A Museum for Industrial Design in Milano, 1949-64

Abstract

At the end of the 1940s, the debate surrounding the need for an industrial design museum re-emerged. This study reconstructs three projects developed for the city of Milan between 1947 and 1964 in three different locations: a Museum of Architecture and Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts or Modern Museum for the Applied Arts at the Palazzo dell’Arte, a section or permanent exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology, an International Museum of Modern Architecture and Industrial Design at QT8. It highlights, on the one hand, the urgency of the question – which led to the development of specific museological concepts for industrial design by supporters such as Gio Ponti or Alberto Rosselli – and on the other hand, considering that nothing came of it, the difficulties connected to the ways in which design began to spread throughout Italy in the twenty years that followed World War II.