Design Museum

The Barcelona Design Museum, also known by its official name Museu del Disseny de Barcelona, is a museum under the city’s Institute of Culture, and aims to promote a better understanding of the world of design, serving as both a museum and a laboratory.

It focuses on four aspects of design: space design, product design, information design and fashion. The Barcelona Design Museum is the result of the union of several pre-existing museums, the Museu de les Arts Decoratives, the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària, the Casa Bloc Apartment and the Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques.

• Museu de les Arts Decoratives: originating in 1932, it contains a vast collection of European decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution,
• Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària: contains a wealth of objects of high artistic and historical value related to the world of textiles, fabrics and clothing. A real journey through the history of textiles, from the 16th century to the present day.
• Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques: a museum dedicated to visual communication, with objects for typography and printers, as well as exhibitions of graphic works by numerous local and international artists.
• Casa Bloc Apartment: a museum-apartment in which you can appreciate the original structure and appearance of Catalonia’s architectural complexes of the 1930s and the innovation of later years.

Tickets for the Barcelona Design Museum

The ticket for the Design Museum is 6 Eur per person for the permanent exhibitions, 4 Eur the reduced one. Temporary exhibitions have different rates.

Admission is free every first Sunday of the month. On other Sundays free admission is only in the afternoon from 3pm to 8pm.

Free entrance with Barcelona Card

The Barcelona Design Museum is one of the attractions included in the Barcelona Card, so if you buy it you get free entry to the Design Museum. Take advantage of it!

Opening Hours

The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 8pm.
Closed Mondays, except on public holidays, 1 January, 1 May, 24 June and 25 December.
On 24 and 31 December it is open until 3.30 p.m.

The Building

The Barcelona Design Museum is located inside the Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB) building in Placa de les Glories. It was designed by the MBM architecture studio formed by Oriol Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay, and construction began in July 2009. Construction finished in 2013, and the museum opened its doors the following year.

The building consists of two parts, an underground area and a floor that rises 14 metres above the ground.

Underground area

The underground area of the building includes two floors with an exhibition hall and rooms reserved for activities such as research, teaching and services.

First Floor

The first floor can be accessed from two different entrances: the one from the square, 14 metres above the ground, and the one from Avila Street, located at an intermediate level of 7 metres above the ground. Its main space reproduces a street or public place, from which a flight of stairs and several lifts lead to the services located at different heights.

The origin of the museum

Barcelona has always been a city connected to the world of design, which is why it was decided in the early 2000s to create a point of contact between this discipline and the people: the idea of a space that would allow the public to understand the nuances of design in a broader sense was born. It was decided to build a single space within which everything related to the world of design in the city would be located.

Oriol Bohigas together with his team was the architect responsible for the construction of the building, located in Placa de les Glories. Originally intended to be called Barcelona Design Museum, from 2008 to 2013 it was called Disseny Hub Barcelona and eventually renamed again to its current name, Museu del Disseny de Barcelona. The building is home to both the Museum and the Foment de les Arts i el Disseny (FAD) and the Barcelona Centro de Diseno (BCD), two pioneering institutions in the promotion of design in Catalonia.