When the Cooper Hewitt introduced its triennial design series, in 2000, the goal was straightforward: to offer a snapshot of the field that reflected, typically with an optimistic gloss, the preoccupations and triumphs of American designers. Early editions were filled with consumer products in a range of streamlined, candy-colored styles; recent shows have added healthy portions of save-the-planet ingenuity. Toothbrushes and sneakers on 1. Biodegradable tires on 3.
“Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial,” the seventh iteration, aims for something appreciably different. It explores, as the introductory text puts it, “the ways in which design is embedded in contemporary life.” The curators have commissioned 25 artists, architects and design teams to create site-specific work around the rather elastic theme of “home.”
The uneven results, which leave visitors pinballing from sharp-witted displays to platitudinous ones, from subtle expressions of domesticity to hand-holding infographics, suggest at least one practical challenge presented by the curators’ organizing conceit. If you want to illustrate how a particular object or design sensibility is “embedded in contemporary life,” you can’t show it in anything resembling isolation. You have to lug a chunk of contemporary life into the museum along with it.
And so “Making Home” offers, in one gallery after another, dense cross-sections of American life, some slipped elegantly and others rather roughly wedged inside the 1902 Carnegie mansion, at the corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue, that has been the Cooper Hewitt’s home since 1976.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic application of this slice-of-life approach, installed on the ground floor, is “Living Room: Orlean, Virginia.” To reflect the relationship between the career of the American bass-baritone Davóne Tines and his grandparents’ home in rural Virginia, where the singer’s musical talents were nourished, the artist Hugh Hayden has faithfully recreated its living room, including upright piano, sofa and chairs, lamps, end tables and framed family photographs, and set the whole scene on a plinth with giant rocking-chair legs.
For the triennial’s opening-night party, Tines, one of the blazing talents of contemporary opera, mounted that wobbly stage with his aunt and grandparents. With his grandfather at the piano, the group ran through a series of spirituals, a performance developed in collaboration with Zack Winokur, artistic director and co-founder of the American Modern Opera Company. The living room rocked and swayed as Tines, and then the others, stood to deliver a raucous finale.
When I went back to see the show again the next morning, though, I found the installation, now quiet and still, disappointingly inert: an earnest serving of Americana that would be more comfortably at home at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History than in an institution, and an exhibition, dedicated to contemporary design. The rocking-chair base, meant as a symbol of the precarity of Black life, seemed an empty gimmick without its activating performers.
Elsewhere in “Making Home” are exhibits on birthing centers and senior housing; on the design of spaces to ease re-entry from prison into civilian life; on efforts to rehabilitate Indigenous architectural practices in three U.S. states; and on the structure of intentional L.G.B.T.Q. communities in three more.
There are rooms lined with tobacco leaves, vials of blood (or a liquid close to it) and adobe blocks. (The vials decorate a display by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an “artist and biohacker,” on the rise of biobanks — facilities that store blood samples, which Dewey-Hagborg explores as “the hidden homes of our DNA.”)
The show’s curators — Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and Christina L. De León of the Cooper Hewitt, alongside Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. — deserve credit for figuring out how to keep the curtains open in some of the ground-floor galleries. How remarkable to see actual sunlight streaming across the Cooper Hewitt’s elaborately patterned parquet floors! Free-standing wooden plinths, a useful alternative to wall text, are largely confined to the edge of each gallery or to the museum’s common spaces.
Many of the installations, meanwhile, come with their own totalizing design strategies preloaded. An extensive analysis of how the Smithsonian has acquired and displayed objects from Puerto Rico, by Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, in collaboration with the theater designer Carlos J. Soto, even features handwritten labels. I wonder how the exhibition’s graphic designer, Ben Ganz, felt about that!
To a degree, this creates a collection of displays that don’t even bother to try to cohere: a parade of Gesamkunstwerks, each marching to its own Trómmler. Many are earthy, others ironic or didactic. Still, for all this tonal confusion, the thematic focus on embeddedness does open up the structure of this triennial in compelling ways. In particular, it dispenses with the overworked definition of a design curator as somebody whose primary job is to celebrate the field’s avant-garde, the advancing front of innovation that quickly turns yesterday’s breakthroughs into so many remaindered items.
