In an essay on the work
of Charles and Ray Eames, the design critic Ralph Caplan fixes upon a
quote from Charles: “The details are not the details. They make the
product. The connections, the connections, the connections.”
“Connections between what?” Caplan then asks rhetorically, answering,
“Between such disparate materials as wood and steel, between such
seemingly alien disciplines as physics and painting, between clowns and
mathematical concepts, between people—architects and mathematicians and
poets and philosophers and corporate executives.”
Credit Courtesy Cooper Hewitt
If that’s the task of the designer, imagine the task of the design museum that must explain all the connections—a design problem itself. How to bring together building models and slide rules and folios and quill pens and executive desks from over the centuries, explain their origins, tell the stories of their use, and make a visually dramatic display, without being boring or pandering? More prosaically, how do you make people pay to see forks and phones, when we have forks at home and phones in our pockets? That’s been the struggle for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for many years. In 2011, the museum took the major step of closing its heavy front doors for what it was calling a transformation. Today, they open to the public again.
You may have heard that the new Cooper Hewitt has touch-screen tables, an interactive Immersion Room, and, arriving in early 2015, a special pen that will allow museumgoers to virtually collect items from their visit. But what it also has are lots of fascinating, three-dimensional objects. What the new Cooper Hewitt is trying to do is to love things and the Internet of things at the same time.
The first thing you may notice: they fixed the logo. What once was Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution is Cooper Hewitt, no hyphen, in a bold all-caps, sans-serif font designed by Chester Jenkins, of Village; it’s available for download, should you need to revivify an institution. The decision by the graphic-design team, led by Pentagram’s Eddie Opara, to keep the founders’ names rather than blowing up “design” or “Smithsonian” feels like a new peace with the museum’s roots, its historical collections, and its glorious mansion.
At a time when so many museums seem intent on new spaces for new design and new art (like the Whitney, Upper East Side deserter), it’s a relief that the Cooper Hewitt finally spent the time and the money to make their 1902 Carnegie Mansion sing. Rather than being a straightjacket, the mansion’s ornate rooms and halls now form a rich and idiosyncratic frame for design objects of all ages. Gluckman Mayner and Beyer Blinder Belle worked together on restoring, updating, and adding to the architecture. The cases, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, are crisp and clean, designed for sightlines and visual connections across the grand salons. The firm, as it did at Lincoln Center, has also jazzed up the outside: a new typographic canopy on Ninetieth Street leeeeans toward Fifth Avenue, and there’s L.E.D. lighting on the granite piers out front. Another example of new and old meeting in an elegant place is Boym Partners’ rendering of the mansion as emoticon: architecture transformed into “#”s, “+”s, and “[]”s, and applied to mugs, playing cards, and notebooks.
If you’re already tired of designers’ names, well, that’s part of the lesson here. Design is not made by one pair of hands, and the team effort required to restore, redesign, fit out, and rebrand a design museum shouldn’t be lumped under the name of one famous, usually male person. Each element that you interact with (and there is a lot of interaction) was created by a different set of skilled people, before you even arrive at the objects on display. It’s only fairly recently that museums have credited Charles Eames and his wife (not brother), Ray, with much of their work, as well as investigated the other talented hands in the Eames office.
Courtesy Cooper Hewitt
The renovated museum now has four floors of galleries, and sixty per cent more exhibition space. The new exhibitions on the first floor ease you into it. “Beautiful Users,” curated by Ellen Lupton, concerns user-centric design and data-gathering. It features many familiar and everyday products, tweaked to make them easier, more flexible, and “smarter.” These include Sabi’s pillboxes, the 3D-printable Free Universal Construction Kit (because why can’t Tinkertoy, Lego, and Zoob just get along?), and the 2011 Nest thermostat, appropriately displayed next to its design grandfather, Henry Dreyfuss’s 1953 Honeywell Round. Much of the coverage of the Nest focussed on the designer Tony Fadell’s short-term callback to his work on the original iPod wheel; we need design museums to point out that there were round thermostats before Fadell was born.
Next door, there’s “Maira Kalman Selects,” the artist’s meditation on time that’s told through a selection of objects, including Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch, children’s books, and fragile glasses. On one podium, Kalman quotes Charles Dickens: “One lives only to make blunders.” Then, around the corner, a Process Lab—a chance to D.I.Y. Stubby pencils and paper, and the command to “Try it!”: mash up two objects from your purse or backpack, or add gels, twist ties, and wire to customize a gooseneck lamp. Interactive museum-going isn’t just for kids.
