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.
“We are now on a completely different trip,” he tells me, looking out at the Tane Garden House, an enigmatic thatched hut raised on little stone legs, designed by the 43-year-old Paris-based Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane. “It is the first building we have made with full awareness of the climate crisis. Over the years we knew, of course, but we didn’t really care. We destroyed this natural landscape by building an industrial site. Now I want to let nature take it back.”
Fehlbaum and his brother, Raymond, inherited the Vitra company from their mother and father, Erika and Willi, in 1977. Their parents had established the business in the 1950s, as the European manufacturer of glamorous designs by Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, who Willi had discovered on a trip to the US in 1953, and built a small factory in the bucolic outskirts of Weil am Rhein. A big fire in 1981 destroyed half the campus, and Fehlbaum brought in Grimshaw to build a new modular factory at speed, triggering his lust for working with architects.
“There was never any guiding plan,” Fehlbaum admits. “We never held competitions or did research. It was more intuition. For example, I saw Zaha in Blueprint magazine and asked her to design a chair for us, but it wasn’t very good. We didn’t manage a chair, but we managed a building!” His Gehry story is similar: it began with a series of cardboard chairs, before a factory, and then the museum, which buckles and writhes with chaotic delight, containing the kernel of his later, computer-aided buildings.
Herzog & de Meuron – whose headquarters is located in nearby Basel – was a different matter. “They’re local,” says Fehlbaum, “so they always looked at me and thought: ‘That guy is really strange; why doesn’t he build with us?’” In 2006, he relented and commissioned them to design the VitraHaus, a dark grey stack of extruded house profiles, which towers above the other buildings on the site. “It was originally going to be closer to Frank’s building, and the same colour as it, but I felt it was a bit too competitive,” he says with a grin. The campus is as much an exhibition of egos as it is of buildings, with each previous architect evidently not particularly happy about what came next.
The emphasis has now shifted. Fehlbaum handed over the day-to-day running of the business in 2012 to his niece, Nora, a lifelong environmentalist, who has set the company on a zero-carbon path. Fabrics are no longer allowed to be glued to seats, allowing easy repair, plastics are mostly recycled and the company has launched a series of “circle stores” where customers can have their chairs repaired and reconditioned. Nora’s outlook has clearly rubbed off on Rolf, who has engaged Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets to come up with a rewilding strategy for the campus. What once were neatly manicured lawns – a green carpet on which the hallowed architectural objects were arranged – are now overgrown wildflower meadows. Expanses of tarmac are to be slimmed down, “Miyawaki” forests planted, and rainwater ponds dug. Fehlbaum says he wants “to make the whole campus one big park”.
In line with his Damascene eco conversion, the Tane Garden House is made almost entirely of locally sourced natural materials, assembled by local craftsmen, and touches the land as lightly as can be. In the words of Tane, it is “overground architecture”, using materials gathered from the surface, rather than extracted from below the earth.
It stands on the edge of a garden, planted by celebrity wildflower alchemist Piet Oudolf, like something that might have scuttled here from the Black Forest, a hairy creature hunkered in its new nest. It looks as if the roof has gone wild and taken on a life of its own, a thatched fringe so overgrown that it has subsumed the building below it and engulfed the whole volume in a thick coat of dried grass. A wooden staircase spills down from the roof, wrapped with a woven rope balustrade, inviting visitors up to a terrace, where views of the surrounding garden unfold. The stairs land on a single giant rock, like a neolithic launchpad, giving the journey to the top a momentous feeling, while a wooden bench wraps its way around the skirt of the thatch, meeting a wooden trough where water drips from a single brass spout.
Compared with the formal fireworks on display across the rest of the campus – where slabs of concrete levitate on steel poles, and not-quite-seamless white surfaces creak and grind with pre-computer abandon – it has a refreshingly primitive quality.
Tane says he was inspired by a visit to Ballenberg, an open air museum of Swiss vernacular buildings, where steeply pitched roofs and deep, overhanging eaves collide with shingle, thatch and Flintstones-like boulder walls. “Architecture has a role in preserving memory,” he says. “I wanted to dig into the memory of this place. Always digging and digging, to think towards the future.” He calls his process “archaeology of the future” (a phrase he shares, somewhat reluctantly, with his former business partner, Lina Ghotmeh, architect of this summer’s Serpentine pavilion). Fehlbaum says his method was completely different from any other architect he had ever worked with, beginning without an initial form in mind. Instead, Tane’s team developed the design by building hundreds of tiny models, using moss, bark, soil, sticks and stones, as if channelling some latent earthy energy from the site. Each one is a jewel-like piece of architectural ikebana, a fleet of tiny huts, caves and grottoes that could have been plucked from a miniature Japanese rock garden. (They will all be shown at an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum later this year.)
Inside, the building provides a calming space for the gardeners to rest and have a tea break, with a small kitchen, loo, table and chairs. Views out are framed by the chunky, sculpted thatch, which doubles up as insulation, with chamfered window reveals and curved eaves elegantly shorn on site. Even the rope balustrade was woven together in situ, to avoid any mechanical fixings. Of all the buildings here, it feels like the one where the most manual care has been lavished – on a space of just 15 sq metres. So is this diminutive hut the final bookend of Fehlbaum’s life of architectural patronage and minting Pritzker-winners in the process?
“We don’t have any more buildings planned,” he says ruefully. “But I hope there will be something else to do. Actually, we are now working on a passage’,” his eyes sparkling with the prospect of yet another project, “which will be something very special indeed.”
