Copenhagen, 1890.

The museum was set up with a practical aim. Its own history page says Designmuseum Danmark was founded in 1890 by the Confederation of Danish Industries in Copenhagen, the Industriforeningen, together with the Ny Carlsberg Museumslegat. The goal from the start, the museum says, was to communicate the idea of quality in design: to show exemplary objects that would raise the level of Danish industrial products, inspire people working in industry and make consumers more critical and quality-minded. Danish Wikipedia names the painter Pietro Krohn as its founding director, from 1893 to 1905.

For 121 years the institution carried a different name. Until 2011, Danish Wikipedia says, it was called Kunstindustrimuseet, or Det danske Kunstindustrimuseum, and it exhibited furniture and decorative objects from before 1950. English Wikipedia gives the English name Danish Museum of Art & Design for that period, and the Danish Museum of Decorative Art before it. The present name puts the word design at the front, and the museum’s Danish Wikipedia entry describes its subject as Danish and international crafts and industrial design of the twentieth century, the period in which the word design came to the fore.

Its original home was purpose-built. English Wikipedia says a building designed by Vilhelm Klein, next to the Industriforeningen’s premises on City Hall Square, was completed in 1894 and opened to the public the following year; the museum’s own history also gives 1895. Danish Wikipedia places that building on Vestre Boulevard, today’s H.C. Andersens Boulevard, opposite Copenhagen City Hall. The displays were arranged by material, with separate galleries for porcelain, faience, silver, furniture, glass and textiles, so that a craftsman or manufacturer could study one field at a time.

Directors after Krohn are listed by Danish Wikipedia as Emil Hannover from 1906, Vilhelm Slomann from 1923, Erik Zahle from 1949, Erik Lassen from 1966, Kristian Jakobsen from 1982 and Bodil Busk Laursen from 1995 to 2011, when Anne-Louise Sommer took over.

A rococo hospital and a Klint interior.

The building the museum is known by came to it in the 1920s. The museum says the former Royal Frederik’s Hospital was built in 1752–57, during the reign of King Frederik V, to drawings by the architects Nicolai Eigtved and Laurids de Thurah, and opened on 31 March 1757. The sickrooms were long galleries sized around a hospital bed, with windows for light and a garden, Grønnegården, in the middle. The hospital closed in 1910, when the Rigshospitalet opened. Danish Wikipedia says the buildings were offered to the museum in 1919, and English Wikipedia says they came as a gift from the banker Emil Glückstadt.

The museum moved in 1926. Its own account says the architects Ivar Bentsen and Kaare Klint adapted the buildings for museum use, and that Klint furnished the entire museum and designed its whole inventory in the late 1920s. Danish Wikipedia adds that Thorkild Henningsen worked with Bentsen on the buildings, that Klint fitted out the individual rooms, and that Poul Henningsen lit them with his newly developed PH lamps. The museum says Klint lived and worked in the building.

Wallpaper*, in a feature by Jeni Porter published on 18 June 2022, described how the scheme worked. Klint created exhibition spaces while keeping the flow of rooms in the single-storey complex, which wraps around a central courtyard. Floors of Norwegian Gjellebæk stone tiles and walls rendered in a grey mortar gave the rooms a restrained backdrop, and the magazine said the design had lasted for almost a century. The same feature notes that a collection of Japanese sword guards assembled by Dr Hugo Halberstadt was originally kept in a cabinet by the designer Johan Rohde, and was moved in the 1950s to a larger drawer cabinet by Klint.

Later additions sit beside the old wings. The museum says a design lab for workshops and learning was built next to it in 2012, and that its 125th anniversary in 2015 was marked with the exhibition “Learning from Japan”. Danish Wikipedia says the forecourt in front of the main entrance on Bredgade was turned into an open outdoor exhibition space designed by Cobe, inaugurated on 2 November 2018.

A hospital façade, grey stone floors and a red typeface.

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.

A family typeface and a two-year renovation.

The museum’s current visual identity reaches back into its own archive. A project description published by the Danish industry body Creative Circle says the typeface Flexibility was created in the early 1960s by the Danish architect and graphic designer Naur Klint, and that it had been forgotten in the museum’s archives. The same text says Urgent.Agency and Lars Klint digitised the face for the launch of Designmuseum Danmark’s new visual identity in 2017, that Flexibility is the cornerstone of that identity, and that the museum’s brand promise is “We share design”. A pop-up exhibition on the typeface ran at the museum from 5 October 2018 to 20 January 2019.

The building then closed for renovation. Wallpaper* reported in June 2022 that the museum would reopen on 19 June 2022 after a two-year renovation, and said Klint’s principles were the starting point for the work. The magazine quoted director Anne-Louise Sommer as saying the two years had been used to rethink the whole museum-going experience. It reopened with exhibitions designed by local practices, among them “The Future is Present” by Spacon & X and “Wonder”, a show of small objects from the collections.

The Copenhagen practice OEO Studio designed the public rooms. Wallpaper* said the shop was moved to the entrance, combining glass cabinets designed by Klint with new built-in cabinets stained blue-grey, and that the café brought back the Le Klint 101 paper pendant designed by Klint. Dezeen, in a report by Cajsa Carlson on 3 August 2022, said OEO Studio made no structural changes but clad the large arched doors in hot-rolled steel, built a counter of oiled oak and hot-rolled steel for the café, and reused the original stone floor tiles. OEO’s Thomas Lykke told the magazine that the bluish tone of the steel contrasts with the tiles and the old plastered walls, and that a special blue-grey paint was mixed to suit the architecture and floors.

For a design guide, Designmuseum Danmark shows how a museum can draw its identity from its own archive and its own rooms, from a family typeface to a Klint interior. Compare Design Museum Gent and Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, two other European design museums in this collection. For this guide we use signal red, steel blue-grey and stone with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Designmuseum Danmark’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.