If you feel like you already know something about design, though, I’d recommend heading straight up the stairs to the second floor, where four exhibits highlight different aspects of the museum’s permanent collection. I understand that the museum is reintroducing itself as an accessible, hands-on sort of place, but I missed the Cooper Hewitt’s equivalent of MoMA’s helicopter: something big and beautiful and immediate that you are not expecting to see in a museum. Maybe DS+R’s swoopy visitor-services desk is supposed to be that, but it read as Zaha lite—and, with white Sayl chairs behind it, a little like the “Hunger Games” control room.
The real futuristic moment is upstairs, in the Immersion Room: a touch-screen table, developed by Local Projects and Ideum, catercorner to the door, facing a pair of blank walls. A river of patterned circles wends its way across the middle of the table. Tap a circle and the pattern pops onto those walls, immersing you in what is now a period room decorated with one of two hundred wallpapers from the collection. Delft tiles or faux concrete, mossy lace or trompe l’oeil picture frames—the variety, complexity, and scene-setting power of wallpaper is on display. There’s something delightful in using technology to animate the fustiest of design-museum categories; it’s not only a gimmick but an updated version of flipping through swatch books. (Now they just need to get the color corrected.) Let’s not confuse looking with acting like a designer, though. To get a taste of that, play with another feature of the tables that lets you draw a pattern and see it repeated on the walls, which seems closer in spirit, and in clunky results, to the pencil-and-paper sketching offered downstairs.
More traditional, but just as spectacular, is the long, south-facing second-floor gallery that is split by a stair-stepped white display case fitted out with three hundred and fifty items from the museum’s permanent collection. These are arranged by loose, suggestive themes such as “Color” and “Line,” juxtaposing industrial design, fashion, graphics, and tableware from many decades. It is hard to resist the pull of the red area, with Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine typewriter, a noodle chair by the Campana Brothers, and a classic bandana. On the wall opposite, illustrating “Line,” the curators combine one of Joris Laarman’s baroque 2007 radiators, Milton Glaser’s 1966 Bob Dylan poster, and a waveform cut-paper stencil from turn-of-the-century Japan. That’s creative curation, one that generates an infinite string of your own sinuous visual references.
If your mental image search is lacking, that’s where more of those iPhone-like tables (there are seven total) could help. Draw a curve on the surface and the table presents something from the collection that contains the same shape, whether an arabesque in a textile or the outer bulge of a vase. You can also watch the river of circular vignettes running down the middle of the table, and tap on something you recognize or would like to see more of. Up it pops, with credits, tags, and a row of items deemed algorithmically similar. Both of these functions were enriching, and I could how they could be used to gain deep knowledge on the spot, after viewing the real things before you.
The critic Justin Davidson already sounded the alarm about all that D.I.Y. tech undermining the curators’ thinking. The tables are indeed like a bigger, better version of your ever-distracting phone. If you spend your time at the Cooper Hewitt parked at one, you might as well be at home surfing the Internet. But there is a reason why the tables don’t have chairs and don’t make noise: you can ignore them, and long-term loitering would be pretty uncomfortable. The combination, in a smaller gallery, of a big table in front of a whole wall hung with the founding Hewitt sisters’ collections seemed very smart. It made an easy connection between the plenty in three dimensions and in the digital sphere. The one place I found a table obtrusive was in the second-floor hallway, where prime real estate could have been used for a few more I.R.L. objects—including a historic table.
It’s a shame, then, to arrive on the third floor and feel a loss of energy. Here’s where the museum finally got the plain, flexible, six-thousand-square-foot gallery it has been wanting for years. This gallery has been installed with the truly topical exhibition “Tools: Extending Our Reach,” curated by Cara McCarty and Matilda McQuaid, with tools, patents, code, and tunnel borers from all branches of the Smithsonian. As our handheld electronics are called upon to be more and more multi-functional, it’s important to reconsider how we got from hand axes to silvery solids, and to recognize all the ways in which design augments our abilities. There is a homely early-twentieth-century child’s tool chest, from the National Museum of American History, that provides an inadvertent lesson in the continuum of gender stereotyping (“Bliss … for Boys”), and there are out-of-this-world displays like the Solar Wall, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (I chatted with the scientist who designed the software that lets us look at the sun.) Downstairs, it felt as if the elements were speaking to one another, and they came together in vivid tableaux. Up on the third floor, Thinc, the exhibition designers for “Tools,” spaced things out and made it harder to make temporal or cross-disciplinary leaps. I loved the giant slide rule—a classroom model—hanging from the ceiling, but what came next? What came before? My mind strayed to Maira Kalman’s selections, and a numbered sampler upon which a nineteenth-century girl had practiced her stitches.
