seen in the context of the other stellar names to have created buildings for the company on its main production site: Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Nicholas Grimshaw, Alvaro Siza and, of course, Gehry. Each project differs from the next in its formal and visual language, yet somehow, in toto, they achieve a dialogue that works. 'We never wanted an architectual zoo,' says Rolf Fehlbaum, son of Vitra founder Willy Fehlbaum. 'We wanted an ensemble.'

    Vitra公司长久以来一直致力于引领设计制造潮流，其品牌地位，因其积极的文化活动的参与获得不小的帮助，世界著名的弗兰克盖里设计的Weil 维特拉博物馆，immpecably策划设计，以及巡展和出版活动。这无疑使得VitraHaus已经由成了建筑实践的代名词，当看到该公司主要生产基地的时候：扎哈哈迪德，安藤忠雄，尼古拉斯格林姆肖，阿尔瓦罗西扎，当然，盖里。每个项目都与下一个在形式、视觉上不同，尽管如此，他们之间仍有某种形式的对话。 '我们从来不想要一个建筑大杂烩，'Rolf Fehlbaum，维特拉威利创始人的儿子Fehlbaum说道。 '我们想要一个合奏。

ANT

Fehlbaum describes the VitraHaus as a form of homecoming. For the first time since Vitra launched its home collection in 2004, the company will have an on-site showroom dedicated to its non-office-oriented products. Presented by Vitra as 'not a museum, a showroom or a shop, but a combination of them', the building takes the very notion of 'house' and uses it to elaborate a set of meanings that tie architectural expression to marketing and brand communication.

The structure of the building plays with the archetypal Western house shape (think of the conventional five-sided drawing that we learn to execute from an early age, with its parallel vertical walls and sloping roof,), elongating this flat form into a series of volumes that are then stacked at various angles. The result, when viewed from outside, is, a highly graphic construction, its graphic-ness heightened by the building's charcoal-coloured stucco skin and the fact that glazing exists only at the gable ends of the tube-like volumes. At night, internal illumination has a dramatic effect, as the building's dark exterior recedes visually, while its large windows become bright display-cabinet fronts, inviting the gaze into its object-filled rooms.

Fehlbaum描述VitraHaus为来自生活的家居。自第一次Vitra在2004年推出家居系列，该公司将致力于非办公型产品。Vitra提出VitraHaus不是一个博物馆，陈列室或一间店铺，而是他们的结合，这座建筑很好的贯彻、体现了'HOUSE'概念，并用它建立了一套相应的建筑表现形式对于营销和品牌传播。

建筑物的结构，演绎了典型西方HOUSE的形状，拉长这些扁平的形式形成一系列的空间，然后呈不同角的的堆积。其结果，从外面看，是一个很图形化建筑，它的图形感来自建筑木炭色粉刷的外表皮和管状建筑空间那大片透亮玻璃面山墙。晚上，室内照明有着戏剧性的效果，建筑的轮廓渐渐消失在浓浓的夜幕，而它的明亮的大窗户，成为展示柜面，室内的陈设最大限度的充斥了观察者的视野。

ANT

Inside, the angular intersection of the individual stacked 'houses', which create in total a five-storey, in places dramatically cantilevered, structure, produces a series of unpredictable spaces, at times domestic in scale (fitting, of course, given the nature of the project), at others grander. The visitor's movement through the VitraHaus is a rather peripatetic and resolutely vertical one, as they negotiate the structure's various layers by means of staircases which, as Vitra's press release puts it rather purply, 'are integrated into expansive, winding organic volumes that figurative eat their way through the various levels of the building like a worm, sometimes revealing fascinating visual relationships between the various houses, at other times blocking the view.'

在内部，相互穿插叠加的“盒子”，总共5层，戏剧化的悬臂着，结构，营造出一系列不可预知的空间，同时也创造出不同比例的室内空间。访问者在VitraHaus内部穿行是一次很好的竖向方向的巡游，他们就好似是在和结构的不同楼层进行谈判，就像Vitra的新闻稿中所说的那样，像是被一个蠕虫吃到肚子去体验那些蜿蜒的有机的空间，有时揭示各种房屋之间不同层次之间的绝妙的视觉关系，有时却刻意阻止了视线。

ANT

Worms aside, the way you discover the totality of this building's somewhat labyrinthine interior is delightful. Great views of the surrounding landscape, both near (in the form of the Vitra campus's other exemplary buildings) and far (like Basel's industrial-looking pharmaceutical sector), only add to the experience, of course. For Herzog & de Meuron, who describe the configuration of the VitraHaus stack as the result of having 'crashed one building into another, allowing for unexpected spaces', the element of surprise experienced by the visitor mirrors the creative process they followed. Suggesting their role as one of observers of the design as it took shape, as much as its agents, the architects examined the multitude of spaces the 'crashing' produced, each space being assessed in terms of how suitable it was to the client's needs.

