即使在位于Weil-am-Rhein的Vitra园区–一个由家具工厂、办公室、陈列室和画廊组成的集合体，其中许多都是标志性建筑师的产品–Vitra设计博物馆也显得与众不同。博物馆由相互连接的曲线体组成的雕塑形式，是弗兰克-盖里（Frank Gehry）明确无误的作品–这位建筑师在这种结构上为自己建立了遗产。可能不是很明显的是这个宁静的白色建筑所代表的十字路口：正是在这个位于德国西南角（靠近瑞士边境）的项目中，盖里第一次实现了他现在标志性风格的结构。

Even at the Vitra Campus in Weil-am-Rhein—a collection of furniture factories, offices, showrooms, and galleries, many of which are the products of iconic architects—the Vitra Design Museum stands out as exceptional. With its sculptural form composed of interconnected curving volumes, the museum is the unmistakable work of Frank Gehry – an architect who has built a legacy for himself upon such structures. What may not be immediately apparent is the crossroads that this serene white building represents: it was in this project at the southwestern corner of Germany (close to the Swiss border) that Gehry first realized a structure in the vein of his now signature style.

与许多伟大的建筑作品一样，Vitra设计博物馆的故事也始于一场火灾。1981年的一个晚上，一道闪电击中了Vitra校园，引发了一场大火，到了早上，一半的校园变成了燃烧的废墟。在这场灾难之后，Vitra委托世界各地的一些著名建筑师–包括安藤忠雄、阿尔瓦罗-西扎和扎哈-哈迪德–提供建筑设计，以取代在大火中损失的建筑，策划了一系列由20世纪末最著名的设计师设计的项目。
盖瑞对校园的贡献是在20世纪80年代末。在其（当时）三十年的经营中，Vitra积累了大量的椅子和其他家用家具的收藏。该公司最初计划将这些物品放置在一个简单的棚屋式结构中，既提供公共展览又提供存储设施。然而，在设计过程中，这个简单的任务变得更加雄心勃勃；原本被设想为私人收藏品的展示空间演变成了维特拉设计博物馆，一个致力于研究、传播和普及设计的独立组织。

As with a number of great works of architecture, the Vitra Design Museum’s story began with a fire. One night in 1981, a single bolt of lightning struck the Vitra Campus setting off an inferno which reduced half of the campus to smoldering ruins by morning. In the wake of the devastation, Vitra would commission a number of notable architects from around the world—including Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, and Zaha Hadid—to contribute designs for buildings to replace those lost in the blaze, curating a sequence of projects by some of the late 20th Century’s most celebrated designers.
Gehry’s contribution to the campus came in the late 1980s. Over its (then) three decades in business, Vitra had accumulated a sizable collection of chairs and other pieces of domestic furniture. The company initially planned to house these articles in a simple shed-like structure, providing both public exhibition and storage facilities. During the design process, however, this simple mandate grew more ambitious; what had been envisioned as a display space for a private collection evolved into the Vitra Design Museum, an independent organization dedicated to the research, dissemination and popularization of design.

到了20世纪80年代，加拿大裔美国人盖瑞已经作为 “解构主义 “建筑师而声名鹊起。他当时的作品摒弃了现代主义的冰冷的纪念碑式的风格，而是寻求与周围环境的完整性，并创造出与人类尺度关系更明确的空间。他在加州威尼斯的家也许是这种理念的最好例证，那里有锯齿状的、倾斜的铁链和玻璃的突起。事实上，他的早期作品几乎完全由直线和角度组成，与他后来采用的起伏的雕塑风格相去甚远。只有在维特拉设计博物馆，他在欧洲的第一个实现的建筑，盖里现在的标志性风格才开始出现。
设计博物馆是与德国建筑师Günter Pfeifer合作设计的，是盖里较小规模的解构主义项目与他更出名的更宏大、更圆滑的美学之间的一个明显过渡。它既不是完全的棱角分明，也不是完全的曲线，而是一种混合，两种性质的体量在整个结构中以浅浅的角度相交。倾斜的曲线，用白色石膏装饰，可能是参考了勒-柯布西耶的上圣母院，位于法国边境的附近。同时，覆盖在屋顶和一些墙面上的锌合金镀层不仅参考了附近的尼古拉斯-格里姆肖的工厂建筑，而且预示着盖里以后的作品将完全用抛光的金属来覆盖。

