Still standing: Vitra Fire Station – ADC

Scarcely a handful of architects ever attain sufficient fame as to graduate to the Mies-level status of a mononym, their surname all but falling out of use in professional circles. In our time, the list more or less stops at three: Frank, Rem, and Zaha—and of these, perhaps only the third cognomen has become so familiar that, even beyond the profession, most culturally-aware persons can recognise it without much prompting.

Six years after her death, Zaha Hadid’s name (or at least half of it) is still on the lips of millions in the design world and in the world at large—though significantly, the expression that those lips assume when pronouncing it, and the words that follow, vary widely. In some quarters, Zaha has become almost synonymous with the excesses of a certain variety of hyperactive formalism, born of the giddy digital mania and go-go globalism of the 1990s, now exhausted creatively and in low political repute. How much blame Madame Z. really deserves for the flaws of that mode of practice, or how much credit for its accomplishments, is difficult to gauge. But in seeking a good measure, it seems only appropriate to start at the very beginning, with her first major completed project: the 1991 Vitra Fire Station in Weil-am-Rhine, Germany.

Already known by that point (at least among the cognoscenti) as an up-and comer, Zaha had been on the scene since the 1970s, serving a long stint with fellow uninomial avant-gardist Rem Koolhaas, while also establishing her own identity through the production of a body of challenging, visionary artwork. Half abstract painting, half architectural rendering, her oversized images fashioned out of synthetics, polymers and paper showed fragmented forms flying through space, coalescing into jagged artificial landscapes and airborne cities seen at high speed and impossible perspectives. They were gorgeous, exciting, and so far as anyone appeared to think at the time, entirely unsuited to translation into anything like built work.

At least one individual, however, thought different. Rolf Fehlbaum, the second-generation hetman of Swiss design mega-brand Vitra, had already gone out on a rather daring limb in 1989 by commissioning a new museum for his company’s sprawling campus in the Black Forest just outside (though across the national border from) Basel, selecting a then-unknown Los Angeles architect who at the time had yet to shed even his middle initial: Frank O. Gehry. The success of that project combined with a devastating fire in 1981 was to prompt Fehlbaum’s next architectural gambit: an onsite fire house, with a dedicated staff and firetruck ready to go at a moment’s notice. In keeping with Vitra’s reputation as a dedicated pusher of aesthetic envelopes, its president turned to the Iraqi-born artist-architect, still untried in the latter capacity, giving Zaha her big break as an actual builder.

Punctuating the southern terminus of the Vitra compound’s central axis, the structure she produced could perhaps best be described as a concrete wall with split personality disorder. Seen from above, the facility reveals itself as a series of splinter-thin, curved volumes pressed together, with one slightly fatter volume out one side; the latter is the garage for the actual trucks meant to service the campus, and is complemented by a sharp, trapezoidal marquee hoisted on spindly pilot is, pointing the way towards the primary pedestrian entrance on the long eastern front. Intimating the same wild, goggle-eyed perspectival effect as Zaha’s paintings, the building operates on a kind of slingshot logic, the mass pulled back and downward for maximum tension, ready to release a pure bolt of firefighting power.

Inside, the procession is rather more sedate, though anything but conventional. The architect’s swirling forms find their way off the canvas and into a similarly collage-like sequence of sharp turns, steep staircases, and irregular windows, with partition walls and built-ins popping into a view in a way that suggests an amped-up version of Mies’s spatial poetics. A rooftop terrace and lengthy, glass-enclosed circulation passages appear to bespeak a fire crew with a surprising amount of time for leisure and reflection, as does the overall program, which includes an exercise room and bicycle storage. Not much of an arson wave in 1990s Weil-am-Rhein, apparently.

The pervasive impression that the Vitra Fire Station was more Vitra than fire station has long been the stock critique of the project. One popular story had it that the exciting if perilous-looking garage door was too tightly slanted to accommodate the firetrucks—though even were this true, there was still plenty of parking space under a west-facing marquee. Whether or not the building was really suited to its nominal function, it never really served as such for very long: Weil-am-Rhein eventually built its own municipal firehouse, obviating the need for Zaha’s. Since then, the foundational project of one of the world’s most famous architects has served the same purpose as so many of her other, more famous designs, used as an exhibition space and a site for cultural events, the smallest and oddest-shaped pearl on Vitra’s glittering string of buildings by Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Prouvé and others.

It’s in that context, then, that the building should ultimately be considered: not as an unusually eccentric bit of functional architecture, but as an unusually modest, functional-minded bit of experiment. The wave of progressively more ambitious projects created by Vitra between the late 80s and today has both reflected and helped to guide the main current of contemporary design over the same period. Zaha’s contribution shows how much she could wring from so little, creating something so thrilling, so improbable, using nothing but a few poured-in-place slabs and her own inscrutable thinking about the history and future of the built environment. That her thinking was strictly formal in its frame of reference does not detract from its primary appeal—that is, its inscrutability, its almost hieratic weirdness—and it is only unfortunate that the architect was later elevated into a sort of pop priestess, losing her mystique along the way. In that sense, the firehouse serves as a memorial, a temple almost, dedicated to the memory of a forgotten architect whom everyone knows: to Zaha, before she was Zaha.