Museums & Galleries

Vitra Design Museum

Basel, Switzerland
Vitra Design Museum

Basel, Switzerland

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A design pilgrimage just outside Basel. Vitra Design Museum is where furniture, architecture, everyday life and modern design history become a full cultural experience — not just inside the museum, but across the whole campus.

Vitra Design Museum – Weil am Rhein

The Vitra Design Museum is one of the world’s leading museums dedicated to design and architecture. Located in Weil am Rhein, Germany, near the Swiss border, it is part of the renowned Vitra Campus.

The museum building, completed in 1989, was designed by architect Frank Gehry and is considered one of his early European masterpieces.

The Vitra Design Museum focuses on the history and future of industrial design, furniture, architecture, and contemporary culture.

Located in Weil am Rhein, Germany, near Basel, Vitra Design Museum is one of the world’s leading museums dedicated to design, past and present. Its work focuses on the relationship between design, architecture, art and everyday culture.

The main museum building was designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 1989; it was Gehry’s first completed building in Europe and remains one of the icons of the Vitra Campus. The wider campus includes major architecture, exhibitions, the VitraHaus, the Schaudepot, gardens, cafés and guided tours — making the visit feel more like a design landscape than a single museum stop.

Image credit

© Google Vitra Design Museum

What you’ll see here

At Vitra Design Museum, you don’t only look at chairs, objects or exhibitions. You understand how design shapes the way we sit, live, work, collect, move, build and imagine the future.

You may experience:

  • Temporary exhibitions on design and architecture
  • Furniture and interior design history
  • The Vitra Schaudepot, with highlights from the museum’s design collection
  • Architecture by Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, SANAA and others across the campus
  • The VitraHaus, gardens and design-focused cafés
  • Guided architecture tours and special programs

Worth the trip

Especially if you are in Basel for art, architecture or design.

What makes Vitra Design Museum special is that it expands the idea of an art trip. It shows that culture is not only paintings and sculptures, but also the objects we live with every day: chairs, lamps, rooms, houses, offices, materials and systems.

For Artlovers, it is worth the trip because it turns design into a destination. You leave thinking differently about the ordinary things around you — and that is exactly what great design does.

ArtLovers Tip

Don’t visit only the Gehry building. Make time for the campus. The real magic is the combination of exhibition, architecture, furniture, landscape and the feeling that design is everywhere — from a chair to a building to a garden.

On show now

Exhibitions at Vitra Design Museum

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