Weil am Rhein's 3 Deconstructivist buildings are all on the Vitra Campus — an open-air museum of radical architecture assembled by a single furniture company. Frank Gehry contributed twice: the Vitra Factory Building of 1989 and the Vitra Design Museum, both introducing the crumpled, tilted forms and colliding volumes that would define his later career. The Factory Building experiments with industrial shed typology; the Museum wraps exhibition galleries in angular white volumes that appear to tumble across the site.
Zaha Hadid's Fire Station — her first completed building — is a composition of razor-sharp concrete planes that appear to be in motion, as if frozen mid-collapse. Though no longer used as a fire station, it remains one of the most powerful early statements of Deconstructivist architecture. Together, these three buildings by two of the movement's founding figures make the Vitra Campus a pilgrimage for anyone interested in how architecture broke free from the orthogonal grid.
