About us

“Designing our environment”

This motto sums up the purpose of the museum: to interpret material culture and the ideas, values and attitudes associated with it, past and present, in order to disseminate and actively contribute to the creation of a high-quality living environment based on social responsibility.

The museum is to be built around design, considered not as a professional speciality that emerged in the 20th century, but as a structural factor in social, cultural and productive systems. This is an expanded concept of design that we might call 'design as a matrix concept', in the light of which the Museum seeks to analyse past and present life and history.

Today, design is more than a method for the creation of consumer objects; it is creation and communication, it is the visual construction of human life. It is the operability of knowledge. It is ‘designing our environment’.

Download the museum dossier here (Spanish)

Download an extract from our master plan here (Spanish)

State Museums

The Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas is part of a ntework of 16 managed by the Office of State Museums of the Ministry of Culture. Watch our promo video here!

You can dowload here the bilingual guide with the basic information needed to visit and discover this state museum network

You can dowload here the bilingual guidewiththe basic information about the 8 museums placed in Madrid