Archivio Progetti

Università Iuav di Venezia

www.iuav.it/archivioprogetti

A center for services to support teaching and research, its work is divided between museum, archives and documentation activities, whose focus is the acquisition of complete archives of architecture (drawings, models, photographs, papers, audio and visual tapes etc.) and on ordering, classifying and publishing the inventories. When the ordering and classification of the archives is completed, it organizes conferences, exhibitions and publications. Currently, the Archivio Progetti counts nearly 80,000 documents involving architectural projects and archives, 100,000 photographs and 6,000 digital reproductions. Over the years the collection has focused on several issues and specific historical periods: the Università Iuav di Venezia since its foundation in 1926 (professional and academic archives of the most illustrious professors at the Iuav), the city of Venice and the Veneto region (professional archives of architects and engineers from Venice and the Veneto region but also single projects, architectural competitions, documents on the works, etc.). The primary research tool is represented by the online catalog of the Archivio Progetti which supplies all the information relative to the archive collections, drawings, documents, photographs, models and instruments, in many cases correlated with reproductions. The catalog offers the opportunity to conduct research at all levels, by using the different archives and extending the research to other data bases that may be consulted within the library and the document System of the university.

Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou

Paris

www.centrepompidou.fr

The Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou arose from the will of President of the Republic Georges Pompidou to create an original cultural institution in the heart of Paris, dedicated entirely to contemporary creation. Located in the center of Paris, in an emblematic building for twentieth century architecture designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Centre Pompidou opened its doors in 1977. With approximately 6 million visitors per year, it has welcomed over 180 million people throughout its thirty-year history. In a single venue, the Centre Pompidou gathers the Musée national d’art moderne, a large public library, movie and performance theatres, a musical research institute and spaces for educational activities. The Centre Pompidou represents a renowned international center for the avant-garde, strongly oriented towards the future, ready to register the evolution of society and technology. The opening of the Centre Pompidou-Metz represents a continuation of the series of initiatives that the Centre Pompidou has been conducting for years in the regions of France, by means of loans to national and international institutions, and traveling exhibitions. The first French example of the decentralization of a public cultural institution, the Centre Pompidou-Metz also constitutes a place in tune with its own time, the constantly renewed reflection of the period and its artistic creation.

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution

New York

www.cooperhewitt.org

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Situated in New York City, it is a museum of contemporary and historic design. Its collection, which was established in 1897, comprised some 250,000 objects. The Museum's mission is to advance the public understanding of design across 24 centuries.

Design Museum

London

www.designmuseum.org

Since opening in 1989 on London’s South Bank, it has gained international acclaim for a varied program of exhibitions (some of them traveling exhibitions) of design history and contemporary design innovation. With over 200,000 visitors in 2006 and the number of students visiting the museum rising by 90% in the past three years, the Design Museum is the leading provider of design education resources, aiming to improve the quality of teaching and learning about design with a dynamic program of activities that includes workshops, continuing professional development courses, conferences, competitions. The website of the Design Museum, which receives over 200,000 visitors per month, provides comprehensive information on the museum’s exhibitions and events, as well as an invaluable research resource on designers, design movements and technologies in the Design at the Design Museum online archive.

Die Neue Sammlung

München

www.die-neue-sammlung.de

With ca. 75,000 objects from the fields of industrial and product design, graphic design and the applied arts of the 20th and 21st century, Die Neue Sammlung is one of the world’s leading design museums.
The idea behind setting up the museum was closely linked to the ideals and foundation of the German Werkbund in Munich in 1907. From that time onwards the creation of a “modern collection of exemplary items” began, which became the core of The Neue Sammlung’s collection. In view of the indispensability of industrial production methods, from the very outset the emphasis was on acquiring “modern” everyday objects with an exemplary design. This marked a conscious break with the practice followed by most arts and crafts museums of the day. In 1925, The Neue Sammlung was established as a museum by the state. Though there might have been shifts of emphasis the reformist-idealist origins and general avant-garde intentions continue to influence the museums’s work to this very day

