A museum for the
21st century
A fundamental part of the Design Campus’ mission is to reflect on the role and relevance of Decorative and Applied Arts museums in the 21st Century.
The Kunstgewerbemuseum in Dresden, or Museum of Decorative Arts, has a dual purpose on the Design Campus. It is, simultaneously, the institution behind the whole Design Campus enterprise and one of its four pillars: Museum, Lab, School, and Network.
Once called Museum of Manufactures or Museum of Industrial Art, the Decorative and Applied Arts museums in Germany had a clear mission: to serve as an education platform to teach industrialists, craftsmen, design students, and working class alike the notion of “good design”. Their motto was “Learning by example”.
The first Museum of Manufactures, the South Kensington Project, opened in 1852, inspired by the huge successes in attendance and commercial revenue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, at the Crystal Palace in London. This museum is better known as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) today.
The original idea and structure of the V&A collection and program was devised by Henry Cole, the museum's first director, and the exiled German polymath architect, Gottfried Semper. The two men worked together previously on the Great Exhibition, where Cole as the general director of the project and Semper designing the presentations of several countries within the Crystal Palace. They would continue their working relationship through the V&A and beyond, when Cole, the director of the Government School of Design hired Semper as a lecturer.
Cole planned the V&A and its collection to be used as educational resources. First, to help boost a productive industry and, second, to establish public taste. He brought in articles created with innovative technology, showcased new production methods and materials, commissioned casting samples, and filled the museum with beautiful models of furniture and manufactured objects linked with arts and crafts.
Semper brought the scientific methodology of Separation, Classification, and Nomenclature to collections. By stepping away from the unintelligible mass of objects in a Wunderkammer, and into a world of collection, material categorization, and interpretation of objects. He defined the organization of the Ideal Museum. Early catalogues documented country of origin and materials of each object. Visitor demographics and attendance, entrance fees and opening hours were also tracked.
Interesting to know, the book Ideal Museum, written by an architect, art critic, and educator who lived and worked in Dresden for many years, Gottfried Semper, served as a blueprint for every Decorative and Applied Arts museum. The South Kensington Project model was replicated throughout Europe and the world, and is still in use today. The philosophy has been updated through the years to reflect contemporary ideas, mainly the purpose educational programs and target audiences. However, the collections management, classification and nomenclature still adhere to his ideal. Visitors can see this reflected in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Dresden.
With the Design Campus, the Kunstgewerbemuseum returns to its roots as a teaching and educational collection, almost 150 years after its founding in 1876. At that time, the museum’s founding concept was a reaction to the upheavals caused by industrialization and capitalism. Now, the museum’s roles and concept are being revisited against the backdrop of the social transformations, environmental crisis, and technological disruptions of the 21st Century. It will take on new dimensions as a place and school for utopias.
The new permanent exhibition in the Imperial Rooms
Starting in Spring 2022, the Kunstgewerbemuseum is opening the new permanent exhibition “Design around 1800”: Illustrated by stunning works of applied arts of the Kunstgewerbemuseum or the porcelain collection and spanning the whole range of object-groups such as ceramics, textiles, glass and metalwork, furniture, wallpaper and clocks multiple facets of the arts and crafts around 1800 are spotlighted.
Towards a phyto-centred design
Plant Fever. Towards a phyto-centred design deals with current debates around the topics of sustainability, human-nature relationship and handling of resources: for example on the ecological footprint, the global warming or our diet. Our relationship with nature needs to be urgently rethought!
A Speculation in Four Seasons
The exhibition and DESIGN CAMPUS SUMMER SCHOOL explore Schloss Hubertusburg and its surroundings, with water taking center stage as a key indicator for sustainable resource use. This focus drives considerations for a regionally tailored circular economy, harmonized with the rhythm of the four seasons.
Part of a larger
Network of Museums
The Kunstgewerbemuseum, and by proxy the Design Campus, is part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), the Dresden State Art Collections, a museum complex with an international profile, comprising fifteen museums.
The SKD museums are among the most significant and oldest in Europe, and were the first to open their collections to the public. The origins of the SKD can be seen in the sixteenth-century Kunstkammer of the Saxon electors. Set up, initially, as a universal collection, the emphasis was on technical devices, tools, instruments, clocks, and automata. Here the desire for costly and unusual things met an enthusiasm for technological innovation. Since 2010, the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony located in Leipzig, Dresden, and Herrenhut are part of SKD and have a leading role in the debate on the de-colonialization of collections and collaboration with the communities of origin.
The extensive range of expertise, history of design, art, and material culture present in SKD’s interdisciplinary museum collections are open to the Design Campus research and activities.
