Vitradesign Museum
How to find us:
- Street
- Charles-Eames-Str. 1
- Zip, City
- 79576 Weil
- Country
- Germany
- Phone
- 0049-7621-702 35 78
- Fax
- 0049-7621-702 31 46
- Web
- http://www.design-museum.de
- Tags
- #Möbel #Innenarchitektur #Design
Description
The Vitra Design Museum forms an international centre for design and architecture on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, near the Swiss border with Basel. The institution operates as a foundation and is primarily dedicated to temporary exhibitions, retrospectives and workshops in the fields of furniture, interior design and architecture.
Originally a building for the permanent presentation of a furniture collection was planned; after a change of focus it became a house for temporary exhibitions and events. A founding director led the museum from its opening in 1989 until 2010. From 2011 to 2020 the exhibition and events programme was significantly expanded; since 2020 the museum has been led by a new sole director.
The collection focuses on furniture and interior design. Its basis was the estate of the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames; the holdings also include designs by numerous well-known industrial designers such as George Nelson, Alvar Aalto, Verner Panton, Dieter Rams, Jean Prouvé and Michael Thonet. The collection is complemented by archives, sketches and prototypes that provide extensive insight into design processes. A supplementary library and archive document the state of research.
In 2016 a windowless visible-storage building of red brick with a low gabled roof was opened on the campus to provide space for the growing collection; some 7,000 pieces of furniture and about 1,300 lighting fixtures are inventoried there, and the permanent exhibition presents roughly 400 key pieces from 1800 to the present. Other sites and project spaces on the grounds have in the past been used by a Berlin branch (2000–2004) and a small museum gallery in which experimental projects were presented between 2011 and 2015. In 2017 the institution recorded its strongest year to date, with a total of 178,707 visitors across the various facilities on the campus.
To improve the campus connection, there are plans to extend Tram line 8 of the Basel tram network; in the context of the "Herzstück Basel" project the idea of an S-Bahn connection has also been discussed.