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Vitra Design Museum

Cultural and Institutional Buildings

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.

Facts
Building Type
Design museum 1
Location
Weil am Rhein, Germany 1
Completed Year
1989 2
Classification
Standing Status
Standing 1
Building Type
Building Type (category)
Museum 1
Connections

Has Building Type

Museum, Concepts

Entity-backed identity for the building-type enum value this building already carries, resolved to an architecture concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The building-type fact itself stays on the building unchanged.

In Style

Modernist Architecture, Styles and Movements
Source Vitra Design Museum, Wikipedia
In the Other Atlases
  • Also in Geography Atlas: Germany, located there.
Sources
1. Vitra Design Museum, Wikipedia
  • Lead section, first sentence
    a privately owned museum for design
  • Infobox, established
    Established 1989
  • Lead section, location
    Weil am Rhein, Germany, near Basel, Switzerland
  • Entity description and the lead of the Wikipedia article
    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.
  • In Style: Modernist Architecture, Wikipedia categories
    Category:Modernist architecture in Germany
View the Source
2. Wikidata: Vitra Design Museum
  • Wikidata Q700747, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
  • Wikidata Q700747, P571 claim (w-bbfill-artsarchag-0926)
View the Source
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