The Vitra Campus located in Weil am Rhein, Germany, has been rebuild but also redesigned after a devastating fire in 1981 that crippled the Vitra design campus. The architect chosen to redesign the Vitra Fire Station was Zaha Hadid, and this building represents Hadid’s first realized project of her career.
The Vitra fire station represents a synthesis of philosophy and architecture that bridges the Vitra design campus to its surrounding context. The first phase of the design process was to relate the existing buildings on the campus to the surrounding agricultural context. The location of the new building was envisioned as a linear landscape as if it were an artificial extension of the adjacent fields and vineyards.
The Vitra Fire Station project is a combination of concrete planes that can bend, tilt, or break according to the conceptual dynamic forces that are connecting landscape and architecture.
