To visit the website in Spanish or Catalan, click on Museu Valencia del Joguet.
To visit the website in English, click on Valencia Toy Museum.
THE MUSEU VALENCIÀ DEL JOGUET DE IBI. NEW PROSPECTS
Mr. Jose Pascual SELLÉS – Director Valencian Toy Museum of Ibi. Spain.
March 2006
Ibi is a town that is known nowadays as the “Spanish Toy Centre”. This is due to the fact that over 60% of domestic production takes place here, in approximately thirty factories. The family of Hermanos Payá founded the first local toy factory at the beginning of the century. Subsequently, other factories emerged and together they formed one of the most important parts of the industrial fabric in Spain.
On 16 February 1987, the” Valencian Toy Museum Foundation” was formed. The founding members were the following institutions: the Regional Government – “la Generalitat Valenciana”; Ibi Town Hall; the Mediterranean Savings Bank; and the firm, Payá, S.C.V.L., which donated its collection for the creation of a museum in the town.
According to its Bylaws, the Foundation is a private, permanent, non-profit making, cultural organisation, whose object and activity is: “…the creation and maintenance of a Valencian Toy Museum to protect, foster and transmit to future generations, the know-how and activities that have been a relevant expression of the traditional culture and work techniques in the toy industry in the Valencian Community”. The Foundation is managed by a Board of Trustees who represents the Foundation and is responsible for its management and administration. The Board is formed by the founding members and two representatives from local industry.
The Foundation’s assets comprised certain property and capital that were necessary for the functioning of the future Museum. Therefore, both the Regional Government and the Mediterranean Savings Bank made financial contributions. Payá S.C.V.L. donated all the historical material that it conserved in its storerooms: toys, plans, machinery and documentation from the oldest and most important industry in Ibi. The Town Hall granted – provisionally and at no cost – the use of the building known as “Casa Gran”, as a temporary location for the museum. The building had been closed in 1962 and had been left to ruin until 1979, when restoration work commenced. On 6 August 1981, it was opened as an Ethnological Museum. In 1989, it was re-converted to house the Valencia Toy Museum on its upper floor. The building comprises two floors and completely conserves its exterior. However, the interior has been modified. Consequently, only the main entrance hall, the kitchen, the lounge and the staircase are in their original state. The layout of the rest of the building has been modified, although some of the curtain walls, balconies and windows remain unchanged.
The Foundation’s Board of Trustees decided to commission the firm EXPOGRAFIC – a firm in Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona, specialising in scientific-cultural projects – to distribute the space on the upper floor of Casa Gran, as the exhibition space for the Museum. Due to the limited space, only 444 exhibits from the collection of over 3,500 toys were pre-selected for permanent exhibition and the Museum was officially opened on 20 December 1990.
This was how the Museu Valenciano del Juguete began. It tried to comply with the regulations provided by the Law on Valencian Historical-Cultural Heritage and Museum Collections. It soon became clear that the physical limitations of the Casa Gran building were seriously affecting the correct functioning of the museum. These problems were aggravated by the massive response of visitors that the Museum received during its second year of activity. At that time, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees was aware of the fact that the Casa Gran building was no longer suitable for housing the Museum. Despite the fact that the Museum was fulfilling its projected social role, it was performing a merely routine function and therefore, not taking full advantage of its intrinsic potential.
Their concern about this situation and the provisional nature of the premises, as specified in the Foundation’s Bylaws, led the Board of Trustees to consider transferring the Museum to a permanent location. The possibility of restoring the former Payá Hermanos factory was considered. The first step required a change in ownership, since the building was owned by the Mediterranean Savings Bank. On Friday, 13 February 1998, at Ibi Town Hall, the Mediterranean Savings Bank – at that time, the owner of the group of buildings – signed an agreement and a public deed transferring the former Payá Hermanos factory to the Local Authorities.
