One evening earlier this month a throng of smartly dressed men and women could be seen pressing towards a slim bridge leading to a wing of Milan’s Triennale building. Through a glass wall on the other side, there were cinematic images of Roman frescoes and naked actors projected on mammoth screens. Beyond was a multi-media path through classic objects of Italian design, 150 metres of cinematic backdrops, sound tracks and even smells, since one room was lined with planks of aromatic wood. This was the opening night of “What is Italian Design?”, the first exhibition held in the new Triennale Design Museum.
The inauguration events, also held during the day and attended by luminaries including Giorgio Napolitano, president of Italy, and Renzo Piano, the world-famous architect, mark an important moment for Milan and all the design-oriented companies – from Armani to Artemide to Alessi – with business there; after three years of development (and three decades of discussion) the city finally has a museum dedicated to its best-known industry.
But it is also a big step for the design museum category, which has seen significant growth in recent years, partly because of rising interest from style-conscious consumers keen to use the principles – and even incorporate the products – on show in their everyday lives.
“Painting and sculpture are becoming legacy, arts of the past,” says Italian architect Italo Rota, who designed the Triennale installation with the help of museum curators, British film director Peter Greenaway and seven Italian directors. “In this exhibit we have a lot of Italy’s most famous objects [but] many of them are still in production; visitors may have some or could go out and buy them. We have a lot in common with cinema in this respect. We are close to people’s lives.”
Not surprisingly, the new museum is breaking away from traditional formats in an effort to engage visitors. Instead of aiming to be an exhaustive archive of Italian design, craft and manufacturing, it will be more dynamic and interactive, mining a network of private and corporate collections around the country – about 85 so far – and making them more accessible through a “standing” exhibition that changes into a new “edition” every 12 to 18 months as well as through an online visual database still under development.
“Italy itself is a museum. It would be absurd to clone collections that already exist,” says director Silvana Annichiarico. “Our vocation is not to accumulate but to experiment and consume at high speed. This museum is about narratives, about telling a story. We are trying to create a living, mutating, dynamic museum.”
“We’re accustomed to seeing museums about classification and taxonomy, [which] remove the emotional dimensions of the objects,” adds Davide Rampello, president of the Triennale Museum. “We said: ‘Enough!’ Design is not just decor. It is a way of conceiving and intervening on reality. Design is social.”
Creative, nimble strategies are a hallmark of design museums around the world. And it might help explain why the group, long overshadowed by institutions devoted to art and history, seems to be expanding so quickly. Aside from the Triennale, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City is set to triple in size to 6,000 sq metres when it moves to Columbus Circle next autumn, while the Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, is also adding new gallery space for its permanent collection soon. The Museo Mexicano del Diseno (Mumedi) is under development in Mexico City and, in Zuidas, the Netherlands, a 5,000 sq metre design museum is due to open by the beginning of 2009. The six-year-old Los Angeles Architecture and Design Museum (A+D) is meanwhile looking for new quarters to expand. And London’s Design Museum will make a £50m move to larger location in time for the Olympics in 2012. Considering how few design museums there are in the world – Luqman Arnold, trustee chairman for London’s, put the number at 12-15 last year – this is serious growth.
Some of the top destinations for design and the applied arts, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the MAK in Vienna, have long histories and vast collections. (The Cooper Hewitt’s archive of roughly 10,000 wall-coverings was used by former first lady Hillary Clinton to select a pattern for the White House Blue Room.) But most, such as the London, Los Angeles and Vitra museums, as well as the Chicago Athenaem and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island, were established in the past 25 years. Old or young, comprehensive or niche, all are now working to attract not only local audiences and physical visitors but also distant and virtual ones. In addition, they are leveraging the commercial dimension of design, working with corporate sponsors and setting up separate money-making offshoots, from online retail outlets to restoration workshops.
The Vitra Design Museum, founded in the late 1980s by Rolf Fehlbaum, chief executive of the Vitra furniture company, has overcome its somewhat isolated location by turning the travelling exhibition into a cottage industry, running 10-12 at a time, with two to four openings per year, says museum director Matteo Tries. Its Charles and Ray Eames show went to 19 museums in eight years, from its launch at home in 1997 through locations as distant as Tel Aviv and Los Angeles and ending with Tokyo’s Meguro Art Museum in 2005. This not only brings the work to a wider public but also enables the museum to share expenses with other institutions, offer a more compelling pitch to sponsors and distribute exhibition-related merchandise through foreign museum shops.
