You don’t need no introduction for Vitra, the Swiss company since the Thirties produces furniture and decor designed by personalities who have made the history of 20th century design. Practical representation is the site where everything takes place, the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. A structure open to the public where you can stroll and literally immerge in the history of design, in an extraordinary ensemble of contemporary architecture. Examples are everywhere: the Vitra Design Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, the Diogene unit, where in just 6 square meters Renzo Piano has combined all the elementary living functions, up to the bus stop shelter, designed by Jasper Morrison. Two new items have graced the Vitra Campus, going to enhance the educational character of the structure in favor of a passionate audience. The Álvaro Siza Promenade is a paved road of approximately 500 meters that creates a path independent of the fenced corporate area, through which visitors arriving from Basilea can easily reach the sights without being disturbed by the traffic of corporate vehicles. Siza chose to enhance the natural element, with tall hedges and green areas that should highlight the changing of the seasons, in stark contrast with the hard and immutable materials used for structural parts, in the typical sense of Siza where landscape and geometry follow each its own laws, finding this way a balance. At the border between architecture and art, was just inaugurated the Vitra Slide Tower by Carsten Höller, which more than a building in the classical sense of the term is a lookout tower with a slide with the main purpose to provide an experience. The slides are in fact distinctive element in the work of the German artist, as a sculpture in which “you can travel”. The Vitra Tower is composed of three pillars-sloping and converging steel, in whose intersection is placed a clock without numbers, whose hands show every twelve hours for a brief moment the Vitra logo. A representation of the time, but not meant to tell the time.
