8. November 2024
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects
World-Architects recently visited Making Home–Smithsonian Design Triennial, which opened at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City on November 2 and is on display until August 10, 2025. Take a visual tour through some of the 25 site-specific installation that “illustrate the ways design is embedded in contemporary life.”
“Ranging from domestic objects to built environments to social systems,” Cooper Hewitt's description continues, “the exhibition considers home as an expansive framework with varying cultural and environmental contexts, and ‘making home’ as a universal design practice.” It is an ambitious theme that owes much of its success to the curatorial approach of soliciting 25 site-specific contributions spread across the three main floors of the museum, a building that was notably built as the home of Andrew Carnegie around 1900.
The exhibition features three thematic “interactions” corresponding with the three floors: “Going Home” on the ground floor and first floor; “Seeking Home” on the second floor; and “Building Home” on the third floor. Below is a visual tour, from first floor to third floor, through some of the contributions that comprise Making Home, which was curated by Cooper Hewitt's Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and Christina L. De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
The exhibition makes itself known outside, at the entrance to the museum on East 91st Street, with The House That Freedoms Built by La Vaughn Belle, an artist active in Saint Croix who designed three structures inspired by the 18th-century houses of formerly enslaved people on the island.
The rooms on the first floor are the most well-preserved from the building's first use, so some of the contributions address specific functions, as in Game Room, an installation in Carnegie's original home office. It features drawings for a Monopoly-like game of philanthropic strategies by designer Liam Lee and playful furniture by artist Tommy Mishima.
In Living Room, Orlean, Virginia Hugh Hayden puts a recreation of singer Davône Tines's grandparents' home on a large rocker in another first-floor gallery to express the precariousness of home. The installation also features a sonic composition by Tines and occasional performances with choreographer Zack Winokur.
The vaulted corridor leading to the gift shop is the setting for Recollection by Joiri Minaya, who was inspired by the “haint blue” color that porches in the American South were traditionally painted.
The installations on the second floor are more architectural than artistis, including Patterns of Life by data journalist Mona Chalabi with SITU Research, who together documented homes in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine that were destroyed in airstrikes and recreated them in models and images.
William Scott, an artist in Oakland, California, living with autism and diagnosed with schizophrenia, imagines San Francisco as an inclusive utopia in Praise Frisco: Resurrection by Design. The collection of drawings, models, paintings, and other imagery is a bit childlike but very appealing.
Contrast from Gestalt by CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York) confronts the private library of Andrew Carnegie that was fitted out by interior designer Lockwood de Forest with details borrowed from Ahmedabad architecture, with contemporary construction framing old elements.
Designer Curry J. Hackett's So That You All Won't Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia is easily the most sensorily immersive installation in Making Home, thanks to the distinctive smell of the dried tobacco leaves that cover the walls and frame a collection of “speculative objects.”
A large gallery on the second floor with vitrines designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro about ten years ago is the setting for Unruly Subjects, in which Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, and Carlos J. Soto examine the Smithsonian as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage.
The most sci-fi installation on the second floor is Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Is a Biobank a Home?, which considers the “hidden homes of our DNA” and consists of numerous vials from when the artist/biohacker's attempted to track down her own DNA samples.
The third floor has been transformed the most by the Cooper Hewitt over the years and therefore has very few original rooms. One such space is a sitting area that highlights Johnston Marklee's exhibition design that unifies the different levels with soft furnishings and wavy wallcoverings.
Hālau Kūkulu Hawai'i: A Home That Builds Multitudes by After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong Architecture features a scalable design that builds upon aspects of indigenous Hawaiian architecture.
Also drawing on indigenous knowledge, but in the American Southwest, is We:sic 'em ki: (Everybody's Home) by Terrol Dew Johnson and Aranda\Lasch, the design of a home for the Tohono O'odham Nation.
Ronald Rael's Casa Desenterrada/Exhuming Home looks like an artistic presentation of the abandoned adobe home in Conejos, Colorado, that he rescued, but it is deeper, confronting the original owner's practice of enslaving indigenous laborers after the Civil War even while he was publicly denouncing it.
The exhibition ends with two comparatively “normal” installations that invite visitors to sit and interact with them but also explore important issues: The Architecture of Re-Entry presents prototypes by Designing Justice + Designing Spaces of transitional housing for formerly incarcerated individuals.
