smow blog compact: Design Museum of Barcelona Opens

On one of the very few occasions over the past 12 months when we’ve put down our axes and stepped, temporarily, back from the coalface of design culture that is the smow blog, we found ourselves on a cool September evening drinking Voll Damm bier underneath Barcelona Design Museum.

No, not like that. It was positive.

Our hotel was just round the corner and after a hard day on the beach we fancied an urban stroll and subsequently found a nice place to enjoy our Voll Damm against the backdrop of the flickering lights of Jean Nouvel’s Torre Agbar office block and with the music from a near-by rooftop hotel bar just loud enough to be audible yet quiet enough not to annoy.

And as chance would have it that location was the future Museu del Disseny de Barcelona, an institution which opens its doors to the public on Sunday December 14th

Arising from the fusion of the city’s established decorative arts, textile and graphics museums the new Design Museum of Barcelona boasts a collection of some 70,000 objects detailing the history and development of design, fashion and graphic art over recent centuries and which will be presented in a series of permanent and temporary exhibitions spread over five floors and 5,000 sqm.

If the new Design Museum of Barcelona is any good, we don’t know. If they avoid the traps that a lot of such museums fall into when presenting their collections, we don’t know. What we do know is that we’re glad it exists. For despite being a city that naturally attracts creatives, design and architecture in Barcelona is largely defined by Gaudí and his gaudy colleagues. And while Gaudí et al did produce a lot of culturally important and aesthetically endearing works, they also generated a lot of self-involved tat. And much as Barcelona has invested heavily in new buildings in the past decade, it has invested in a lot of self-involved tat. Modern Gaudí perhaps, but sadly not always modern interpretations of those positive elements in Gaudí’s oeuvre.

For us the best example of this split personality of Barcelona design is given by the city’s best known manufacturer, Barcelona Design. On the one hand producing genuinely refined objects such as Konstantin Grcic’s Chair B, Jaime Hayon’s Gardenias garden furniture collection or Doshi Levien’s Chandlo vanity desk. And then absurd, less refined creations such as the designs of Salvador Dali or indeed the furniture designs of Gaudí himself with their singularly anthroposophical forms.

As such Barcelona needs an institution that can place design and architecture in context and help those interested, or perhaps more importantly just plain curious, to understand what design is and what design can be.

We’re not saying the Design Museum of Barcelona is that place, but we hope it will be.

Should you find yourself in Barcelona over the next few weeks, entry is free until January 31st and in February comes the first temporary exhibition “Design for Life”, which promises an exploration of how design can be applied to help ease banal, everyday situations and chores.
And which sounds like a nice excuse to head down to Barcelona.

The Design Museum of Barcelona can be found in the so-called Edifici Disseny Hub at Pl. de les Glòries Catalanes, 37-38 08018 Barcelona or online at www.museudeldisseny.cat/en

And should you find some non-Spaniards lounging in the vicinity, enjoying a robust Catalan beer, do say hello……………..

Design Museum of Barcelona and in the background Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar (Photo: Lourdes Jansana © Museu del Disseny.)