In recent years, so-called “toy museums ” have proliferated. Originally, many of these museums were private collections that eventually led to some form of museum. Others, however, were a result of the intervention of certain politicians, in response to the concern of their constituents regarding the conservation of their local cultural heritage. A common feature of the latter type of museum is that they share a traditional, historical, industrial activity that, over time, became specialised in toy manufacturing. We can find examples of this, on an international level, in museums such as the Spielzeugmuseum in the German town of Nuremberg. This Museum grew from a private collection belonging to Lidia Bayer and it now offers an insight into the industrial activity of this German region, which is easily identified with toy manufacturing. The French town of Morains-en-Montagne is a similar example. Its museum contains the traditional manufacturing know-how of the Franco Condado territory and particularly, of the Jura Valley, where already in the 18th Century, they were manufacturing wooden toys. Another more distant example is the Wooden Toy Museum in the Japanese town of Ikutahara, which exhibits examples of the traditional craftsmanship used in the toy manufacturing process.
There are many towns whose raison d’être lies in toy manufacturing and whose museums enable us to study this activity in depth and to discover the different scientific and technical developments that have taken place throughout history. Many regions have become, to a greater or lesser extent, focal points for toy manufacturing. Sometimes, this is a result of private initiative. Other times, it is due to the impact of more developed, neighbouring areas – or to the mechanical process itself. These centres have usually been reasonably well treated by their respective governments, since they met the demand for something that is considered a basic product. As far as our country is concerned, Catalonia and Valencia are the regions that have traditionally been the seat of Spanish toy production. The following institutions are the museums of this type to be found in the Valencian Region: Museu Valencià del Joguet in Ibi; the projected Doll Museum in Onil – a town that was a pioneer in the manufacture of industrial toys in Spain; and the projected Toy Museum on the coastal town of Denia, Alicante – a town that specialised in the production of wooden toys in the thirties.
There are other museums whose contents and objectives go beyond the strict collection of games and toys. These are the so-called “Childhood Museums”, as they are known in Anglo-Saxon countries. These museums combine the preservation, conservation and exhibition of their materials with an insight into everyday childhood life, using elements of study such as oral history, photographs or conserved ethnographical material. Thus, they not only delve deeply into the historical aspects of a crucial stage in our lives but they also include features that would be out of place in a general museum, e.g. folklore, health or education. In these museums, unlike their hands-on counterparts, toys and games are not the essential elements and principal objects of study. Instead, they are one more piece in the puzzle that forms the concept of childhood, understood in its widest sense.
There is a third option in the international scenario: the so-called “Children’s Museums”. Their aim is to conceptually situate learning as the ultimate objective in their working philosophy. They achieve this by organising different programs that enable a revaluation of the role of play in the world of children. In these museums, children can participate in play activities. The museum is equipped for that purpose with leisure rooms for children, playrooms, spaces for experimentation and handicrafts. There are even small television studios for recording programs. In the countries in our region, Toy Libraries cover some of these play activities. These centres have specific programs for motivation, education and stimulation through play, as a method of child education. To complicate matters even more, there are also other places, which are aimed at children, although their objectives are different, e.g. Theme Parks, Children’s Towns, Educational Museums, Funfairs, Miniature Museums and Towns, Science and Technology Museums, etc.
During its initial stages, the Museu Valenciano del Juguete in Ibi tried to adapt to the circumstances surrounding its creation: a certain financial instability, improvisation and a lack of human resources. The museum project is now entering an important phase. The former premises of the emblematic, Payá Hermanos toy factory, (at present occupied by its successor, Payá SCVL) have been transferred by the Mediterranean Savings Bank to the Local Authorities in Ibi and will now be the location of the future museum.
The social significance of reconditioning the old Payá Hermanos factory, as the location for both the Payá Cooperative and the future Museu Valenciano del Juguete, is extremely important. Furthermore, it is a viable option. Many traditional museums are housed in buildings that were not built for that purpose. This option has meant a laborious process that had to combine the original location and characteristics of the building with the museum’s requirements for modern facilities in which to exhibit the different objects of artistic, technical and scientific interest. The efforts to co-ordinate these aspects did not always achieve the desired results.
