The inauguration of the new Museu del Disseny in Barcelona takes place Saturday, 13 December at noon, and will remain open until 8 p.m. that night.

Starting Sunday the 14th until January 31st, 2015, the Museum will be open free of charge.

Since the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona closed its exhibitions at the end of 2012, it has been working on the moving process from the Palau de Pedralbes to the new Disseny Hub Barcelona building.

The Museu del Disseny de Barcelona is the city’s museum devoted to the object and design arts. It was established by bringing together, in a single space and under a common museographic project, the collections of four centres that previously conserved the object heritage built up in the city of Barcelona over the years: the Museu de les Arts Decoratives, the Museu de Ceràmica, the Museu Tèxtil i de la Indumentària and the Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques.

The new centre conserves an extraordinary collection of some 70,000 objects from different historic periods, right up to the present.

The new Museum is characterised by a flexible, inclusive discourse, which highlights the transversal aspects of these four large collections whilst also focusing on more specific facets in each.

Moreover, the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona will also devote considerable resources to its archive collections, housing a Documentation Centre to conserve more than 22,000 documents. In this way, the public will be able to view this shared heritage under a new light.

Designed by MBM Architects (Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas, David Mackay, Oriol Capdevila y Francesc Gual), and located in Plaça de les Glòries, the new building is made up of two parts: one underground, which takes advantage of the slope created by urban development of the plaza, and another which emerges at 14.5 m (at the level of Plaça de les Glòries).

When the Museum opens in December 2014, the permanent exhibitions will occupy four floors of the building , along with the areas devoted to the conservation of object and documentary heritage (collection storage rooms and Documentation Centre), and with the area for educational workshops.

To begin, five exhibitions

The programme with which the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona will open this coming month of December will be based on five exhibitions. In-house productions, these shows are conceived independently of each other in line with the new discourse, which seeks to suggest plural readings of the objects that form the collection: from ceramics to dresses, from poster art to artisanal and mass-produced furniture. Four permanent exhibitions with a medium-length duration, showcasing the Museum’s heritage, and one temporary show.

The four exhibitions will each occupy one of the floors in the building:

First floor – FROM THE WORLD TO THE MUSEUM: Product Design, Cultural Heritage

Second floor – EXTRAORDINARY! Decorative and Auteur Arts Collections (3rd-20th Centuries)

Third floor – DRESSING THE BODY: Silhouettes and Fashion (1550-2014)

Fourth floor – GRAPHIC DESIGN: FROM TRADE TO PROFESSION

Ground zero – DESIGN FOR LIFE

Images courtesy of Museu del Disseny

from the top:

– BruumRuum! Iinteractive installation. © Museu del Disseny. Photo: Xavi Padrós

– Disseny Hub Barcelona building © Museu del Disseny. Photo: Lourdes Jansana

– Disseny Hub Barcelona building © Museu del Disseny. Interior view

– Disseny Hub Barcelona building © Museu del Disseny. Section

– other images: objects and documents from the museum collection

– Disseny Hub Barcelona building © Museu del Disseny. Photo: Lourdes Jansana