If you plan to visit the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, make sure to drop by the new Vitra Pop-Up Shop and design office. Located in the Meatpacking District at 100 Gansevoort Street (located opposite of the Whitney Museum), Vitra’s latest Pop-Up shop is a pleasant diversion. It’s also filled with dozens of iconic designs from the Swiss manufacturer’s many decades of furniture collections. In many ways, the Vitra Pop-Up shop compliments its adjacent neighbor as some of the designs are museum pieces themselves. Make sure to check out the miniatures collection. It ranges from serious Bauhaus pieces through whimsical designs in the shape of chairs and hearts.
From the Vitra website: “Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein began making miniature replicas of milestones in furniture design from its great collection. As a kind of summary of the history of industrial furniture design – moving from historicism and art nouveau to the new objectivity of Bauhaus and radical design, and from postmodernism all the way up until the present day – the collection has grown to include more than 100 pieces. The chairs are all one sixth of the size of the historical originals. They are all true to scale and replicate the originals right down to the smallest details in construction, material and colour. Thus, not only have the design´s key points been translated in the miniature versions, but details such as materials, the natural grain of the wood, the reproduction of screws and elaborate handicraft involved have also been taken into consideration. All of this has made the pieces in the Miniatures Collection into popular collector´s items. At the same time they provide people who are interested in culture and design with insights into the history of the environments that we create.”
