COOPER-HEWITT NATIONAL DESIGN MUSEUM

Earlier this afternoon, we visited the COOPER-HEWITT NATIONAL DESIGN MUSEUM.

From the official website: The Cooper-Hewitt Museum is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum presents compelling perspectives on the impact of design on daily life through active educational and curatorial programming. It is the mission of Cooper-Hewitt’s staff and Board of Trustees to advance the public understanding of design across the twenty-four centuries of human creativity represented by the Museum’s collection. A branch of the Smithsonian since 1967, Cooper-Hewitt is housed in the landmark Andrew Carnegie Mansion at the corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue.

Curretn exhibitions:

House Proud: Nineteenth-century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection commemorates the recent gift of eighty-five watercolor interior drawings—the largest collection of its kind in America—to Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum by Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw. Approximately seventy drawings and a selection of related objects from Cooper-Hewitt’s permanent collection document the evolution of the domestic interior in the nineteenth century, revealing the impact of economic, social, and political developments on the concept of the house.

Tulou/Affordable Housing for China

In the fifth installment of the Solos series, the museum will present Tulou, a prototype for affordable housing being built in the city of Guangzhou by the Chinese architectural practice Urbanus. The Tulou project incorporates 245 apartment units, a dormitory, a small hotel, shops, a gymnasium, a library, and various communal and public spaces. For the exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt, Urbanus will display two full-scale bedrooms, with additional areas of the unit outlined on the gallery floor and walls, in order for visitors to fully experience the spatial interior.

Wall stories: Children’s wallpaper and books

Dozens of beloved children’s story characters that can be found in Wall Stories: Children’s Wallpaper and Books, an exhibition which plumbs the holdings of Cooper-Hewitt’s Wallcoverings department—the largest such collection in the United States, with more than ten thousand objects dating from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries—and the Museum’s 70,000-volume National Design Library.