Design Museum of Barcelona

The Museu de les Arts Decoratives was a museum created in 1932. This historic museum contains a rich and diverse collection of European decorative arts, from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. In 1995, the museum extended its boundaries with the incorporation of design, thus converting it into the first and only statewide museum concerned with the preservation and exhibition of Spanish industrial design. The collections of the Museu de les Arts Decoratives were created from an important resource of industrial design and decorative art objects, that included salvers, carriages, furniture, wallpaper, clocks, tapestries and glasswork.[6][7]

The Museu Tèxtil i d'Indumentària possesses countless objects and pieces of major artistic and historical value that make up their collections of garments, fabrics and jewellery. Regarding their collection of clothes, the museum allows you to take a journey through the history of textiles, from the 16th century right up to the modern day. The museum’s collections include Coptic, Hispano-Arab, Gothic and Renaissance fabrics, as well as embroidery, a section on lacework and a collection of prints. Also worth mentioning is the jewelry collection, comprising approximately five hundred pieces that were made and produced in Spain.[8][9][10]

The Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques, a Cabinet of Graphic Arts, was a museum dedicated to visual communication design. The collections of the museum bring together significant samples of typography such as punches, matrices and tracing plates, as well as, prints that include samples of binding, packaging, labels and posters.

Important printers such as; Elzeviriana, Bobes, Seix Barral and Tobella, Naips Comas (the makers of playing cards), Tallers Roca (the industrial bookbinders) and the Neufville type foundry, have contributed to the museum’s expanding resources. In addition, certain artists and their families, have also donated graphic works and engraving moulds – as is the case of Miquel Plana and the families of Josep Obiols and Miquel Llovet. The collection is presented during exhibitions and study galleries programmed by Disseny Hub Barcelona.[11] The concept that initiated the Study Galleries was to create an area that combines the ideas of a temporary exhibition, a documentation centre and a museum repository but that has its own identity. Various objects are assembled according to their typologies and presented in a way that allows visitors to study, contemplate and reflect upon the museums collections.

Casa Bloc.

The Room 1/11 of the Casa Bloc (1932–1939) (in Catalan, Block house) is an apartment-museum run by the Design Museum of Barcelona. Inside you can visit the structure and the original look of the floor of this architectural complex, a reference architecture worker housing at the time of the Second Spanish Republic. The opening of this museum floor space as a tribute to the work of Josep Lluís Sert Josep Torres Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana and innovation that its approach assumed the 1930s. The Casa Bloc is open to everyone, with a regime of guided tours by reservation, from March 2012. Room 1/11 is a duplex measuring 60 square meters. It is located in Block 2, Level 1, Gate 11. The internal layout is very simple and clearly differentiates the day and the night.[12]

The archives of the documentation center currently include:

• ADI FAD Archive. Collection of the reserves of the Associació de Dissenyadors Industrials del Foment de les Arts Decoratives (1957–2007) It contents documentation generated by the association in its everyday activities, being of work or management. Includes documentation related to its administration(foundational acts, meetings, members, reports, participation in international entities…), information management (archives, computer system…), external relations (public acts, relations with other private and public institutions…), human resources management, financial resources management, heritage management (movable and real state items), legal issues, promotion of industrial design (exhibitions, conferences, publications…) and services to the members (distribution lists, labour exchange, bulletins…)[13]
• Rigalt i Granell Archive. The Archive is made up of documents collected from the stained-glass workshop Rigalt, Granell & Cia and is a testimony to the work of this centenarian workshop that was in operation from 1890 until 1984. Until now, the documentation from the stained-glass workshop Rigalt, Granell & Cia. was being preserved by the Granell family. The archive consists of diverse information about the artistic and technical aspects of the workshop whose work was central to the modernist period. Their work can be found at the Palau de la Música Catalana, the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau and the Casa Lleó Morera, among others. The company worked with architects including Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Lluís Moncunill, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Geroni Granell. The documentation is a testimony to the work of this centenarian workshop that was in operation from 1890 until 1984. Rigalt, Granell & Cia. faced many challenges throughout this period, which, while it always remained in the hands of the Granell family, included changes to its founding members. In this archive you can find accounting documents, drawings, sketches, inventories, publicity catalogues and photos from the stained-glass workshop. The largest number of documents that have been preserved are 500 sketches that include drawings of stained-glass and acid-etched glass. Thanks to these drawings, we can follow the artistic trends in stained-glass over the last 100 years. Included are drawings from the pre-modernist, modernist, noucentista, art deco, and works that reflect the abstract tendencies of the 80s. The donation comprises a total of 3,000 pieces, including prints (from different countries), diverse themed plates, brochures, business directories (among which include Les Vitraux de Paris (c.1900), Aus der Deutschen Glasmalerei de Berlin (1901) and Religiöse Malerein für Kirchedekoration de Viena (1907), company photographs and folders with original drawings and sketches.[14]
• Montaner y Simón editors collection.[15]

It offers its users some of the best specialized databases available. Requests and consultations should be carried out at the centre's facilities.

• Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI) allows for the consultation of summaries of published articles from design publications [16] dating back to 1973. It covers a wide variety of disciplines: Ceramics, glass, furniture, jewelry, graphic design, fashion design, textile design, interior design, architecture, web design, etc. It includes approximately 1200 new records every month.
• Berg Fashion Library is an online resource that provides integrated access to visual and textual content on clothing and fashion throughout history. It includes the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, a collection of electronic books, dictionaries and other reference resources, as well as, an extensive image bank.