Striking New Design Museum Opens

HOLON, Israel, March 5, 2010— -- Visitors to the Design Museum of Holon crane their necks to get a better view of the striking red and orange steel waves looping overhead. Israel's first design museum opened to the public Thursday, making it one of only a handful of design museums in the world.

The building's architect, Israeli Ron Arad, is considered to be one of the world's top five architects, and the museum already has won the Conde Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Award. The design museum is Arad's first project in his home country.

"Even I can get surprised by views and aspects that I haven't seen before when I wander around the museum," Arad said. "It's different every different second of the day because a great part of it frames the sky in a very amazing way. I notice that everyone who walks in just has to look up."

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The bold, swirling design of the building was modeled after the movement of ribbons.

"These ribbons really allowed us to make some very dangerous and experimental assumptions about what these ribbons could do for us structurally, in terms of flying in the air," said Asa Bruno, director of Ron Arad Architects. "It's very difficult to make 300 tons of steel fly in the air, and this required some very careful engineering."

Galit Gaon, the creative director of the museum, spoke of the "spiraling embrace" of the building's structure.

"The building itself is the biggest object in our collection," Gaon said.

The museum's first exhibit, called the "State of Things: Design in the 21st Century," showcases more than 100 products portraying the consumption and impact of contemporary international design. The exhibit contains pieces so modern they only could have been created in the last few years.

One theme, "Social Anxiety," showcases design that reflects life in what the museum terms an "increasingly dangerous" world filled with devastating national disasters and terrorism. As designers begin to address such social anxiety issues, their work finds a platform in the Holon museum.

Israeli designer Yael Mer's "Evacuation Skirt," conceived after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, shows how fashion literally can be a lifesaver. The black-and-white-striped top and red skirt is designed to inflate into a kayak in case of an emergency. It is strong enough to hold a grown woman afloat.

Another theme is the "Design Lab," featuring the world's most recent materials, processes and creative technologies. An example is the Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka's "Pane Chair" (Italian for "Bread Chair"), created through a process similar to baking bread.

The chair is made exclusively from 0.5 mm polyester elastomer fibers woven together around a structure and then baked for a half an hour in a large kiln, where the fibers retain the shape and bond together to form a chair. Visitors to the museum can watch the baking process on handheld devices.

The body always has been a subject of design, and the "Of the Body" section of the exhibit shows different "life-enhancing and life-extending" technologies.

Modeled after the lunate tail found in whales and dolphins, Ted Ciamillo's Lunocet Fin greatly enhances swimming performance. Featured as an individual piece in the museum, it's difficult to understand the Lunocet Fin's purpose -- but an accompanying digital headset allows the visitor to see a video demonstration of its wearer whizzing through the water like a modern-day mermaid.

Ben Wilson's monowheel is a part of the "New Essentialism" exhibit, which aims to spotlight "aesthetically straightforward objects" without further ornament. The monowheel is a vehicle that is essentially one large wheel, low to the ground, with its rider in the center using his hands to steer and feet to pedal.

"I saw the video on YouTube for the monowheel and got really excited about it," said Yoni Levi, an industrial design student from Haifa. "I came here on opening day to check it out in person."

The $18 million museum is built entirely on public funds, and its developers worked closely with the municipality of Holon.

"There is not a single shekel or cent of donations in this project," Bruno said. "It was all a building by the public for the public ... which is a testament to the boldness and creativity of the municipality."

In the last six years, Holon has built a total of eight museums, each one of a kind in Israel. Museums like the Cartoon Museum, the Puppet Museum, the Children's Museum, the Digital Technology Center -- and now, the Design Museum -- all are intended to make this suburb of Tel Aviv a center for culture in the country.

"The Design Museum was born out of two needs," Bruno said. "One is the need to project the presence of this city and this museum specifically beyond the boundaries of Israel. And [the other] is to create a permanent platform for the presentation, debate and discussion of design in Israel."

"Within Israel, there are so many cultures from so many places that we haven't yet developed our own design culture," said Nadav Kermish, 27, a design student at the Holon Institute of Technology. "This means that so far, there is less culture driving the production of design, and we don't have any pre-conceived limits to what we'll create.

"This museum is a key component to forging own design culture," Kermish said.