A stubbly thatched roof pokes up above a hedge in a field on the outskirts of a small town in south-west Germany, the latest arrival to an unlikely scene of experimental structures dotted around the landscape. Nearby the futuristic profile of a geodesic dome rises, along with the folded aluminium shell of a modernist petrol station and the pitched wooden roof of a 1960s Japanese house. Across another field, there is a gigantic helter-skelter, a jagged concrete fire station and what looks like a teetering stack of supersized Monopoly houses, as well as a number of large industrial sheds that jiggle and jive with their own distinctive architectural ambitions.
Welcome to the Vitra Campus, a fun-filled home to a furniture factory on the edge of Weil am Rhein, at the southern tip of the Black Forest, which has evolved into a curious petting zoo of Pritzker prize-winning architects over the last 40 years. It is where Frank Gehry built his first building outside the US, where Tadao Ando realised his first project outside Japan, and where the late Zaha Hadid completed her first ever building at all, when it looked like her gravity-defying visions might never leave the canvas. Among them stand works by Álvaro Siza, Renzo Piano, Nicholas Grimshaw, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé, Herzog & de Meuron, Sanaa and more, forming a who’s who of starchitects against the foothills of the Alps.
The man with the architectural addiction, who took a chance on these sometimes untested names, is Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum. A softly spoken 82-year-old with a low-key, unassuming manner and thick black spectacles, he cuts an improbable figure as a Medici of 21st-century design. After decades of daring commissions, he has just completed what looks to be his final building on the site – and it couldn’t be further from what has come before.
