The Shakers: A World in the Making
Vitra Design Museum, 2025
Formafantasma design the exhibition The Shakers: A World in the Making, organised and co-curated by the Vitra Design Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation in collaboration with Shaker Museum.
The Shakers were a religious group for whom design and architecture were an expression of beliefs surrounding community, labour and social equality. The exhibition “The Shakers: A World in the Making” examines how this resulted in meticulously crafted furniture and vernacular architecture that continue to resonate centuries later. Bringing together a wide range of Shaker furniture, architectural elements, tools and commercial goods, paired with newly commissioned works by contemporary artists and designers, the exhibition reveals the complex social, material and spiritual context that created the “Shaker style”, and what possibilities its values offer today.
The exhibition design draws on core Shaker principles—functionality, clarity, and collective labour—translating them into a set of modular elements conceived as a toolkit. This approach not only enables the exhibition to travel, but also foregrounds process over form: a system built from gestures rather than fixed structures. The gesture of hanging a cloth, laying wooden beams on the floor, or fixing elements with nails and thread—each simple act contributes to an architecture that is intuitive, repeatable, and deliberate. These gestures mirror the rhythms of domestic construction and maintenance central to Shaker life.
Throughout the exhibition, fabric is used as a structural element: freely suspended on the walls, it recalls the presence of table linens, bed sheets, and other domestic textiles. Rather than evoking decoration or softness, this gesture points to the spatial logic of interiors shaped by cloth—flexible, functional, and made to be handled.
Textile work, traditionally associated with women—at the loom, embroidering, sewing, or caring for household fabrics—speaks here to the labour involved in shaping and sustaining the domestic realm. This connection is especially significant given that the Shaker movement was founded by a woman, and placed women's work—material, spiritual, and organisational—at its centre.
Using a minimal vocabulary of wood, fabric, nails, and thread, the exhibition constructs a space through gestures of care, repetition, and repair—echoing the practical poetics of the Shaker tradition.