Fondazione Adi Compasso d’Oro

Milano

www.fondazioneadi.org

The Fondazione Adi for Italian design, constituted in November 2001 by Adi (Associazione per il disegno industriale), gathers the entire design system within its group of founding partners, from professionals to manufacturers, from public to private institutions. Its legacy is constituted by the historic collection of the Compasso d’Oro Adi, the prestigious design award instituted in 1954 in Milan to promote innovation and the quality of the industrial product. The objective of the Foundation is the cultivation and diffusion of the cultural model of the avant-garde in design, of which Milan and its territory are the internationally recognized epicenter. Its cultural program includes various forms of collaboration with museums, archives and design collections, to contribute to the creation of a model of a widespread museum system. The historic Collection of the Premio Compasso d’oro gathers over 650 pieces of industrial design, all very different in terms of typologies of use, materials, technology and size. It is a collection in progress that constitutes a historic scientific map of significant documentary value, whose selection is the work of prestigious international juries. In April 2004 the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Soprintendente Regionale per la Lombardia, signed a decree that declared the historic Collection of the Compasso d’oro to be “of exceptional artistic and historic interest” and officially recognizes it as an Italian cultural legacy.

Kartellmuseo

Noviglio (Milano)

www.kartell.it

Kartellmuseo narrates a unique chapter in the history of Italian design, started in 1949 by Giulio Castelli, an engineer who studied with Nobel prizewinner Natta, and founder of Kartell. Since its inception, and thanks to the discreet influence of Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Giulio’s wife and one of the first “women architects”, the company declared its vocation: to shape plastic by means of design and to produce objects contaminated by the design culture. Gino Colombini’s buckets, the chair for children by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper, Anna Castelli Ferrieri’s modules, Joe Colombo’s chairs, Achille Castiglioni’s lamps, through the transparent objects by Philippe Starck, are only some of the icons to be found along the itinerary of the exhibition. Designed by Ferruccio Laviani, the exhibition design frames them within a synoptic table with several levels of reading: events, design, technology and communication, distributed in chronological order. The captions describe their unique historical process. The database with the data sheets relative to products, technology and designers may be consulted online.

La Triennale di Milano

Milan

www.triennale.it

Founded in Monza in 1923 as a Biennial of decorative arts to stimulate the relationship between industry and applied arts, and moved to Milan to the Palazzo dell’Arte in 1933, the Triennale has become the reflection of artistic, architectural and design culture in Italy, hosting the themes of industrial design and contemporary production, including fashion and audio-visual communication. Reorganized as a Foundation in 1999, in a renovated venue since 2002 and with a new section at the Bovisa, it is a center of cultural production that organizes conferences, cultural programs, traveling expositions and exhibitions. Conserved in the archives of the Triennale, in anticipation of the Design museum which will open soon, the Permanent Collection of Italian Design, founded in 1997, constitutes the basis for design exhibitions at home and around the world. Today it counts over 1000 historic pieces of Italian design, most of them owned by the Triennale, as well as the communication artifacts concerning the image of the Triennale, Giovanni Sacchi’s wood models, Alessandro Mendini’s drawings and other collections. The objective is to increase the collections and available objects by creating a “network” that connects and cultivates the various “sources” present on the territory. The Museum is thus not only a collection of objects, but a laboratory for exploration and representation in a field where design and production are primarily centered in Milan and the Lombardia region.

Mart

Rovereto

www.mart.trento.it

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto came into being in 1987 as an independently administered body of the Autonomous Province of Trento. The Mart still comprises three galleries: Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, the Casa-Museo Fortunato Depero in Rovereto, and the large complex designed by the architect Mario Botta, together with the Rovereto engineer Giulio Andreolli, and inaugurated in Rovereto in 2002. The Mart’s valuable permanent collection comprises more than 10,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, and has been built up over the years through acquisitions, donations, and bequests from important private collections. A large part of the collection is devoted to Futurism. Indeed, the Mart possesses more than 3,000 works – drawings, paintings, sculptures and tapestries – bequeathed to the museum by the artist Fortunato Depero. Italian twentieth-century art is represented by works from the Giovanardi collection, among them masterpieces by Osvaldo Licini, Mario Sironi, Massimo Campigli, and Carlo Carrà, and an important group of paintings by Giorgio Morandi.
The museum's valuable collection also comprises works by Gino Severini, Giorgio de Chirico, and Felice Casorati. Abstract and informal art is represented by Fausto Melotti, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Afro, Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Emilio Vedova, Antonio Sanfilippo and Carla Accardi. In the section of the museum devoted to contemporary art, the Panza di Biumo collection comprises works by the foremost American artists of the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, a systematic endeavour to expand Mart’s collection has led to the acquisition of works by artists engaged in the most advanced inquiry of the 1970s and 1980s, among them Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Salvatore Scarpitta and Jannis Kounnelis.

