Build me a house! When someone asks you this question, probably the first thing that comes to your mind, is the typical house you used to draw when you were a kid. The rectangular volume with the triangle on top of it. We scrabbled this form so many times on sketch papers and showed it to our parents proudly. Herzog & de Meuron were asked by Vitra to build a space that would house their furniture designs. The Architects started with the Pitched House contour, they extruded & came out with the space. So simple yet so captivating. The space was left hollow from the inside, the only thing kept was this contour. The design of the volume challenges our way of perceiving the typical pitched roof houses. The design is stripped from its functional purpose and the form was used as it is. The same shape is stacked on top of each other to create the Vitra house, the volume interlinks with each other and create a chaotic relation between each other. The volumes are unifies by both their shape and their color, however together they meet randomly and open up to different areas of the vitra campus. The interior of the volumes offer a continuous flow of vision; the walls are white to make the displayed items stand out.
Looking at the Vitra house at night is intriguing. The only thing you see is the typical archetype house form lit, for a second it looks like a 2D yellow plane. It stands out in front of the dark outer walls finish. This relation is also obvious during daytime, where the white inner walls contrast with the dark outer ones.
Build me a house! Stack the houses on top! I do not care about the inner walls. To me they do not exist. The relation is now with the inner space and the outer skin, how does the two dialogue with each other? I think Herzog & de Meuron created the perfection relation. Although the skin contrasts with the inner space, yet the two seem to complement one another. At the first glance the project might seem a bit bulky, but then one can notice that the vision is continuous throughout the inner spaces, nothing cuts your sight, a delicacy the architects succeeded in achieving.
ARTSIE ARTSY 