A culture district, a commission and a 2010 opening.

Design Museum Holon is a museum of design in the city of Holon, Israel. Wikipedia places it in the eastern part of the city’s newer culture area, which also holds the Médiathèque, a complex with the central library, a theatre and a cinémathèque, and notes that the design faculty of the Holon Institute of Technology sits nearby. The museum’s own website says it opened in March 2010, and Wikipedia gives the date as 3 March 2010.

The building opened before the galleries did. Haaretz, in a report by Noam Dvir and Yuval Saar dated 5 February 2010, described a grand opening of the building held the previous Sunday, with the opening exhibition scheduled only for March. The paper quoted the museum’s artistic director, Galit Gaon, who singled out the building itself as the museum’s main exhibit. The same report said the architectural model had already been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was due to appear in a Ron Arad retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London.

The commission had a long run-up. Haaretz recalled an interview with Arad from September 2003, in which he said he had initially tried to talk his way out of the project and had suggested that the city study design museums elsewhere. According to that interview, the city then approached the designer Daniel Charny, who researched the subject and submitted recommendations for the museum. Arad eventually accepted the commission and, the paper said, supervised the project from his London studio through daily photographic updates, seeing an almost finished building on a visit in mid-December, a few weeks before the opening.

The museum’s website describes the building as the work of Ron Arad Architects and says it was four years in construction. It frames the building as the opening exhibit a visitor meets, and lists the disciplines it shows as including industrial design, fashion, textiles and jewellery.

Ron Arad, Bruno Asa and the Corten bands.

The architect is the Israeli-born designer Ron Arad, who works from London. The New York Times style magazine, in a piece by Pilar Viladas dated 19 June 2013, described him as an Israeli-British architect and designer long fascinated by metal, known for furniture such as the sheet-steel Well Tempered Chair for Vitra. Haaretz in 2010 noted that he had recently finished a term as head of the design department at the Royal College of Art. Wikipedia says Arad planned and designed the museum in cooperation with Bruno Asa, and Haaretz also named the Israeli-born Asa as his partner on the design.

The building is two things at once. Haaretz described a system of steel spirals and a conventional concrete building that carries them and contains the exhibition halls. The spirals are bands of Corten weathering steel in shades the paper called brown, orange and red, and The New York Times called the exterior ribbonlike. Arad told Haaretz that the bands were cut in segments whose length was set by the shipping container that brought them from Italy, and that they are structural rather than decorative: he said there is not a single column in the building. The paper added that the spirals began as pencil and freehand drawings and were then realised entirely by computer.

Inside the bands, the plan is compact. Haaretz described an inner plaza between the steel and the concrete, entered from the street, with a black ceiling over its front section that is in fact the floor of the main gallery; the paper compared it with the belly of a whale. Around that plaza sat the ticket office, a museum shop and a café. There are two galleries: a small enclosed space on the ground floor for smaller or wall-mounted work, and a main gallery of about 500 square metres on the upper floor, lit by natural light. An education wing faces an inner courtyard with a garden.

Arad stressed that the design is site-specific. He told the paper that the plaza is squeezed between the back of the Holon Médiathèque and two main streets, and that the aim was a hierarchy of external spaces that made the building inviting to enter. Once inside, he said, the view out is only to the sky. Haaretz observed that the rust-coloured steel is seen indoors only once, at the edge of the staircase linking the two galleries.

A museum read through its building, its posters and its shop.

Museums and print shops carry identities that rarely stop at a logo. For many institutions the building itself becomes the mark: a façade, a roofline or an unusual material is the image that photographers, visitors and the press repeat, and an architect’s drawing can end up on more surfaces than any wordmark. A new wing or a move to a new address can change how a place is pictured for years.

Posters are a second, older surface. A steady programme of exhibition or event posters, held together by a grid, a typeface or a printing method, can describe a place more clearly than its symbol, and over time the archive of those posters becomes a collection in its own right.

Typefaces and signage carry the identity inside: wayfinding, wall texts and labels repeat the same letters a visitor meets on the website and the ticket. Shops, editions and printed souvenirs extend the system again, turning a postcard, a print or a tote bag into a small portable version of the brand. When reading these guides, look at the building, the posters, the type and the shop together; they usually tell one story.

Four collecting categories and a run of dated shows.

Wikipedia says the museum collects and shows design in four categories: Historical Design, Contemporary Design, Commissioned Works and Academic Projects. It lists exhibitions built around food-related design, around functional everyday objects and around the role of emotion in design, as well as shows on the work of individual designers including the fashion designer Alber Elbaz, the swimwear designer Lea Gottlieb, the Spanish designer Jaime Hayon and the milliner Stephen Jones. Wikipedia also links the museum to a materials library, the Aharon Feiner Eden Materials Library.

The architect has come back as a subject. The New York Times reported in June 2013 that Arad was returning to the museum for an exhibition called “In Reverse”, running to 19 October 2013. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the paper said, the show paired his designs from the 1980s onwards with a project on how car bodies behave under compression: six Fiat 500 cars crushed flat and hung on the gallery walls, a wooden mould used to shape the car’s panels, lent by Fiat’s archive, a sculpture of polished stainless-steel rods in the car’s shape, a digital simulation of the crushing and a 3-D printed piece taken from one frame of that film.

Industry has supplied exhibitions too. Wikipedia says that in 2015, and again in 2017, the museum produced an exhibition of designs made for the Italian homeware company Alessi that were never put into production, under the title Alessi IN-Possible. Designers in those shows included Andrea Branzi, Hans Hollein, Toyo Ito, Marcel Wanders and Zaha Hadid, among others.

For a design guide, Design Museum Holon shows how a museum can let its architecture carry the identity: the weathered steel bands are the picture the place is known by, and the exhibitions inside are read against them. Compare the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Design Museum Brussels (ADAM). For this guide we use rust, weathered orange and brown with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Design Museum Holon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.