“蠕虫”的外部，你对这个建筑的内部整体的认知方式有点迷糊却是令人愉快的。周围拥有极好的景观视野，无论近（在维特拉校园的其他示范建筑）或远的（如巴塞尔工业前瞻性的制药厂），都只会增加体验的过程。对于赫尔佐格和德梅隆，这样描述VitraHaus-一堆盒子的不期而遇的碰撞，形成了始料未及的空间，访问者出乎意料的体验、经历反映了创作过程中，也是他们可以追求的。说明它们作为设计的，这意味着他们的角色更多的是一个观察者，而不是一个被委托设计者，建筑师检视过那些“不期而遇”的碰撞产生的空间，每一个空间均是对合客户的需求的反映。

ANT

Rolf Fehlbaum really works the metaphor of the home and the idea of homecoming: the VitraHaus is presented as a homecoming in architectural-commission terms, with Vitra using local Basel-based 'old friends', Herzog & de Meuron, for the project, after the international likes of Hadid and Ando. Home is also the Weil am Rhein site itself. '"Why is the building here?," people ask. Because we are from here. We produce here.' While Vitra's headquarters may be over the border in Basel, the German production site has, through its safari park of architectural attractions (which, in additional to the large-scale structures, include a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, a knock-down petrol station by Jean Prouvé and a bus stop designed by Jasper Morrison, replete with Eames wire seating) achieved a particular signficance in the imagination of both the design cognescenti and a more general public. Vitra is visited by 100,000 people a year.

Rolf Fehlbaum确实贯彻了家居的概念：“VitraHaus是家具概念的代表和体现”在建筑设计竞赛中被明确提出，就像当地巴塞尔的'老朋友'，赫尔佐格和德梅隆项目，后现代 。像哈迪德和安藤。Home也是Weil am Rhein基地本身。“为什么建筑要在这里？”有人问。因为我们是从这里开始。我们在这里生产。虽然维特拉的总部可能会越过在巴塞尔边境，德国的生产基地已通过其景点野生动物园建筑的吸引力取得了显著的意义。维特拉每年有10万人次来访。

ANT

The VitraHaus capitalises on the idea of Weil as hallowed ground. The building, positioned at the front of the site, acts as a highly visible welcome sign to those arriving. A welcome home, as Vitra would have it. But beyond this function as a brand and communication tool, the project has a canny business rationale. In tough economic times, why spend money on showing at expensive trade fairs when you can invite commerical customers to your very own on-site showroom, where the brand experience can be controlled to a much greater degree? It'll also be interesting to see what effect the VitraHaus will have on the company's existing network of much smaller showrooms in nearby cities. 'We are an economically minded company,' Fehlbaum reminds us.



The plan is that the VitraHaus will encourage visitors – trade, consumer and cultural – to spend a full day on site. Various rooms contain staged settings of furniture and other objects, including classics by Charles & Ray Eames, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Jean Prouvé and Verner Panton, as well as contemporary designs by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Hella Jongerius, Jasper Morrison, Maarten van Severen, Antonio Citterio and others. A 'colour laboratory' has been created to help visitors negotiate that always-tricky area of chromatic choice. There is a children's area upstairs and, immediately on entering the building of course, a shop.

Next to the small, larch-floored courtyard (defined by the building's intersecting forms) that you pass through before reaching the main entrance is a small gallery space called the Vitrine. Acting as a trailer almost for the main attraction that is the Vitra Design Museum's stunning permanent collection, it presents a small, but impressive, selection of industrially made chairs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps as a nod to the artefacts contained within, the two non-glazed sides of the Vitrine house are concave, forming banks that allows visitors to sit outside.

'We wanted buildings that are memorable and exciting,' says Rolf Fehlbaum of the architectural collection that Vitra has built up at Weil, 'and we got them.' He's not wrong. With the VitraHaus, the company has achieved a pedigree landmark building that, in brand terms, speaks confidently of Vitra's status as high-end design manufacturer with a real commitment to creating a cultural legacy, but which also, on a practical level, provides it with a space, or series of intimate spaces that allow it to do what it ultimately comes down to: to sell persuasively to an already interested audience. It's not been the best of times financially for the company, as Fehlbaum admits readily: 'Vitra has been badly affected (by the economic downturn). 2009 was a bad year.' But, as the chief executive also points out, 'Buildings have always anticpated great changes at Vitra. They give us focus.' This is one house that plans on welcoming home the profit.

liink

vitra在上海有代售点，地址是淮海西路570红坊（就是有很多城市雕塑的那个） B111号

孟怡辽

好神奇的空间，结构要怎么做呢

kobewy

空间很有个性啊