Tsuyoshi Tane's Garden House Opens at Vitra Campus

Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane (born 1979, Tokyo) has completed the Tane Garden House at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The 15-square-meter structure, opened in summer 2023, is built with sustainable materials sourced locally—stone, wood, rope, and straw—and draws on Swiss rural architectural typologies. It sits adjacent to Piet Oudolf's Oudolf Garden (2020) and Kazuo Shinohara's Umbrella House. The Garden House features a rationally designed interior with living, kitchen, and bathroom spaces, an external staircase leading to a panoramic roof, built-in wooden benches, and a wooden fountain for washing gardening tools. Tane's practice, ATTA (Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects), founded in Paris in 2017 after co-founding DGT with Dan Dorrel and Lina Gothmeh in 2006, is guided by his methodology "The Archaeology of Memory," which emphasizes the memory and history of each site. Tane previously designed the Estonian National Museum in Tartu (2016) on a former Soviet military airfield, the Todoroki House in Valley in Tokyo (2018), and the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art (2020) in a converted sake brewery. In 2021, he adapted the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris to house Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani's collection. Tane's work seeks to integrate vernacular traditions with contemporary design, creating a global language rooted in the past but living in the present.