Moscow gets a first look at its new Design Museum

Today, ArtPlay (the sprawling industrial complex home to this year’s main project of the Moscow Biennale) will present the city with the “Museum of the Future,” the Moscow Design Museum.

The Museum will exist in two iterations. The permanent collection will reside in a bomb shelter on site at ArtPlay. The second collection will be installed within a specially-outfitted bus, and then driven to neighboring cities outside the capital, with an earnestness that almost seems anachronistic in the internet era (though according to the site, hyper-designed by the Dutch LAVA group,  it’s “AHEAD OF ITS TIME!”)

The telegraph room at the Polytechnical Museum

Considering Moscow’s wealth of marvelous museums (from the Borodinsky Panorama to the Military Museum to the wondrous Museum of the Cosmonauts), it is quite perplexing why Moscow has not had a design museum before (although to be fair, the Soviet juggernaut, the Polytechnical Museum, perhaps eclipsed the need with its anything-goes displays, which are currently getting a very modern facelift.) A recent attempt was made with MOD “The Center of Modern Design and Innovation”, until it was discovered that the space amounted to little more than the foyer to a mini-mall specializing in oriental carpets and interior knickknacks. (The Moscow Times still has footage of MOD‘s innovative first exhibition – Karim Rashid.)

We look forward to learning more about what this new museum can do for Moscow.