In the past architecture week We were able to enjoy a visit to the Museum of Costume. Our guide was a real luxury, Juan Carlos Rico, the curator of the Costume Museum and also a Doctor in architecture. As he himself told us, he saw how the building was built and works in it, so he knows it perfectly.

The visit was planned as a visit to the building, not the collections. It is the work of Jaime López de Asiaín y Angel Diaz Dominguez, who carried out the project in 1969. The works lasted from 1973 to 1975. There were some interventions, some parallel, such as the Julio González Room, by Antonio Fernandez Alba and an expansion in 1980 of Francisco Valero de la Parra.

The building is largely the result of Museum Architecture Congress, held in Mexico in 1968. There they talked about museum buildings and how they should be conceived to give them an eminently didactic character, provide them with museographic flexibility and design options for these exhibition spaces to grow.

Maximum freedom was sought in the use of space and a grid with pillars was chosen. A container was created, a composition that integrated vertical and horizontal elements and connects the interior and exterior, with the wonderful garden of the Costume Museum which we will talk about next Saturday (and which generates quite a few conservation problems).
The building is basically a U around a central patio, with an open ground floor, in the manner of a large arcaded plaza between pillars. On the pillars, the container, which was intended to adapt to the dynamic needs of a museum defined as a cultural center.

The central tower would house research departments, workshops, administrative areas, etc. An opposition between vertical space and the horizontal space of the exhibition area.

He won the National Architecture Prize in 1969 but controversy has always followed him. Initially it was the headquarters of Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, whose funds went to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In 1987 the funds arrived from the Museum of the Spanish People, a cultural project born in the II Republic and that intended to preserve the historical memory of “the works, activities and data of the knowledge, feelings and actions of the anonymous popular mass.” In 1993 the Museum of the Spanish People and the National Museum of Ethnology they joined in National Museum of Anthropology although they continued to operate independently.

In 2004 the current one was created Museum of Costumeas the Ethnological Heritage Research Center. It houses numerous objects from daily life from the past, organized into various collections of clothing, jewelry and accessories, textiles, economic activities, domestic equipment, recreational activities or religiosity and beliefs.

An entertaining and very interesting visit that is well worth it.

A hug