The best examples of this approach are richly layered, suggesting that subjects like the legacy of Manifest Destiny expansion are stitched so deeply into the fabric of American culture that they are impossible to yank out whole and display on their own. One standout is a double-sided installation by the artist Amie Siegel, called “Vues/Views,” with wallpaper samples on one side of a hanging screen and a film projected onto the other. It explores the relationship between the French wallpaper company Zuber and domestic architecture in the United States; Siegel’s film (in which Tines, the bass-baritone from “Living Room,” reappears) uses Zuber’s picturesque panoramic scenes, often installed in genteel if decaying interiors in the American South, as the basis for a larger critique of American wealth, power and racial prerogative.
I was encouraged to see a clever critique of oligarchical reach, and of the Carnegie family in particular, in “Game Room,” a display by the designer Liam Lee and the artist Tommy Mishima featuring a tongue-in-cheek board game, a Monopoly for Millionaire’s Row instead of Atlantic City, installed in Andrew Carnegie’s former home office. Even braver — though the installation itself is somewhat underdeveloped — is the decision by the curators (and the Cooper Hewitt’s director, Maria Nicanor) to feature an exhibit by the journalist Mona Chalabi and New York design office SITU Research on “domicide,” or the destruction of residential architecture around the world. On one wall it cites a statistic measuring the massive scale of destruction to homes in Gaza in the continuing war.
Yet I wandered this triennial in vain looking for entries related to many of the most pressing design-related challenges of the day, including several — the construction of affordable housing in American cities, especially, as well as the electrification of residential buildings and the conversion of the empty office towers into apartments — that could have fit without much strain under the wide umbrella provided by the theme of “home.”
Often, instead, the exhibition is content to treat design and designers as something of a support mechanism, a means of advancing what the curators frequently frame as more pressing subjects, including health care and racial equity. Another way to put this is to say that “Making Home,” for all its engagement with political themes, is reluctant to portray designers as figures who themselves have meaningful political agency beyond a principled sort of opting out.
And so the work on view tends to fall into one of two categories: things that are vulnerable (that need protection or resuscitation or generate nostalgia) or things, like Zuber wallpaper, that are emblematic of an inequitable power structure.
I’m sure some of this can be chalked up to the fact that the Cooper Hewitt, as an arm of the Smithsonian, has to be careful not to be too aggressive or overt in its political advocacy. Fair enough, although given that constraint, the curators’ emphasis on embeddedness, on design’s entanglements with the larger culture, was a recipe for precisely this dilemma — for an exhibition that strides confidently in the direction of real politics only to pull up short on its doorstep and decide not to ring the bell.
This reluctance is clearest in a multimedia installation in the museum’s basement gallery. It celebrates efforts at East Jordan Middle/High School, in a small Michigan town about 250 miles northwest of Detroit, to more fully embrace its growing group of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The initiative has included “culinary and linguistic exchanges” as well as events such Noche Latina (Latino Night).
The story is one “of a changing community coming together, highlighting themes of home, belonging and the power of youth collaboration.”
The installation’s focus on shifting demographics in small-town Michigan, or places like it, is perfectly unobjectionable — as far as it goes. I mean, good for the students of East Jordan Middle/High School! The point is that debates over immigration are not just deeply politicized already, but also directly implicate architects and other design professionals in ways that this installation, at least, seems to want to wish away.
Three weeks after the opening party for “Making Home,” the land commissioner for the state of Texas, Dawn Buckingham, offered up a 1,400-acre parcel near the border with Mexico to the incoming Trump administration as a location to build camps facilitating mass deportation.
“I have 13 million acres,” Buckingham told ABC News. “If any of them can be of help to this process, we’re happy to have that discussion.”
The camps will be designed by whichever architecture and engineering firms decide they want to help Trump carry out his most ambitious campaign promise (if he keeps it). They will function as domestic spaces, however provisional or punitive. And I doubt their designers, or the authorities responsible for rounding up immigrants and their families and delivering them to the completed camps, will care much about the value of linguistic and cultural exchanges or the good vibes produced by Latino Night.
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