By the 1980s, the Canadian-American Gehry had already made a name for himself as a “Deconstructivist” architect. His body of work by the time rejected the cold monumentality of Modernism, instead seeking integrity with its surroundings and creating spaces that related more clearly to human scale. This philosophy was perhaps best exemplified by his own home in Venice, California, with its jagged, oblique protrusions of chain link and glass. In fact, his early work was almost exclusively composed of straight lines and angles, a far cry from the undulating, sculptural style he has since adopted. It was only with the Vitra Design Museum, his first realized building in Europe, that Gehry’s now signature style began to emerge.
Designed in collaboration with German architect Günter Pfeifer, the Design Museum is a clear transition between Gehry’s smaller-scale Deconstructivist projects and the grander, sleeker aesthetic for which he is better known. It is neither fully angular nor fully curved but a mixture, with volumes of either nature intersecting at shallow angles throughout the structure. The sloping curves, finished in white plaster, are likely a reference to Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut, located nearby across the French border. The zinc alloy plating which covers the roof and some wall planes, meanwhile, not only references a nearby factory building by Nicholas Grimshaw, but calls forward to Gehry’s later works, which would be sheathed entirely in polished metals.

建筑内部包括四个主要的展示厅、生产区、一个测试实验室、食堂、多功能厅和办公室。这些空间的功能要求决定了构成建筑形式的体积塔、桥梁和立方体的大小，但它们的安排显然是由创造空间复杂性的愿望决定的。[6] 曲线的加入，除了参考Notre Dame du Haut之外，还可能受到附近Vitra工厂的启发：焦点元素是温和的、横跨的曲线。这也许是为了暗示一种集体运动的感觉，适合于工业制造的地方。
尽管其8000平方英尺（743平方米）的展览空间对于一个博物馆来说是比较小的，但维特拉设计博物馆仍然是世界上致力于设计的领先机构之一。展示区占据了建筑的两层，由一系列的展厅组成（其中两个展厅由一个引人注目的螺旋形楼梯连接）。屋顶上有一个巨大的十字架，使展览空间沐浴在光线中。主要的家具收藏，最初只包括Vitra首席执行官Rolf Fehlbaum的大约200把现代和当代椅子，后来发展到6000多件物品，包括椅子、餐具、消费电子产品和建筑原型。
维特拉设计博物馆于1989年向公众开放，并在此后的近三十年里享有广泛的赞誉。它由相互关联的体量组成的流畅、动态的构图给人留下了深刻的印象；建筑作家和评论家保罗-海尔（Paul Heyer）称赞该建筑，将其描述为 “外部是一个连续变化的白色漩涡，每个漩涡似乎与其他漩涡没有明显的关系，其内部是一个动态的强大的相互作用，反过来直接表现了外部的旋转。作为一个整体，它将自己分解成一个纠缠在一起的连贯性展示”。对盖瑞本人来说，Vitra设计博物馆代表了一种改变生活的顿悟：”我喜欢我在画草图时可以做的塑形，但我从未想过我会在建筑中这样做。无论人们对盖瑞独特的建筑风格持何种立场，都不能否认它已成为一种全球性的轰动–这种轰动诞生于德国一个不起眼的角落里的一个规模不大的工厂园区的博物馆。

The interior of the building comprises four main display galleries, production areas, a test laboratory, cafeteria, multi-purpose room, and offices. It is the functional requirements of these spaces that helped to dictate the size of the volumetric towers, bridges, and cubes that compose the form of the building, but their arrangement was evidently dictated by a desire to create a sense of spatial intrigue.[6] The inclusion of curves, beyond referencing Notre Dame du Haut, may also be inspired by the nearby Vitra factory: the focal elements being gentle, sweeping curves. This, perhaps, was meant to imply the feeling of a collective movement, fitting for a place of industrial manufacturing.
Despite its 8,000 square feet (743 square meters) of exhibition space being relatively modest for a museum, the Vitra Design Museum is nonetheless one of the world’s leading institutions dedicated to design. The display areas occupy two floors of the building, consisting of a series of exhibition halls (two of which connected by a dramatic spiral stairway). A large cross is cut into the roof above, bathing the exhibition spaces in light. The main furniture collection, originally consisting solely of Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum’s approximately 200 Modern and contemporary chairs, has since grown to over 6,000 objects including chairs, cutlery, consumer electronics, and architectural prototypes.
The Vitra Design Museum opened its doors to the public in 1989 and has enjoyed widespread acclaim in the almost three decades since. Its fluid, dynamic composition of interconnected volumes made an instant and lasting impression; architectural writer and critic Paul Heyer lauded the building, describing it as “a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display.” For Gehry himself, the Vitra Design Museum represented a life-altering epiphany: “I love the shaping I can do when I’m sketching and it never occurred to me that I would do it in a building. The first thing I built of anything like that is Vitra in Germany.”Whatever stance one takes on Gehry’s unique architectural style, it cannot be denied that it has become a global sensation – a sensation which was born in a modestly-sized museum in a factory campus in a discreet corner of Germany.

Architects: Gehry Partners
Year: 1989
Photographs: Liao Yusheng
Manufacturers: PHOS Design
City：WEIL AM RHEIN
Country：Germany