© Barcelona Design Museum

Museu del Disseny de Barcelona is the Catalan capital’s centre devoted to the arts of the object and design. The new museum was created as a result of merging the collections from four of the city’s museums: the Museu de les Arts Decoratives (devoted to the decorative arts), the Museu de Ceràmica (ceramics), the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària (textiles and clothing) and the Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques (graphic arts). Evidently, then, the common denominator of all these collections from the past and the present is the object and all that it signifies or has signified and contributed to our lives: from conception, creation and production to use in different epochs and societies, during both the artisanal and preindustrial periods and the industrial and digital ages.

The new museum conserves a collection comprising more than 70,000 objects traditionally classified under the name of decorative arts or applied arts. These pieces, which range in date from the fourth century AD to the present, include such unique, internationally-famed collections as those of medieval fabrics, sixteenth-century Catalan enamelled glass and ceramic from Alcora, amongst others. These arts of the object naturally link up with the museum’s twentieth-century design collections, which feature product, graphic and fashion design. Most are, or have been, “objects for living”, that is to say, closely bound up with everyday, personal or collective life.