London’s Design Museum takes a different but equally flexible approach. In September 2006 it put its permanent exhibition in storage to make room for temporary and timely offerings, such as its annual Designer of the Year show and competition, last year won by Gorillaz creator Jamie Hewlett, as well as the Designer in Residence programme featuring recent graduates. Director Deyan Sudjic describes the institution as a “multiplex” with blockbusters, including one dedicated to architect Zaha Hadid this autumn, as well as niche shows that are the equivalent of art house films. At the same time, it continues to expand its collection, aiming to acquire an authoritative selection of modern design pieces, many of which will go on display in a few years when the move to bigger quarters is complete.
Another tool for design museums trying to expand their reach is the internet. “Nowadays the web is often the first point of interface between the public and museums,” says Viviana Narotzky, design historian at London’s Royal College of Art. “It’s an extremely dynamic medium that responds equally well to aimless browsing or focused searching. The online presence developed by museums can make design visible to an unprecedented scale.”
There is a risk of going too far. “Online museums definitely cannot replace the real museums where a product’s entire materiality can be discovered, its three-dimensionality and its materials,” says renowned Italian designer Giulio Capellini. But, as the Netherlands’ Marcel Wanders, one of today’s design stars, notes: “Regular exhibitions – the idea of creating a space and expecting people to travel there – are old-fashioned. It is logical, economical and faster to get there online.”
In spite of its age, the V&A offers a particularly good example. Its website is dynamic and informative, using a combination of flash animated images, pithy explanations, behind-the-scenes blogs and competitions. It has a database of more than 43,000 high-resolution images of 27,000 works available to download free of charge for educational or personal use. And users, which log 24m sessions per year compared with the 2.6m physical visits the museum records, can share their photography, videos, knitting designs or memories online.
“Any design museum that doesn’t digitalise its collections will be losing out,” Sudjic says. In fact, his institution’s website draws more than seven times as many “visitors” as its physical building, allowing them to explore exhibitions, buy tickets, research designers, read blogs and shop. (He also notes that a Google search for the generic term “design museum” puts London’s at the top of the results list.)
Stores – both on site and online – are significant for all museums but particularly for those devoted to design, where items on display are often commercially available or at least replicable. “Entrance fees are never enough to cover expenses so we need other bigger activities and we have quite a product range,” says Tries at Vitra. Perhaps the most characteristic is the company’s miniature chair series, replicas crafted in original materials and intended as teaching models and collectors’ items. A 12cm copy of a 1929 cube-shaped leather armchair designed by Le Corbusier costs €402.
The offerings available at London’s Design Museum, which recently relaunched its online shop, include Lego-shaped USB memory sticks (£45) and the Kapow light (£32) by Tina Leung, which looks like a Medusa head of acrylic tubing. The V&A offers half of its range of merchandise through its soon-to-be-expanded online shop, including lush beige wallpaper with a 1680s floral pattern (£120) and household tools decorated with William Morris designs (£6-£20). New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which along with Paris’s Pompidou Centre incorporates design into its broader art collection, even offers large items, such as desk and storage units based on a 1950s Eames design for $4,360. And from the Noguchi museum website one can order pieces such as the designer’s paper Akari light sculptures ($1,195) and a free-form sofa ($9,145) and ottoman ($2,355).
Although the Triennale Design Museum is still working on its website and its online shop, it is branching out in a different way commercially, opening a centre for the study and restoration of modern furniture in partnership with the chemistry faculty of the University of Pavia in an attempt to address the rapid corrosion of the chemically complex materials used.
As for the success of its first exhibition, reactions were varied. “These images are extremely powerful,” said one woman in her mid-50s. “This is a masterpiece,” a man in his mid-30s exclaimed over a vintage three-wheeled car. “We have that” was another common refrain – one not often heard at museum openings.
A woman in her 60s with green spectacles and blunt-cut grey hair was having none of it. “It’s a commercial discotheque,” she said, turning away from a colourful and crowded display of stackable outdoor furniture, including a tower of Philippe Starck’s plastic garden gnome stools for Kartell.
But perhaps that’s why so many others liked it.
