Vitra Schaudepot

This building on a furniture company campus gives its design museum a place to show key objects from its collection, with a cafe and a shop, and creates a second entrance to the campus.

The collection ranks among the most important holdings of furniture design in the world, with some 7,000 pieces, a large body of lighting and many archives, including the estates of Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton and Alexander Girard. The main museum building of 1989 is used for temporary exhibitions, so the collection had never been on permanent display.

At its heart is a permanent exhibition of more than 400 key pieces of modern furniture from 1800 to the present, from early bentwood chairs to classics of modernism, colourful plastic designs of the Pop era and recent 3D-printed objects. A lower level offers further views into the collection. The building itself is a simple gabled volume in hand-broken brick, a windowless storehouse in which the objects are seen as on open shelves.