Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Tuomas Markunpoika; Cabinet, from Engineering Temporality series, 2012.
This week, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York,
announced a new exhibition, “Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial,” as the fifth installment of a series of
shows, inaugurated in 2000, about aesthetic innovation. Featuring more than 250 works by 62 international
designers, the exhibition, which begins in 2016, presents “design as a creative endeavor that engages
the mind, body, and senses with works of astonishing form and surprising
function,” museum director Caroline Baumann said in a press release.
With projects ranging from furniture and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural prototypes, the exhibition explores seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
SO-IL: Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu, and Ilias Papageorgiou, with project team Kevin Lamyuktseung and Ted Baab; Rendering of Amant private arts gallery, New York, expected 2017.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Industrial Facility: Sam Hecht and Kim Colin for Herman Miller; Formwork series, 2014.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Ken Wong for Ustwo Studio; Moon, Monument Valley game, 2014.
Organized by assistant curator Andrea Lipps and senior curator of contemporary design Ellen Lupton, the exhibition was designed by Tsao & McKown Architects, based in Brooklyn, N.Y. A panel of international curatorial advisors, including Adélia Borges (Brazil), Claire Catterall (England), Kenya Hara (Japan), Mugendi M’Rithaa (South Africa), Suvi Saloniemi (Finland), Sarah Scaturro (U.S.) and Annemartine van Kesteren (Netherlands), also helped develop the exhibition.
Correlating with the exhibition’s theme, the museum also announced a series of public programming throughout the spring and summer of 2016. Planned events will center around “magical materialism,” “beauty and biology,” and graphic design.
The exhibition will run Feb. 12 to Aug. 21, 2016.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Trace Architecture Office: Hua Li for Beijing Meijingtiancheng Investment Co., Ltd.; Forest Building exterior, 2015.
Chris Linton/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Michael Anastassiades, Mobile Chandelier 9, 2015.
