Japanese Architect Tsuyoshi Tane Creates New Garden House for the Vitra Campus

Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane is the latest figure to be tapped to create a space for the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. Located just a stones throw from Basel, Tane is the fourth architect of Japanese descent to design a unique space for the Swiss-owned furniture company, alongside Kazuo Shinohara who created the Umbrella House, Tadao Ando‘s Conference Pavilion and the Factory Building by SANAA.

The Tane Garden House is primarily made to store gardening tools, but can also accommodate up to eight people inside with a dedicated coffee corner, along with an observatory deck on the roof to offer a 360-degree viewing of the Vitra Campus. Built with sustainability in mind, the compact unit is made primarily of overground materials, such as thatch, stone, and wood, which is sourced from local craftsman within a 32-mile radius.

The idea for the building first started roughly three years ago, when Vitra chairman emeritus, Rolf Fehlbaum, took Tane for a drive around Weil am Rhein while recounting his childhood and his memories of the surrounding fields where the Vitra Campus sits today.

“Like archaeologists, we begin a long process of exploration and digging up the memory of a place,” explained Tane in a statement on the Garden House. “It is a process of surprise and discovery, a quest to encounter things we did not know, what we had forgotten, what has been lost through modernization and globalization. I believe that a place will always have memories deeply embedded in the ground and in history. And that this memory does not belong to the past, but is the driving force that creates architecture. Through this process of thinking about the future from the memory of a place, archaeology gradually becomes architecture,” he added.

The Tane Garden House was unveiled this past week to coincide with the Art Basel festivities. Later this fall, Vitra Design Museum wil present a special exhibition providing insights into Tane’s career and his Garden House project.

Elsewhere, maharishi links up with Heimplanet for “The Cave” tent.

Vitra Campus
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein, Germany