robots_ Tom Geismar

An avid robot collector himself, Kit Hinrichs has long admired the toy robot collection of designer Tom Geismar of Chermayeff & Geismar, and so when Hinrichs’s ongoing client Experience Music Project in Seattle sought a temporary exhibit for its Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, he immediately saw an opportunity to showcase the robots that Tom had amassed over a period of about thirty years. The exhibition, Robots: A Designer’s Collection of Miniature Mechanical Marvels,designed by Hinrichs and Maurice Woods, includes 135 robots, ranging from a mechanical Godzilla, to printed 1950s tin toys and ingenious plastic transformers, to Japanese pop TV robot heroes and wooden Folk Art characters.

These intricately detailed miniatures are displayed like jewelry in a large, bottom-lit vitrine surrounded by ten-foot-tall murals of the same robots creating a unqiue juxtaposition of imagery. The descriptive signage is “held” by giant robots as you walk around the exhibition.