Collecting and exhibiting design objects is nothing new. London’s Victoria & Albert museum was founded in 1852 and the Designmuseum Danmark opened just three decades later. But while early design collections focused on furniture and tableware, posters and consumer goods, the advent of digital computer-based technologies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s raised new questions for design departments about what should be included in their collections.
How might one collect or exhibit a digital file, for example? Some museums like the Cooper Hewitt in New York have diligently collected not only the artistic products of computer software, but also the devices—early models of cordless and mobile phones—that created the digital world we live in today.
Others, like the ArtScience Museum in Singapore have created a fully immersive digital universe within their exhibition halls. In addition to showing an evolving range of content, many of today’s museums are housed in buildings that are equally captivating as design objects. Here are our top picks.
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
ArtScience Museum
It may not be a design museum in the strict sense, but Singapore’s ArtScience Museum adds a brainy element to the Las Vegas-style Marina Bay Sands development and provides a provocative platform for linking the realms art and science. Its permanent collection includes Future World, the country’s largest interactive digital playground, and, since opening in 2011 the museum has also hosted a range of traveling exhibitions including “Essential Eames: A Herman Miller Exhibition”, and “The Art of the Brick”, an art exhibition featuring sculptures by Nathan Saway made solely using LEGO® bricks. The lotus-shaped structure designed by Moshe Safdie itself embodies a forward-thinking approach to design and a clever use of natural resources. A central waterfall in the building is fed by rain deftly caught in the huge bowl that is formed by the roof. The re-circulated water is also filtered and used for the restroom facilities. http://www.marinabaysands.com/museum.html
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
Cooper Hewitt
Located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side Museum Mile, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is the only museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to historical and contemporary design. Its collections span around 240 years of design aesthetic and creativity and include more than 210,000 design objects. The museum is housed in a stately 64-room mansion built by billionaire Andrew Carnegie in 1901, and though it resembles a Georgian country house, at its time the building was a pioneer of modern engineering. It was the first private residence in America to have a structural steel frame, and one of the first in New York to have a residential Otis elevator. More recently the museum completed an extensive three-year renovation and introduced up-to-date technology, interactive touchscreens and a renewed sense of novelty to museum halls. “Beautiful Users” in 2014 / 2015 looked at how design has become more and more user-focused over the past fifty years, and how this shift has affected the daily lives of people everywhere. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
Designmuseum Denmark
Unsurprisingly the capital of Scandinavian cool has its own design museum. Founded in 1890 but housed in one of Copenhagen’s most historic Rococo buildings that dates back to 1752, Desingmuseum Denmark is the country’s biggest museum for Danish and international design, industrial design as well as decorative and applied arts. The museum retraces the history of design from Art Nouveau to the present as seen through the Danish prism and its fairly extensive collection includes Danish silver and porcelain, textiles, as well as the iconic design pieces of modern innovators like Kaare Klint, Poul Henningsen and Arne Jacobsen. Chairs figure strongly here, particularly those designed in the style of new organic Modernism. The museum has a permanent exhibition, “The Danish Chair” that includes 110 individually framed chairs, and in 2014, a special exhibition “Just One Good Chair” celebrated the life work of Hans J. Wegner who designed over 1500 of them in his lifetime. designmuseum.dk
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
Design Museum Holon
Israeli-born architect Ron Arad designed this striking, much-acclaimed structure outside of Tel Aviv using rounded ribbons of red and orange steel that rises from the street like a modernist mirage. The museum, which opened in 2010, is Israel’s first Design Museum and aims to create a national platform for the presentation of design. As part of a 16-year urban regeneration scheme, the institution also aims to change the perception of the design - environment - community relationship by examining the holistic impact design has on urban spaces. Inside is a two-story space with changing exhibits on contemporary design, including fashion, jewelry, and textiles, and annual site-specific exhibitions concentrate on design concepts, objects and architecture. Last summer’s installment “Nendo: The Space in Between” stretched from the interior to the exterior grounds and focused on the gaps and spaces imbedded in Oki Sato’s extensive design portfolio. http://www.dmh.org.il
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
The London Design Museum
Last fall London's Design Museum reopened in Kensington at the site of the former Commonwealth Institute. OMA worked with London firm Allies and Morrison, and Arup engineers to restore the shell of the 1960s Grade II*-listed building, including its distinctive copper-covered paraboloid roof. Minimalist designer John Pawson created the interior. Now with three times the amount of space, the museum, which first opened in 1989 in a former banana warehouse in Shad Thames, can stage a wider range of exhibitions and extend its learning program, which includes designers-in-residence. The top floor is home to the museum's permanent exhibitions and includes the hulk of a Model T Ford next to a Tesla driverless car and a wall of cameras, audio devices and other objects that show the many stages of evolution from analogue to digital. There is also a restaurant and members' room designed by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby's practice Universal Design Studio. http://designmuseum.org/
- ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM
- COOPER HEWITT
- DESIGNMUSEUM DENMARK
- DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON
- THE LONDON DESIGN MUSEUM
- VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
Vitra Design Museum
Designed by Frank Gehry in the architect’s signature sculptural abstract style, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil Am Rhein, Germany features an archive of nearly 20,000 objects. The collection ranges from furniture to lighting fixtures and highlights design from the 1800’s to the present including pieces from the estates of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Alvar Aalto, Verner Panton, Dieter Rams, Richard Hutten and Michael Thonet. Last year, a new structure at Vitra Shaudepot by Herzog & de Meuron created space for more of the collection to be shared with the public. A new permanent exhibition of more than 400 key pieces of modern furniture design includes examples of early bentwood furniture, icons of Classical Modernism by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Gerrit Rietveld, along with colorful plastic objects from the Pop era and recent designs produced with a 3D printer. www.design-musuem.de
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