Designer: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, 2008
Manufacturer: Vitra

The Vegetal is an organically-shaped chair that is meant to look as if it had taken its shape naturally. With that goal in mind and inspired by small trees which American gardeners had fashioned into the shape of seating furniture, the French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec set about designing the Vegetal. Designed for outdoor use, the chair had to be both water-resistant and – for practical purposes – easily stackable.

Neither the Bouroullec brothers nor Vitra could have imagined that it would take four years of intense work on both the design and the development of the chair before the ambitious project would finally be realised. The inspiration of natural vegetation is easy to see in the intricate, asymmetrical structure of the branch-like ribs that make up the Vegetal's seat shell as well as the colour scheme. Made from polyamide and manufactured using injection moulding, the chair is an exploration of the limits of its material and the latest production techniques.

• Scale: 1:6, 135 x 96 x 101 mm
• Materials: Polyamide dyed throughout in cactus
• Dimensions: H 5⅛" x W 4" x D 3¾"

MINIATURES COLLECTION

The collection of the Vitra Design Museum ranks among the most important holdings of furniture design worldwide. It contains some 7000 pieces of furniture, over 1000 lighting objects, and numerous archives, as well as the estates of such designers as Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton, and Alexander Girard.

Although the main museum building by Frank Gehry from 1989 was originally conceived to house the collection, the museum now utilises the space to stage major temporary exhibitions. To date, the museum’s collection has never been on permanent display.

For over two decades, the Vitra Design Museum has been making miniature replicas of milestones in furniture design from its collection. The Miniatures Collection encapsulates the entire history of industrial furniture design – moving from Historicism and Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus and New Objectivity, from Radical Design and Postmodernism all the way up to the present day.

Exactly one sixth the size of the historical originals, the chairs are all true to scale and precisely recreate the smallest details of construction, material and colour. The high standard of authenticity even extends to the natural grain of the wood, the reproduction of screws and the elaborate handicraft techniques involved. This has made the miniatures into popular collector's items as well as ideal illustrative material for universities, design schools and architects.

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