Vitra Design Museum

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, near the Swiss border at Basel, is a privately owned museum devoted to furniture and design, built for the Vitra furniture company's founder Rolf Fehlbaum and opened in 1989. Designed by the architect Frank Gehry, it was one of his first major buildings in Europe and a landmark of deconstructivist architecture, built largely of white plaster over a steel frame with a roof clad in titanium-zinc alloy, its sloping, curving white forms breaking from Gehry's more typically angular sculptural language and recalling, by some accounts, the curved concrete forms of Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in France. The museum building sits on a wider Vitra campus that has since grown to include structures by other prominent architects, including Tadao Ando, alongside Gehry's original design.