There are defenders and detractors of reconverting historical buildings for use as museums. The former believe that reconversion rescues these buildings from oblivion, abandonment and possibly total destruction. They believe that these buildings can perform the functions of a museum perfectly well, if the restoration process is adequate. Detractors argue that, even when the characteristics of the building are respected, very rarely do these buildings offer sufficient functionality for them to meet their purpose: they don’t have the required flexibility and modularity; their reconversion to meet the demands of a modern museum is expensive; they usually have no possibility for extension; they are normally located in the centre of the older parts of the town and in our contemporary society, this makes it impossible for the museum services to be installed.
The reconversion of the former Payá factory means the recovery of one of the leading industrial toy firms in Spain. Their main bay dates back to the twenties and was built using materials and construction methods that were completely innovative at that time. Furthermore, it means identifying an artistic-industrial building, in the historic centre of the town, with a positive impact on the conservation of the urban landscape: its reconversion will improve planning by dividing a block whose present dimensions break the characteristic scheme of the old town. The truth is that it is not merely a question of rescuing an old building from ostracism but of industrial archaeology in its purest form.
Apart from materially safeguarding the building, we are also talking about the necessary survival of a company whose manufacturing activity has to be simultaneously compatible with museum life. Since Payá Hermanos became a co-operative in 1984, the factory workers reoriented their activities. Since all the machinery and tooling required to manufacture toys in the past had been conserved, they decided to put it to use to reproduce, in a completely traditional way, models that had been launched on the market in the twenties and thirties. The location of the museum in the Payá SCVL factory offers an undeniable pedagogic advantage, since the visitor will be able to observe the old toys that are exhibited in the exhibition rooms and then see firsthand the production process carried out by the workers. The complementary nature of the two activities – exhibition and manufacture – is completely innovative in the world of toy museums, not only in our environment but also on an international level. However, it is not unique in its representation of objects of cultural heritage. There are several examples of traditional craftsmanship associated with museums, where the latter serve as a centre for development and interpretation of traditional and present-day production and reinforce the environmental and cultural characteristics of their exhibits. This type of project was conceptualised some time ago in the “economuseum”. In these museums, the company has an inseparable, legal materiality i.e. a hybrid reality where museum activities and economic objectives necessarily overlap. However, the future Museu Valenciano del Juguete will maintain its own legal personality. It will share a space with another company, which forms part of its Board of trustees but has a separate form of regulation and its own legal, economic objectives. It will also have its own commercial activities, which, in any case, will be separate from those of the Museum, despite the fact that the museum project will probably be designed to include those characteristics defined by specialists for economuseums, i.e.:
1. A permanent location.
2. Production workshops.
3. An interpretation centre for traditional production.
4. A collection of real creations.
5. An archive and documentation centre.
6. A gallery/shop.
The above list could be considered insufficient, since we all know that the museum must have suitable permanent premises for it to function. This would include many other essential elements, such as: storerooms, conservation and restoration workshops, a temporary exhibition room, a conference room, offices, exhibition spaces, an archive, a library, etc. Furthermore, the new location will resolve certain security problems and will enable compliance with regulations – something that is lacking at the present location.
Furthermore, during the research stage and considering the large amount of space available, the museum project intends to incorporate a number of complementary services that modern society demands from a museum. These services, i.e. a cafeteria, a place for the friends of the museum, car park, etc., will make a visit to the museum more attractive.
The majority of visitors to the present Museu Valenciano del Juguete in Ibi are schoolchildren – approximately 65%. Therefore, it has yet to be decided whether the museum should adopt some of the methodological tools used in other museum institutions and which have already been described. However, it is a difficult decision, since an attempt to find the right combination might remove the museum from what we believe to be an unwaivable final objective: to disemminate common cultural heritage in an intelligible way.
