Luoghi del divenire

Since the 1990s historical several companies have been setting up their own museums, especially in Northern and Central Italy: the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum (1995), the Guzzini Archive / Gallery (1998), the Olivetti Historical Archive Association (1998), the Alessi Museum (1999), the Dalmine Foundation (1999), the Kartell Museum (2000), the Piaggio Museum “Giovanni Alberto Agnelli” (2000), etc. Exceptions to this trend are the Alfa Romeo Historical Museum, which opened in 1976 and the oldest of the kind in Italy, the Doccia Museum of present-day Richard Ginori, established as early as the 18th century. For Western historical companies working in the fields of furniture, design, fashion, etc. a company museum can constitute an effective tool to communicate a brand and assert an identity, using Quality to contrast the low-cost productions of some Asian countries which for a few years have been flooding the international market. Already in 1939, in writing about company museums Laurence Vail Coleman pointed out that as compared to other museum types company museums are “different in nature, scope and organisation”. Nevertheless, their reference model has remained that of the museum tout court, which is unsuitable to accomplish the task of promoting a brand. The issue mainly concerns the exhibit design culture which, for museums of this kind (that, among other things, welcome very few visitors), has all too often recourse to design categories and methodologies which are suitable for art, history, archaeology, science and technology, but certainly not for the products – unless they are design museums belonging to the more general category of arts. The company museum is a place where the products should not be merely displayed, as is the case with well-designed stores. Instead it should exhibit the processes leading to those very products and propose itself as the true drive of a company with a history behind and a future ahead, an “open work” that tells the life and the evolution of a company, that speaks of its designers and its people and explains its strategies. Hence it becomes necessary to devise a “company museography” supported by a discipline which, like marketing, has traditionally been unrelated to the culture of interior architecture, and to put forward unexpected solutions by having recourse to new materials (which are particularly appreciated in great architectural works but derive from the wider area of interior design) as well as state-of-the-art multimedia systems.