Before 1950
The Automobile as Archive: What Motor Museums Preserve
A reading of automotive preservation as a cultural practice: vehicles, engines, chassis and manuals, together with their social contexts, explain far more than technical evolution.
Design and the visual languages of everyday life
Latest additions
1970s
Spanish Toys in the 1970s: Plastic, Consumption and Memory
A cautious reading of the changes that several museum and popular-history sources associate with Spanish toys in the 1970s: the expansion of plastic, battery- and wind-up mechanisms, broader consumption, and the continuity of figures and construction toys.
1960s
Madrid 1940–1970: How an Exhibition Turned Fashion into a Document
Drawing on documented Spanish exhibitions and collections, this analysis examines Madrid fashion from the post-war period to the 1970s as a material and visual source. Garments, photographs, fashion drawings, magazines and accessories can reveal changing customs, without mistaking a museum exhibition for a complete portrait of an era.
1990s
From Children’s Boxes to Designer Games: Board-Game Milestones, 1970–2009
A documented tour of several decisive changes in board games from 1970 to 2009: Spanish editions of historical games, the so-called European school, the expansion of the 1990s, and a selection of titles whose chronology appears in the available sources.
Before 1950
MAUTO: When Collecting Automobiles Became a Way of Telling Modern History
Turin’s Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile opened to the public in 1939 with a collection of 181 objects. Its origins show how the automobile became not only a technical object, but also a record of design, mobility and social change.
Before 1950
When a Toy Enters the Museum: Childhood, Material Culture and Memory
Toys do more than evoke an individual childhood: they make it possible to study crafts, materials, educational models, consumption and everyday life. Drawing on documented collections and exhibitions in Spain and Colombia, this analysis examines what changes when an object of play is preserved and interpreted as heritage.
Contemporary
Contemporary Retro: When the Past Becomes Present-Day Design
A critical reading of contemporary retro as a strategy of design, consumption and differentiation: it is not simply about repeating old objects, but about selecting recognizable features from the past and combining them with present-day uses.
1970s
Spanish Toys as a Portrait of Their Time
A reading of Spanish toys through their materials, advertising circulation, and the ways museums and exhibitions place them within social and design history.
Contemporary
Design and Advertising in the Museum: When the Archive Also Shapes the Story
A critical reading of graphic design, documentation and advertising as layers that shape how a museum preserves, interprets and communicates its heritage.
Before 1950
Restoration Also Means Documentation: The Archive as the Memory of Collections
The institutional evidence available shows that conservation and restoration are not limited to repairing objects: they depend on reports, inventories, protocols and traceable decisions. A look at the Prado, the MNCN and Spanish public documentation to understand why the record of an intervention becomes part of the object itself.
1970s
Spanish Toys of the 1970s: Plastic, Figures and Mass Consumption
A documented reading of the transformation of toys in Spain during the 1970s: the predominance of plastic, expanding consumption, and the place of figures such as Airgam Boys within a heritage now preserved and reinterpreted by collections and museums.
Before 1950
From Industrial Art to Design: The Material History of the National Museum of Decorative Arts
A journey through the changing focus of Spain’s National Museum of Decorative Arts: from its early support for industrial products and technical education to a later reading centred on objects, their uses, and their contexts of production and consumption.
