The Schaudepot exhibition pavilion, where the permanent exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum is created, is the second building of the famous Swiss on the factory campus. Their showroom VitraHaus, built here in 2010, is made up of 12 gable-roofed houses stacked on top of each other, and the new object has received a similar archetypal "proto-hut" shape. Moreover, it is completely windowless and has only one entrance. As the architects themselves say, this ostentatious privacy allows visitors to be more intrigued, protects exhibits better and is more in line with the industrial purpose of the campus.
Justifying the name, which can literally be translated as "exhibition warehouse", the new pavilion really looks like a kind of hangar, but rather refined. It naturally interacts with the surrounding works of other "star" architects: the walls, lined with half bricks (they were broken by hand right on the spot), echo the factory building of Alvaro Siza, and the laconic forms of the building, on the contrary, contrast with the fire station of Zaha Hadid. The dynamic podium on which the building is raised forms an open public area for various events and also plays an important role in integrating the new facility into a very vibrant, strong environment: the Vitra campus architectural collection is the most imposing and brilliant of its kind.
The interior of the pavilion is also laconic and close to industrial roots. The main space is lined with a regular pattern of fluorescent lamps on the ceiling and organized with special display racks designed by Dieter Thiel. They house about 400 of the most important pieces of the furniture collection. Also on the main level there is a museum shop and a cafe, a separate space connects it with restoration workshops, a library and an office of the museum staff.
But the building, located in a small hollow, has another basement, in which the storage of exhibits is organized. This area is not open to the public, but is visible from the main hall thanks to the large elongated "window" in the wall. And this visual integrity of the collection and the museum space was extremely important for both the architects and the clients of the project.
