Vitra Opens Schaudepot

Per Vitra, the Schaudepot "provides the Vitra Design Museum with a venue for presenting key objects from its extensive collection to the public." These include 400 key objects of modern furniture design from 1800 to the present culled from the museum's roughly 7,000 pieces of furniture and 1,000 lighting objects and archives. Frank Gehry's design for the Vitra Design Museum from 1989 was intended to display these furnishings, but since its galleries have been used primarily for temporary exhibitions, such as Alvar Aalto: Second Nature and Making Africa, a dedicated building was needed to display Vitra's sizable collection.

The Schaudepot is the latest addition to a campus that also includes buildings by Tadao Ando, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, SANAA, and Alvaro Siza. It is the first new building on campus since Herzog & de Meuron's VitraHaus from 2010, which stacked a series of gabled forms to create a series of domestically scaled showrooms. This residential allusion extends to the new building, which is basically a big shed that looks like a house. 

In addition to displaying part of the collection, the Schaudepot includes the Schaudepot Shop, which presents "a carefully selected assortment of design products," and the Depot Deli, which serves "a variet of internationally inspired delicacies." With the new building, the Vitra Campus has become a place to spend the whole day, not just a few hours visiting the museum and taking an architectural tour.