Which is another way of saying: I made a connection. A museum reopening after a three-year hiatus has to flood the zone: six thousand here, three hundred and fifty there, two hundred there. Hacking and 3D-printing and interactive. But I do think, once the excitement dies down, that there are many things to discover on the walls and in the cases, plus a glorious mansion (with a perfect new downtown-minimal staircase) to explore, classes to take, and, indeed, tables to fondle. If a Luddite and a technologist were to fall in love, the Cooper Hewitt would be an excellent place to do it—and the museum shop could provide the engagement gift.
fonte:@edisonmariotti #edisonmariotti http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/new-cooper-hewitt?mbid=social_twitter
Credit Courtesy Cooper Hewitt If that’s the task of the designer, imagine the task of the design museum that must explain all the connections—a design problem itself. How to bring together building models and slide rules and folios and quill pens and executive desks from over the centuries, explain their origins, tell the stories of their use, and make a visually dramatic display, without being boring or pandering? More prosaically, how do you make people pay to see forks and phones, when we have forks at home and phones in our pockets? That’s been the struggle for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for many years. In 2011, the museum took the major step of closing its heavy front doors for what it was calling a transformation. Today, they open to the public again.
You may have heard that the new Cooper Hewitt has touch-screen tables, an interactive Immersion Room, and, arriving in early 2015, a special pen that will allow museumgoers to virtually collect items from their visit. But what it also has are lots of fascinating, three-dimensional objects. What the new Cooper Hewitt is trying to do is to love things and the Internet of things at the same time.
The first thing you may notice: they fixed the logo. What once was Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution is Cooper Hewitt, no hyphen, in a bold all-caps, sans-serif font designed by Chester Jenkins, of Village; it’s available for download, should you need to revivify an institution. The decision by the graphic-design team, led by Pentagram’s Eddie Opara, to keep the founders’ names rather than blowing up “design” or “Smithsonian” feels like a new peace with the museum’s roots, its historical collections, and its glorious mansion.
At a time when so many museums seem intent on new spaces for new design and new art (like the Whitney, Upper East Side deserter), it’s a relief that the Cooper Hewitt finally spent the time and the money to make their 1902 Carnegie Mansion sing. Rather than being a straightjacket, the mansion’s ornate rooms and halls now form a rich and idiosyncratic frame for design objects of all ages. Gluckman Mayner and Beyer Blinder Belle worked together on restoring, updating, and adding to the architecture. The cases, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, are crisp and clean, designed for sightlines and visual connections across the grand salons. The firm, as it did at Lincoln Center, has also jazzed up the outside: a new typographic canopy on Ninetieth Street leeeeans toward Fifth Avenue, and there’s L.E.D. lighting on the granite piers out front. Another example of new and old meeting in an elegant place is Boym Partners’ rendering of the mansion as emoticon: architecture transformed into “#”s, “+”s, and “[]”s, and applied to mugs, playing cards, and notebooks.
If you’re already tired of designers’ names, well, that’s part of the lesson here. Design is not made by one pair of hands, and the team effort required to restore, redesign, fit out, and rebrand a design museum shouldn’t be lumped under the name of one famous, usually male person. Each element that you interact with (and there is a lot of interaction) was created by a different set of skilled people, before you even arrive at the objects on display. It’s only fairly recently that museums have credited Charles Eames and his wife (not brother), Ray, with much of their work, as well as investigated the other talented hands in the Eames office.
Courtesy Cooper Hewitt The renovated museum now has four floors of galleries, and sixty per cent more exhibition space. The new exhibitions on the first floor ease you into it. “Beautiful Users,” curated by Ellen Lupton, concerns user-centric design and data-gathering. It features many familiar and everyday products, tweaked to make them easier, more flexible, and “smarter.” These include Sabi’s pillboxes, the 3D-printable Free Universal Construction Kit (because why can’t Tinkertoy, Lego, and Zoob just get along?), and the 2011 Nest thermostat, appropriately displayed next to its design grandfather, Henry Dreyfuss’s 1953 Honeywell Round. Much of the coverage of the Nest focussed on the designer Tony Fadell’s short-term callback to his work on the original iPod wheel; we need design museums to point out that there were round thermostats before Fadell was born.
Next door, there’s “Maira Kalman Selects,” the artist’s meditation on time that’s told through a selection of objects, including Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch, children’s books, and fragile glasses. On one podium, Kalman quotes Charles Dickens: “One lives only to make blunders.” Then, around the corner, a Process Lab—a chance to D.I.Y. Stubby pencils and paper, and the command to “Try it!”: mash up two objects from your purse or backpack, or add gels, twist ties, and wire to customize a gooseneck lamp. Interactive museum-going isn’t just for kids.
If you feel like you already know something about design, though, I’d recommend heading straight up the stairs to the second floor, where four exhibits highlight different aspects of the museum’s permanent collection. I understand that the museum is reintroducing itself as an accessible, hands-on sort of place, but I missed the Cooper Hewitt’s equivalent of MoMA’s helicopter: something big and beautiful and immediate that you are not expecting to see in a museum. Maybe DS+R’s swoopy visitor-services desk is supposed to be that, but it read as Zaha lite—and, with white Sayl chairs behind it, a little like the “Hunger Games” control room.
