How Industrial Heritage Shaped Our Making Activities Errol van de Werdt
T h e Te x t i e l M u s e u m ingredients for a more is the keeper of a classical approach heritage collection. towards establishing This collection is the a museum. That was result of the industrial how the TextielMuseum past of the city of started, and was Fig. 1 The TextielMuseum / 2016 Tilburg. It is located the starting point for Photo credit: Josefina Eikenaar/TextielMuseum in the southwest its transition into a part of the Netherlands, between Antwerp and “working” museum, which is more of a combination Rotterdam. The city has had a long history in of a museum and a workshop. The beating the wool industry, starting in the Middle Ages. heart of the museum is the TextielLab: in part a For hundreds of years wool was the backbone specialised workshop and in part a laboratory for of the local industry. From the 18th century – the manufacturing of woven and knitted textiles. due to mechanisation and industrialisation – the In the near future, the next step will be made to local wool industry grew rapidly, until at its peak transform the museum into a museum of making, in 1881 Tilburg had as many as 145 wool mills. in anticipation of the new industrial revolution: This wool capital of the Netherlands collapsed the Industry of Making 2.0. Our future TextielLab in 1960 and, by 1980, had nearly disappeared. visitors will also be able to customise some On the remnants of hundreds of years of textile products themselves. craftsmanship and industry a museum was established in 1958. Since 1986 the museum has The role of the collection been set in a former 19th century textile factory. In 2008 the museum reopened after a largeThe museum collection and its archives are an scale renovation. The combination of a restored important part of our shared cultural capital. The industrial building with modern architecture collection of the TextielMuseum is composed reflects the concept of the institution: creating of several different sources: 200,000 objects, a dialogue between the past and the present of 6,000 images and sound records, 3,000 textile both the local and the wider European textile techniques, a specialised library of 25,000 industries, with an emphasis on the importance of books, a large sample collection, and a material a heritage-based creative industry (Fig. 1). reference collection. The next step: a museum of making Preserved industrial heritage buildings and a collection of objects from past times form the
Within the museum walls are centuries of accumulated knowledge on crafts, materials, techniques, patterns and recipes. These form the starting points for the present role of this heritage
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