DANISH DESIGN CENTER - Copenaghen The attention of Danish people for design certainly is not surprising, but since one year Copenaghen has a new place for the Danish Design Centre, a big five-storey building near the garden of Tivoli, that has allowed the structure to open the doors to private costumers, supporting the usual activity of advising, information, organization of competitions, with an intense calendar of exhibitions, seminaries and conventions. The Danish Design Center shows up as an open window on the world of the Danish design and not only, becoming meeting point for designers, companies, creatives and for all those people who are in the world of the design. Three of the five storeys of the building are mainly assigned to a small permanent collection, temporary and semi-permanent exhibitions, partly produced by the Center itself. The selection is particularly oriented to young designers and students, coming in a small part from all over the world, so to give an outline of the Danish production but also to stimulate the development of the local design through the comparison with different realities. The 158 objects of the semi-permanent exhibition, dedicated to the winner projects of prizes ID for design and IG for graphic design - replaced beginning from the 2000 with the Danish Prize Design - give an outline of the Danish production of last 35 years, in different fields, starting from furnishings to plates, from strictly technical designs to the famous lamps of Arne Jacobsen, nowadays still very appreciated in all their multiple versions, by the Danish public. Particularly rich the publishing production: since 1980 in fact, the DDC has published 35 books concerning the most various aspects of the design, from graphic design to product design, from management to monographies by Danish designers, in parallel with two reviews, available also on the Internet in format PDF. The attempt to approach more closely the audience to design is pursued by a wide range of activities, from conferences to the DDC design - shop, whose setting-up changes frequently and where costumers have the chance to buy some of the most famous products of Danish design, often linked to current exhibitions and connected by a main idea or a topic, like the one of the Travel Light, a series of products that share with light the characteristic of being compact and, often, of having multiple functions. Danish Design Center H C Andersen Boulevard 27 1553 Copenaghen - DK tel. +45 / 33693369 fax +45 / 33693300 http://www.ddc.dk e-mail: design@ddc.dk

Text by: Gloria Refini I. II. III. IV. V. VI. In cooperation with: M.Angeles Fernández Alvarez TOP