Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, VitraHaus is a multi-layered structure that recently opened at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.
Designed to display the furniture brand's Home Collection, the five-story building consists of stacked volumes with pitched roofs covered in charcoal stucco. Each end is glazed and shoots outwards up to 16 feet (5 meters), creating the impression of a pile of houses.
On the interior, magnificent spiral staircases connect the intersecting white-painted interiors. All of the staircases are integrated into expansive, winding organic volumes that figuratively eat their way through the various levels of the building like a worm, sometimes revealing fascinating visual relationships between the various houses, at other times blocking the view.
The VitraHaus project joins existing buildings on the Vitra campus by Frank Gehry and Tadao Ando.
photos via: Julien Lanoo, Iwan Baan