During Art Basel, the world’s largest modern and contemporary art fair held in Basel in early June, Vitra unveiled a building of only 15 square meters signed by a young Japanese, Tsuyoshi Tane. He is the youngest designer invited to create a piece for the company’s campus: a collection of signature interventions, between architecture and art, articulated in a scheme that manages to be both functional – to meet the needs of a large manufacturing and commercial reality – and usable as an open-air museum.
The story is well known: in 1981 a fire destroyed part of the factory, and it became an opportunity to rebuild the spaces under the banner of architectural experimentation. Since then, small architectures and installations signed by Nicholas Grimshaw (1981), Frank Gehry (1989), Zaha Hadid (1993), Tadao Ando (1993), Herzog & De Meuron (2010), SANAA (2012) and Piet Oudolf (2020), among others, have been attached to Vitra’s factory in Germany, just a few hundred meters away from the Swiss border.
The latest designer invited by Rolf Fehlbaum to work on to the Vitra Campus located at the Weil am Rhein is, indeed, architect Tsuyoshi Tane. Born in 1979, Tane, who founded the firm that bears his name in Paris, signed the small structure squeezed between Kazuo Shinohara‘s very recent Umbrella House (1922) and the Industrial Pavilion built by Alvaro Siza in 1994.
Built with sustainable and locally sourced materials and by local artisans, the small architecture signed by Tane is a compact structure that can accommodate up to eight people. In addition to a small café corner, the house is equipped with gardening tools and is designed for garden enthusiasts and gardeners who, on campus, maintain the Oudolf Garten, the garden designed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, by the Dutch landscaper. Outside, seating and a small fountain have been created for watering or cleaning boots and tools. The building also features an outdoor viewing platform from which visitors can enjoy unprecedented perspectives on the Vitra Campus.
