Vitra Campus 2026: Ishigami Pavilion vs Grcic Scout
Vitra in 2026 placed two answers to the same brand question on opposite ends of the Vitra Campus 2026 brief: Junya Ishigami’s 280-square-metre transparent pavilion held up by 47 needle-thin steel columns of 16–31 millimetre diameter, and Konstantin Grcic’s Scout, a five-piece modular workplace family launched on 19–20 March 2026 from a tubular-steel kit assembled by hand. One is architecture-as-statement, sited in Weil am Rhein and engineered with Jun Sato Structural Engineers; the other is product-as-statement, a workspace system shipped in flat-pack pieces and tightened with mechanical tilts and no firmware. Read together, they describe how Vitra now wants to be understood — as a company that argues with both buildings and chairs, and that no longer treats one of those as the warm-up act for the other. ...