Vitra Fire Station

A lightning strike in 1981 set fire to part of Vitra's furniture factory in Weil am Rhein, and the company responded by building its own on-site fire brigade; Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra's chairman, then gave the commission for its station to Zaha Hadid, then known only for competition drawings and unbuilt projects shown at MoMA's 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition. Built between 1991 and 1993, it became her first constructed building. A single cast-in-situ concrete shell is folded and sliced into sharply raked planes that converge on a knife-thin edge, with no right angle anywhere and no clear front or back; Hadid later said the flat agricultural site around the Vitra campus offered no context to answer, "so we had to invent one." The finished building turned out to be awkward for its intended purpose — firefighters found the tight, angular plan hard to manoeuvre in — and the volunteer brigade disbanded within a few years of moving in. Vitra has since used the empty station for exhibitions, dinners and events tied to the neighbouring Vitra Design Museum.