The Plaça de les Glòries is finalizing a profound transformation to reclaim a centrality that for decades was covered by too many cars and annoying traffic jams. As a new green lung of the city, it will weave new relationships with its surroundings, opening a new opportunity for the Disseny Hub (DHUB) to find a way for Barcelona residents to make it their own. With the end of the works on this large public space on the horizon, the DHUB reaches its tenth anniversary concretizing the change of direction it has been immersed in for some years now, with an exercise full of changes that strengthen its position as "the great house of design" and complete the triumvirate of contemporary culture along with Macba and the CCCB, according to its artistic director, José Luis de Vicente, who believes that this discipline today must serve to "develop strategies for the survival and production of new worlds."
"For me, the Disseny Hub has to function as an emergency social institution, with a set of resources and tools to address the great unknowns of our time from culture, not only of thinking and talking, but of doing and speculating how things could be," defends De Vicente. With a collection made up of more than 80,000 objects ---only 2,000 are on display---, the museum will renew its permanent collections this year to advance towards its conversion into "a laboratory of citizen speculation, public and open to everyone, to be able to build new futures from our shared memory."
"When this building was inaugurated in 2014, there was a big project for all the design and decorative arts collections of the city to be together for the first time under the same roof. They were presented separated by disciplines and chronologically. We no longer read the impact of design like that, as a single linear story, but as a multiplicity of stories, episodes and chapters, where things that ten years ago might have seemed anecdotal are now revealed as very important to talk about decolonization, climate crises and new materials," says the cultural researcher, who has previously been founder and artistic director of Sónar+D, co-founder of the Model Architecture festival and curator of the LlumBCN festival. "Barcelona has the capacity to always bet on being a laboratory, it's something that is deeply embedded in its DNA. It's a privilege that we have a house like this in the city and, moreover, located at its great crossroads and its new symbolic center. There is no space like this in southern Europe dedicated to contemporary reading and looking towards the future from design, architecture, urbanism, technology, innovation and the digital medium," he remarks.
"Barcelona has the capacity to always bet on being a laboratory, it's something that is deeply embedded in its DNA. It's a privilege that we have a house like this in the city and, moreover, located at its great crossroads and its new symbolic center"In that vein, the DHUB will incorporate a think tank, where research residencies will be opened to rethink the problems society faces"To me the idea ofhub what I like is that of a connector, like an interface to which you can plug different things together. The new space will serve to connect the scientific community with the cultural community, designers, architects, and artists," explains De Vicente. It will be located in a space that remained closed and unused when the building was finished in 2013, which can be seen from the entrance on Ávila street, next to the cafeteria. Originally, it was going to be a restaurant, but it ended up remaining empty. With an area of 800 square meters distributed over two floors, construction began last year and is expected to be inaugurated soon.
It will not be the only new piece that the DHUB will have on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. It will also incorporate a store dedicated to design, in a space located after the building's entrance through Plaza de las Glòries, previously intended for events: "It will be the first large bookstore in Glòries and, in a way, a new great social and public space also exists when there is a bookstore". Its opening is linked to the completion of the tram connection works and the remodeling of the square.
In that sense, the new metro station will be another leg of the Disseny Hub, since one of its exits will lead directly to its interior. "It will thus transform into a street museum. It will feel so much its own that some will use it just to transit. When you leave, it will never be entirely clear to you at what point you stop being in the metro and start being in a museum," indicates De Vicente. "People find a cultural institution, by definition, often somewhat intimidating, and, furthermore, our architecture is very forceful, large-scale. I believe that being able to enter directly into its guts, without even having seen its exterior skin, will be very interesting," he adds.
This new storyline will be accompanied by unifying everything that happens inside the building, the Disseny Hub, under a single concept, leaving behind the separation between Museu del Disseny and Disseny Hub. In fact, De Vicente was appointed almost a year ago as director of the Museu del Disseny, a position that has now been replaced by that of artistic director of the DHUB. He is accompanied by Mireia Escobar as executive director of the Disseny Hub.