Work for the Design Museum began in 2004 with the building of the Design Library, the Historical Archive and the Documentation Centre. They then continued with the restoration of the Museum site until 2007, when the Museum was officially opened by the deadline and without interrupting even for one day the cultural events and exhibitions of La Triennale di Milano.

The architectural design for the restoration of the building and its conversion into a Museum is by Michele De Lucchi. All the exhibition areas of La Triennale have been adapted to meet international museum standards, including air conditioning in the Salone d’Onore. In particular, the most innovative architectural feature of Triennale Design Museum is the entrance via a bridge, so that the Museum is both inside the Triennale and also an independent body, visible as such. The scientific director of the Design Museum is Andrea Branzi. The Museum of La Triennale aims at being deeply innovative. Usually one goes to a museum just once or twice. The purpose, the challenge made by La Triennale is to have visitors come back twice a year. Hence the idea of a dynamic, and not a crystallized or static Museum, which is able to be renew itself and offer itself with renewed views, time and again. A scientific as well as emotional Museum that offers visitors an intriguing experience which makes them want to repeat it again.

On the one side, wide-spread scientific research portrays the history of Italian design from different perspectives, through different stories, interpretations, approaches, addressing the question “What is Italian design?”, from an idea of Italo Rota with Silvana Annicchiarico and Andrea Branzi. Italo Rota has been called as Museum Exhibition Designer. The history of Italian Design will be presented not only through a scene of domestic objects but also through a film-architectural contribution by Peter Greenaway (Ouverture. Blow your trumpet! 2000 year of Italian design) and Italian directors who will interpret the obsessions of Italian Design:

 

Antonio Capuano

The Light of the Spirit

Lamps, beams, immaterial realities from the Baroque to the present;

 

Pappi Corsicato

Super-Comfort

Problematic elaboration of the popular comfort;

 

Davide Ferrario

Energy

From the Futurists to the modern quest for instability, speed and the precarious;

 

Daniele Luchetti

Stackable Democracy

Seeking the serial, the stackable, the washable;

 

Mario Martone

The Theatre of Animism

From Pompei to the objects of contemporary theatre;

 

Ermanno Olmi

The Great and the Simple

From the early Christians to the current search for archetypes;

 

Silvio Soldini

The Great Middle Classes and the Sanctity of Luxury

The initial basis of a social consensus surrounding Italian design and its reference to the sacred luxury of the Byzantines.

 

Besides there will be an Agora Theatre, a space totally made of wood, where debates, conferences, presentations, events and art performances will take place. A permanent physical place, but with continuously changing contents, where ancientness and technologies combine inside with Lebanese cedar wood and outside with a game of aluminium mirror effect and an illumination system consisting of 39 monitors. Triennale Design Museum is also characterized by the presence of a Restoration workshop. A centre dedicate to the “memory of modernity”, but also to the experimentation of new technologies, which aims at becoming an international point of reference for the complex issue of recovery and preservation of contemporary objects and materials. Triennale Design Museum is the centre of the network of the ‘veins’ of design which are very rich in Italy, especially in Lombardy. The truly widespread beauty, however, is often unknown as it happens to belong to private museums or public and private collections. Therefore, the Museum is also an opportunity to form a network of such vast heritage and make its contents visible.

The Museum is to be directed by Silvana Annicchiarico who for nine years was the Curator for the Permanent Collection of Italian Design of La Triennale di Milano and in charge of the Design Department at La Triennale for six years. L’Europeo has produced a 360-page special monographic issue to celebrate the birth of Triennale Design Museum. The process of development of Italian design will be told by the big names of L’Europeo, historians and designers, from the perspective of twentieth-century Italian history. Thanks to Banca Popolare of Milan, admission tickets to Triennale Design Museum will cost 11 Euros and together with the entrance ticket, visitors will receive L’Europeo special issue. The new logo and the institutional graphics of Triennale Design Museum were designed by Pierluigi Cerri. 
In order to celebrate the museum, all visitors will receive Munari’s travel sculpture which has been made to celebrate 100 years from his birth (ed. Corraini), thanks to MINI support.