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Miniatures MR 20

Mies van der Rohe, 1927

During the mid-twenties, tubular steel won favor among avant-garde designers as a preferred material for furniture design. The most important designs for tubular steel, now regarded as classics of modern furniture design, were created within the course of just a few years.

During preparations for the Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart, Mart Stam developed a new chair type, the tubular steel chair with no back legs. In order to counter the possible instability of the cantilevered frame, Stam reinforced the steel tubing at critical angles, thereby creating a strong, but rigid structure. It was Mies van der Rohe who first discovered the elasticity of steel tubing and utilized it as a structural principle.

Inspired by Stam's idea, he designed the first flexible cantilevered chair in the history of design in 1927. The model was produced both with and without armrests under the names MR 20 and MR 10, respectively. The tubular steel furniture of the 1920s represents a rejection of the conventional, overladen bourgeois interior of the time, filled with massive furniture and decorative trinkets. The transparency and structural clarity of tubular steel furniture embodies a new ideal in architecture and design: interior space flooded with natural light.

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Miniatures Collection

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.