Herzog & de Meuron make reference to the archetypal form of the gabled house, which is found in residential structures around the globe. It was clear even from this confection that the building was meant to serve as a new emblem of the venerable Swiss furniture manufacturer.But, standing in front of Herzog & de Meuron’s completed structure in Weil am Rhein, it’s hard to shake the mental image of the gingerbread house. It was certainly Koolhaas who engendered the stacking of “programmes” – or functions – in the generation to have emerged out of his office in the last decade.REX’s Louisville Plaza in Kentucky is a brute of an example, but the methodology has since been refined in Japanese hands by the likes of SANAA (at the New Museum in New York) and In the global context of images the VitraHaus is still relatively reserved. Like the gingerbread house, the campus is a fairytale creation, a curated zone where only the best architects in the world are allowed to play – a far cry from the pragmatic mediocrity of real cities. The company is shifting the emphasis from office to domestic furniture, and hoping that it can lure homemakers to its dream factory in Weil. But unless you know the countryside the way you distinguish one window from another is that in front of it Vitra has curated its furniture into a themed room (thus the Noguchi Window, the Eames room and so on).How is this different from a showroom in South Kensington or an Ikea in Edmonton? This is a stack of individual dreams, of infinite houses, none of them alike. Stacked into a total of five stories and breathtakingly cantilevered up to 49 feet in some places, the twelve houses, whose floor slabs intersect the underlying gables, create a three-dimensional assemblage – a pile of houses that, at first glance, has an almost chaotic appearance.Culture House Eemhuis | Neutelings Riedijk ArchitectsErste Campus Headquarters | Henke Schreieck ArchitectsArchitectural Design Tips by Luis F. (IG/lfdesign_bayarea)© Arch2o.com 2012-2020, Some rights reserved. The volumes cantilever up to 15m (image: Leon Chew)The first time I saw the VitraHaus it was made of gingerbread. This is quite simply as culturally ambitious as furniture showrooms get.As a piece of iconography the building serves a very clear purpose. Having said that, it’s not your average industrial park.

It’s a place, as Fehlbaum put it, “to find out who you are”. In the future, architecture historians may trace this typology back to mid-20th century Dutch modernists like Hugh Maaskant, whose comfort with bigness and the honest inelegancies of multifunctional buildings were such an influence on Rem Koolhaas. The difference here is the context. Ostensibly, it is a stack of houses. And yet somehow not. The concept of the VitraHaus connects two themes that appear repeatedly in the oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron: the theme of the archetypal house and the theme of stacked volumes. Come in, my little ones, and choose the home – the life – of your dreams.The VitraHaus embodies the modern idea that consumers want experiences as much as things. In Weil am Rhein, it was especially appropriate to return to the idea of the ur-house, since the primary purpose of the five-storey building is to present furnishings and objects for the home. The individual ‘houses’, which have the general characteristics of a display space, are conceived as abstract elements. In fact, even in the most literal sense it is a stack of houses – or archetypes, let’s say: the perfect Swiss pitched roof house. It is somehow not – to use Freud’s term – unheimlich enough for a stack of houses. Is it too arch to collide the Grimm fairytale and Vitra’s business ambitions? Since “how does it look in the Haus?” will be the question Rolf asks from now on, the question we should ask is how will the Haus influence what Vitra makes from now on?This is one of those odd buildings that exists in two contexts: one is in Weil, and the other is in the global firmanent of ideas avidly devoured by young architects on the digital hinterlands of the webOn the ground floor, the Vitrine space shows chairs from the Vitra Design Museum collection (image: Iwan Baan)Copyright © 2020 iconeye - Website Designed by Media 10 Ltd | Enjoying the landscape with the help of Eames and Prouvé (image: Iwan Baan)

Carefully stacked and finished with beaded icing, 
it looked delicious on Vitra’s 2009 Christmas card. Having seen the model – and of course that mouth-watering gingerbread version – the real thing seems to have little more to offer except for the drama of the odd cantilever. Just what is it that makes Vitra’s homes so different, so appealing? It avoids a Swiss-army-knife neatness by being just chaotic enough. But it’s also the aptness of that image. It is after all more rural than Fujimoto’s building, a stack of barns rather than houses. Surely this heap of structures is too chaotic, too monumental, too expressive, too playful, too – let’s face it – untidy. They have stretched this basic form and combined a series of “houses” in an intersecting stack. Standing beside the Vitra Design Museum by Frank Gehry (1989) and the Conference Pavilion by Tadao Ando (1993) VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein, by Herzog & de Meuron (2010) connects the two buildings.

This isn’t New York or LA, it’s not even Basel – it’s an industrial park in Germany, just over the Swiss border. On the face of it, Herzog & de Meuron are ripping up the form book.