The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein is a place of pilgrimage for lovers of design and architecture. Currently it attracts around 350,000 visitors each year. Sir Nicholas Grimshaw produced the master plan for the 25-hectare site. In 1989 the entrance building and design museum by Frank Gehry were the first deconstructiv-ist landmarks placed in the northern part of the site. Buildings by other great architects - almost all of them winners of the Pritzker Prize - followed. In the southern part Zaha Hadid gave material form to her pioneering dynamic ideas about space in her fire station building with its pointed canopy roof. In 2010 the Vitra flagship store opened: showing immense delight in experiment Herzog & de Meuron stacked twelve pitched-roof houses with fully glazed gable walls to create an anthracite grey "heap of houses", 21.30 metres high. Vitra products are displayed here. However the collection of around 7,000 pieces of furniture, more than 1,000 lighting objects, archives and designers' estates remained under lock and key. A dilapidated build- ing beside Hadid's fire station offered an opportunity to erect the Schaudepot there.
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