Yes, interior design of the Sixties has survived. And so I found a few chairs, lamps and other furniture at the special exhibition “Sixties Design” at the Imperial Furniture Collection, which you can still find today.
At the Sixties Design exhibition at the Imperial Funeral Collection
The Imperial Furniture Collection is a museum not too big and one that people might not visit when they are in Vienna for a short period of time. But for those that are interior design freaks it is definitely worth visiting. Here they show furniture that was used during the imperial times back when Austria was still a monarchy. But they also have temporary special exhibitions. And since I love interior design I decided that I had to go for this Sixties design exhibition.
Yes, I would put this great desk into my room …
At the beginning I thought that exhibition would be bigger but then they provide you with a good overview of design of the sixties. The Sixties a decade when everything was still possible and when technology was the key. Plastic was great and pollution was still not an issue yet. But it was also a decade of counter movements, like the Hippie Lifestyle and protest movements against the Cold and the Vietnam War.
The Book which is a chair at the Sixties Design exhibition
And this exhibition takes you on a time travel and starts with the colorful furniture, the furniture which is somehow strange. And strange it is still when you come to the end of the exhibition – at the end of the sixties. There is this great object – nice. But wait? It is something you can sit on. It says that it just looks like hard plastic but it is flexible.
It does look like a place to sit on, doesn’t it?
Yes, it was a decade which was very creative and so the exhibition ends with an outlook – an outlook to the Seventies, the beginning of the environmental movement, the first oil crisis.
And my conclusion: yes, I think this exhibition is really interesting but this museum is just not a big museum and one should not expect it to be one. It is a great place to discover interior design, is it from the sixties or from the imperial times. And so it is a museum off the beaten track – something very nice, when you feel like being tramped on in museums like the Leopold Museum.
Info: Imperial Furniture Collection (http://www.hofmobiliendepot.at); Andeasgasse 7, 1070 Vienna; phone: +43/1/524 33 57; opening hours: closed Mondays, Tue to Sun from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; the Sixties Design exhibition runs until 17 June 2012; you can reach the museum by getting off at U3 Zieglergasse and taking the exit Andreasgasse and then walking up Andreasgasse on the left side.
