A Munich design museum turned its storage depot into a 600-object anti-hierarchy showcase

The Munich museum wanted to show far more of its vast collection than a conventional exhibition allows, in a basement space originally meant for storage.

Hang 600 design objects on open warehouse shelving in about 30 theme constellations, dropping chronology, geography and hierarchy entirely.

Floor-to-ceiling shelving racks and a walkable second gallery level separate the themes; constellations group objects by material, form, colour, style and current debates such as medical design and sustainability. Many objects — tools, packaging design, gaming, material studies — had never been exhibited; a 360-degree virtual tour extends access.

The X-D-E-P-O-T runs as a permanent exhibition; Core77 featured it as 'a design wonderland' proving 'good product design is art', and visitors can tour it online.

Die Neue Sammlung, the Munich design museum that calls itself the world's oldest, had a 600-square-metre space in the Pinakothek der Moderne originally earmarked as display storage; it ended up serving as a museum warehouse. Instead of leaving it back-of-house, the museum turned it into the X-D-E-P-O-T, a long-term exhibition of some 600 objects from its collection.

The rules of a normal design-history show are deliberately absent: no chronology, no geographical boundaries, no hierarchy. Objects from different periods and origins sit together in about 30 theme constellations — material, form and colour, design categories, styles of certain periods, and current topics such as medical design, sustainability and protection — arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelving with a second gallery level.

Many of the objects had never been exhibited before, spanning tools, packaging design, gaming, secondary architecture and material studies. The museum positions the X-D-E-P-O-T, together with its collection space and temporary exhibitions, as a triad that rethinks what a design museum can be.

The idea is structural, not cosmetic: the storage condition itself — shelving, density, juxtaposition — becomes the exhibition format.

It attacks a real museum problem, vast collections with limited gallery space, by making the depot public.

Objects that had never been exhibited get a first showing without a new build.

The museum's own page frames it as an intervention in the debate about the format of design museums.

Constraint reframed as format: a depot's logic — shelves, density, juxtaposition — became the exhibition's argument that good ideas don't need a timeline.

The exhibition is listed as permanent on the museum's site — installation photography there dates to 2021 — and a 360-degree virtual tour keeps it visitable from anywhere.