Carsten Höller's Vitra Slide Tower: a new building for the Vitra Campus

An iconic new building was inaugurated on June 18 2014: the Vitra Slide Tower designed by German artist Carsten Höller.
The new tower will be a landmark on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, opened to the public in 1984, featuring the Balancing Tools sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, followed by Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum (1989), Tadao Ando's conference pavilion (1993) and, in 2010, the VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron.

The Vitra Slide Tower is a 30.7 metre tall panoramic tower consisting of 3 inclined, converging steel pillars. At the point where the pillars converge at the top of the tower is a revolving illuminated clock 6 m in diameter, with no numbers.
The tower is accessed via two flights of stairs with a landing in between them, at a height of 17 metres: the panoramic platform and top of the big slide 38 metres long. Artist Carsten Höller sees the slide as a practical element: a sculpture people can travel through and an architectural element that takes people from one place to another while allowing them to enjoy an unusual emotional experience.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Design: Carsten Höller
Location: Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein (Germany)
Images courtesy of Vitra

www.vitra.com

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