Musée des arts decoratifs

Paris

www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr

A private non-profit organization, recognized for its public utility, Les Art Décoratifs were created in 1882 in the wake of the universal expositions by a group of collectors who were anxious to cultivate the “fine arts applied to industry” and to create close relationships between industry and culture, design and production. Long entitled “Union centrale des arts décoratifs”, Les Arts Décoratifs modernized their image in 2004, though their original vocation did not change, and included the conservation of the collections, the dissemination of culture, artistic education and professional training, through the museum, the library and the schools. The institution is articulated in three sections, with different venues in Paris: the Nissim de Camondo museum, the Camondo private school and the Musées des Arts Décoratifs, de la Mode et du Textile et de la Publicité. Opened to the public in 2006, the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in particular, with a collection of over 150,000 objects, represent a unique testimony of art, industry, research, creativity and knowledge from the Middle Ages to our time.

Museo Alessi

Omegna (Verbania)

www.museimpresa.com

Inaugurated in the spring of 1998, the Museo Alessi was constituted as an archive for the precious historic legacy of the company (products, prototypes, objects collected around the world) and to enrich the collection constantly through the acquisition of all the objects, drawings, images and documents of any kind, that are significant for the history of Alessi and more in general for objects of domestic use. Located in a building inside the factory grounds at Crusinallo di Omegna, designed by Alessandro Mendini, the museum exhibits a vast collection of models, pieces no longer in production, printed material, graphic and design documents, in addition to models, designer installations, historic images, books, magazines and catalogs. The Museum’s activity was focused on reinforcing the company’s activity in the field of product concept-design and policy (relying on the contribution of historic knowledge), and to reinforce the relationships with other museum structures that Alessi is involved with, in a more direct and competent way; the collection is in fact a precious archive open to curators of temporary exhibits who are interested in including the materials it conserves in their exhibitions. The Alessi Museum is also a member of Museimpresa [www.museimpresa.com], the Italian association of company museums and archives that gathers some of the most interesting concerns in Italy.

Museo di Castelvecchio

Verona

www.comune.verona.it

www.archiviocarloscarpa.it

The Museo di Castelvecchio, restored and rearranged by Carlo Scarpa between 1958 and 1975, constitutes one of the primary examples of the Venetian architect’s museographic work. The Museum heads the network of civic museums and monuments in Verona, founded in the early nineteenth century. It exhibits important collections primarily of sculpture and painting from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Seen by over 90,000 visitors per year, it is intensely involved in conservation, restoration, teaching and promotion, producing publications, exhibitions, conferences. It has a library, a specialized document and photographic archive, open to the public. The museum’s cabinet of drawings and prints conserves several collections of drawings by Carlo Scarpa, which may be consulted online at the website www.archiviocarloscarpa.it.

Victoria and Albert Museum

London

www.vam.ac.uk

Founded with the intention of selecting and exhibiting objects shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – as the Museum of Ornamental Art -, moved to its current location in 1857 under the name of South Kensington Museum and finally christened Victoria and Albert Museum by Queen Victoria in 1899, it is the largest art and design museum in the world, with extensive collections that include a wide range of periods and typologies. The museum in fact gathers artifacts such as ceramics, furniture, fashion, glass, jewelry, metal objects, sculptures, textiles and paintings, prints and books from the richest cultures of the world over a period of 3000 years. It also hosts a national photography collection. As part of a significant renovation program, it inaugurated a series of new galleries, dedicated to painting, architecture, sculpture and Islam. In addition to the permanent display, it also organizes a vast program of exhibitions, shows, events and activities, particularly in the fields of research ( on single pieces or systematic research) and conservation. The collections may be consulted online, in over 20,000 pieces and over 26,000 images. For 150 years our unsurpassable collections have intrigued, inspired and informed.

Vitra Design Museum

Weil am Rhein

www.design-museum.de

Housed in a building created by Californian architect Frank Gehry, Vitra Design Museum first opened its doors to the public in 1989. The many faceted program of the museum focuses upon the research and presentation of historical and contemporary developments in industrial furniture design and related fields of study. Temporary exhibitions explore design topics within the various contexts of architecture, the fine arts, society and non-western cultures. The design and architecture exhibitions of Vitra Design Museum are shown internationally in renowned partner museums. The Vitra Design Museum also holds workshops for school children and students. Furthermore, the Museum publishes exhibition catalogues and produces miniature models of classic furniture designs and authentic re-editions of historical designs. For 150 years our unsurpassable collections have intrigued, inspired and informed.

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