MoMA goes Danish

DESIGN: All the furniture and equipment – for actual use rather than exhibition – in the world’s finest museum of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is Danish. Chairs, tables, couches, cutlery and crockery. They are gifts from Danish designers and design manufacturers

The world’s leading museum of modern art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, has become an unrivalled shop window for Danish design and furniture. Since November last year, when the museum reopened after three years of building and renovation at the famous address on Manhattan’s 53rd Street, all the visitor areas of the museum have been fitted out with Danish designed furniture and textiles, cutlery in the restaurant, even the coffee pots, ashtrays and candlesticks.

It is not a special exhibition, but a permanent feature of the whole museum. It has been sponsored by a large number of Danish funds, and a number of manufacturers and Danish design companies have given the Museum of Modern Art generous discounts on their products.

MoMA and the Danish Foreign Service began collaborating in September 2002 following a Danish offer to sponsor furniture and accessories in all public areas of the museum. Based on the interest expressed by MoMA, the Royal Danish Consulate General in New York approached a number of Danish manufacturers. Ultimately, 24 MoMA goes Danish DESIGN: All the furniture and equipment – for actual use rather than exhibition – in the world’s finest museum of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is Danish. Chairs, tables, couches, cutlery and crockery. They are gifts from Danish designers and design manufacturers companies accepted a sponsorship.

“The point of the project was to sponsor a platform of global quality on a par with MoMA’s standards – not a ’Danish exhibition’, cultural attaché Irene Krarup explains. “It has become a design solution with an emphasis on comfort, functionality, and the highest aesthetic standards.”

In the final selection of furniture and accessories, a total of 33 Danish designers is represented, with approximately 150 different items and several thousand units including chairs, tables, couches, coffee pots, flatware, candlesticks etc. produced by 13 different Danish manufacturers.

It was important to MoMA not just to include design icons such as Arne Jacobsen, Hans J. Wegner and Poul Kjærholm, but also to give space for young designers. The result was that a lot of young, and to many visitors, quite unknown designers have been introduced.

The Danish Design Project has given MoMA an extraordinary design profile in all its public areas including restaurants and galleries. The curators and interior design architects of the museum spent many months assessing and selecting each product to find precisely the items that meet the museum’s high aesthetic level and also emphasise the fascinating rooms of the new building.