27^th June. I had been looking forward to Basle, in fact I had rushed there to see projects by SAANA, Markali, Botta to name but a few, yet in the end I had time to see a fraction.  Skirting the city entirely, I first completed a tour of the Vitra Design museum in neighbouring Veil am Rhine before crossing the Swiss border to Riehen and the Beyeler Foundation, but even this was too much for one day.

Vitra was built up by Willi Fehlbaum who having fallen in love with the Eames’ furniture while on holiday in America, decided to bring it to Europe.  And indeed he did.  By 1967, they were manufacturing their own originals, and began to assume a position at the forefront of the art.  A change of direction and leadership came after a fire virtually destroyed the original plant in 1981.  Ralf Fehlbaum, the son of Willi, began to take over and rebuild Vitra with a series of ambitious architectural commissions.  His first move was to recruit Grimshaw Associates and a soon after, Frank Gherry.  Vitra now boasts buildings from Ando, Siza, Hadid, and before the year is out, SAANA and Basle’s own Herzog and de Mouron.  Despite all of the museum like features, it is still a working factory and also the headquarters of the companies operations, but one in which a conspicuous designeryness, pervades.  Everything is on display here, even the rough and ready – it is interesting to consider that Vitra, the company and the name finds its origin in ‘vitrine’, an object in which to display an object.

While waiting for the tour I walked around the museum, one of the buildings built by Gehry.  It was showing an impressive collection from the São Paulo partnership, the Campania Brothers – the highlight being an organic knot of velvety green, inspired by the virility and flora of the Amazon.  The building itself is both dynamic and practical.  Stylistically it inherits something from the alpine churches, whose tall white spires pierce the landscape in the surrounding area, yet particularly inside, it is unmistakably Californian.  A number of monolithic walls seem to act more as frames than as structure, painted white and composed in a sculptorly manner they carve out a variety of spaces, each with different lighting conditions and many nooks for individual displays.  Most impressive is the skylight, a cruciform that hovers over the main hall.  Like everything else in the building, it is achieved in a complex fashion.  The cruciform extends down deep into the hall, its sides extruded at different angles and lengths through the ceiling which is lost in shadow against the incoming light.  It may be a signature architecture but it is spatially intriguing and not without human touch.

Across a grassy swathe and amongst an orchard of cherry trees sits a very different building, a conference centre by Ando.  At first Ando was reluctant to accept the project, on the grounds ‘he was unfamiliar with the European mindset’.  In the end it was the cherry trees that swayed him more than anything and he got to build in his own way, with his back turned on the rest of the Vitra compound, for the building is all about escape, forward looking and concentration.  A path leads east and away, wide enough only for a single person it winds its way in a most geometric fashion along a line of cherry trees, and finally turns a corner behind a three meter wall enclosing the orchard.  You leave everything behind, a few more moments to straighten yourself out and then you enter, perhaps making greetings, taking off your jacket, already mentally prepared for business

The form is abstract, platonic even, two long rectangular plans meet off axis at a circular drum in the centre which links the two and also the entrance level with the floor cut out below.  Ando is playing a number of compositional games, walls never quite meet and light enters between gaps where ceiling hover, one is also sure proportioning systems are engaged, the repletion of the signature shutter pattern clearly demarks this.  But it is all enacted with a robust and securing palate of materials, heavy masonry, black ironwork and wood.  This is certainly a building comfortable with intensity and intellect.

As I left I noticed a blemish in the concrete.  Ando is famous for his finish, his shuttering boards are designed with six fixings when only four are necessary.  He even punched a foreman for failing to clean his shutters before a pour, presumably pretty hard as he used to be a boxer.  It is fitting then that this little scar was a perfect imprint of a spring cherry leaf, petrified forever – a reminder of renewal when the orchard is bear and icy.

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