The real futuristic moment is upstairs, in the Immersion Room: a touch-screen table, developed by Local Projects and Ideum, catercorner to the door, facing a pair of blank walls. A river of patterned circles wends its way across the middle of the table. Tap a circle and the pattern pops onto those walls, immersing you in what is now a period room decorated with one of two hundred wallpapers from the collection. Delft tiles or faux concrete, mossy lace or trompe l’oeil picture frames—the variety, complexity, and scene-setting power of wallpaper is on display. There’s something delightful in using technology to animate the fustiest of design-museum categories; it’s not only a gimmick but an updated version of flipping through swatch books. (Now they just need to get the color corrected.) Let’s not confuse looking with acting like a designer, though. To get a taste of that, play with another feature of the tables that lets you draw a pattern and see it repeated on the walls, which seems closer in spirit, and in clunky results, to the pencil-and-paper sketching offered downstairs.
More traditional, but just as spectacular, is the long, south-facing second-floor gallery that is split by a stair-stepped white display case fitted out with three hundred and fifty items from the museum’s permanent collection. These are arranged by loose, suggestive themes such as “Color” and “Line,” juxtaposing industrial design, fashion, graphics, and tableware from many decades. It is hard to resist the pull of the red area, with Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine typewriter, a noodle chair by the Campana Brothers, and a classic bandana. On the wall opposite, illustrating “Line,” the curators combine one of Joris Laarman’s baroque 2007 radiators, Milton Glaser’s 1966 Bob Dylan poster, and a waveform cut-paper stencil from turn-of-the-century Japan. That’s creative curation, one that generates an infinite string of your own sinuous visual references.
If your mental image search is lacking, that’s where more of those iPhone-like tables (there are seven total) could help. Draw a curve on the surface and the table presents something from the collection that contains the same shape, whether an arabesque in a textile or the outer bulge of a vase. You can also watch the river of circular vignettes running down the middle of the table, and tap on something you recognize or would like to see more of. Up it pops, with credits, tags, and a row of items deemed algorithmically similar. Both of these functions were enriching, and I could how they could be used to gain deep knowledge on the spot, after viewing the real things before you.
The critic Justin Davidson already sounded the alarm about all that D.I.Y. tech undermining the curators’ thinking. The tables are indeed like a bigger, better version of your ever-distracting phone. If you spend your time at the Cooper Hewitt parked at one, you might as well be at home surfing the Internet. But there is a reason why the tables don’t have chairs and don’t make noise: you can ignore them, and long-term loitering would be pretty uncomfortable. The combination, in a smaller gallery, of a big table in front of a whole wall hung with the founding Hewitt sisters’ collections seemed very smart. It made an easy connection between the plenty in three dimensions and in the digital sphere. The one place I found a table obtrusive was in the second-floor hallway, where prime real estate could have been used for a few more I.R.L. objects—including a historic table.
It’s a shame, then, to arrive on the third floor and feel a loss of energy. Here’s where the museum finally got the plain, flexible, six-thousand-square-foot gallery it has been wanting for years. This gallery has been installed with the truly topical exhibition “Tools: Extending Our Reach,” curated by Cara McCarty and Matilda McQuaid, with tools, patents, code, and tunnel borers from all branches of the Smithsonian. As our handheld electronics are called upon to be more and more multi-functional, it’s important to reconsider how we got from hand axes to silvery solids, and to recognize all the ways in which design augments our abilities. There is a homely early-twentieth-century child’s tool chest, from the National Museum of American History, that provides an inadvertent lesson in the continuum of gender stereotyping (“Bliss … for Boys”), and there are out-of-this-world displays like the Solar Wall, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (I chatted with the scientist who designed the software that lets us look at the sun.) Downstairs, it felt as if the elements were speaking to one another, and they came together in vivid tableaux. Up on the third floor, Thinc, the exhibition designers for “Tools,” spaced things out and made it harder to make temporal or cross-disciplinary leaps. I loved the giant slide rule—a classroom model—hanging from the ceiling, but what came next? What came before? My mind strayed to Maira Kalman’s selections, and a numbered sampler upon which a nineteenth-century girl had practiced her stitches.
Which is another way of saying: I made a connection. A museum reopening after a three-year hiatus has to flood the zone: six thousand here, three hundred and fifty there, two hundred there. Hacking and 3D-printing and interactive. But I do think, once the excitement dies down, that there are many things to discover on the walls and in the cases, plus a glorious mansion (with a perfect new downtown-minimal staircase) to explore, classes to take, and, indeed, tables to fondle. If a Luddite and a technologist were to fall in love, the Cooper Hewitt would be an excellent place to do it—and the museum shop could provide the engagement gift.
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