Disseny Hub Barcelona

About this place

The Disseny Hub Barcelona — officially the Barcelona Design Museum — is a large civic building by MBM Arquitectes (the practice of Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas, and David Mackay, with additions by others over the decades) completed in 2014 at Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. The building consolidates several previously dispersed design collections into a single institution: the decorative arts, fashion, product design, and graphic design collections of the city of Barcelona. The building's position at Les Glòries is significant. The square — the planned intersection of the Diagonal, the Gran Via, and the Meridiana — was long one of Barcelona's most problematic urban spaces, dominated by a ring road that physically separated the surrounding neighbourhoods. The ongoing transformation of the square, which includes the Torre Glòries (Jean Nouvel, 2005) and the reclaiming of the road as public space, has made it one of the city's principal sites for testing contemporary urbanism, and the Disseny Hub is one of the anchoring institutions of that process. The building itself is a large, somewhat angular volume that lifts itself off the ground to create a covered public plaza beneath — a gesture repeated across Barcelona's civic architecture but here given additional prominence by the scale of the building and its exposed position. The collection inside is genuinely extensive and well-presented, particularly the decorative arts holdings, which span medieval to contemporary Catalan and European production. For visitors interested in design history and practice, the Disseny Hub is essential; for those primarily interested in the building, the architecture is competent but not exceptional — the urban position and the programme are more interesting than the architecture.