Vitra Design Museum opens show depot
On June 3, 2016, a new building will open on the Vitra Campus: the Vitra Schaudepot, designed by Basel architects Herzog & de Meuron. According to Vitra, the Schaudepot will be one of the world's largest permanent exhibitions and research facilities for modern furniture design.
In the show depot, the Vitra Design Museum will present key objects from its extensive collection to the public in an area of 1,600 square meters, complemented by a new café and store.
The collection of the Vitra Design Museum comprises a total of around 7,000 pieces of furniture, more than 1,000 lamps, numerous archives and the estates of designers such as Charles & Ray Eames, Verner Panton and Alexander Girard. Although the museum's main building was originally designed by Frank Gehry in 1989 as a collection building, today the museum presents large temporary exhibitions in it. The museum's collection has not been on permanent display until now.
Now the Basel architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron has realized a new building for the museum in which the collection is exhibited and communicated. At the center of the Schaudepot is a permanent exhibition of over 400 key pieces of modern furniture design from 1800 to the present day. Among the objects on display are early bentwood furniture, icons of classical modernism by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto or Gerrit Rietveld, but also colorful plastic objects of the pop era or recent designs from the 3D printer. (ah)
