American poet Robert Frost wrote that, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That quote features prominently in the Cooper Hewitt exhibition “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial,” where it is displayed as part of a textile by Chicago artist Robert Earl Paige that hangs above the museum’s grand staircase. The Cooper Hewitt’s building, known as the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, is unique for having once served as a home of its own — and this past identity adds another potent layer to the institution’s already far-reaching exploration of domestic life, which is on view now through August.
I
Moving New Designs Into an Old Mansion
Sure enough, several of the 25 site-specific installations in “Making Home” engage directly with the history of their setting. In what would once have been steel titan Andrew Carnegie’s home office, artist Tommy Mishima presents “Philanthropy,” an alternate version of Monopoly that reframes Carnegie’s $350 million in charitable donations as power plays. In the same room, designer Liam Lee introduces a high-back chair, table, daybed and room divider inspired by the space’s original furniture. Lee’s versions use fibrous needle-felted wool to achieve a sinewy, biological identity — the designer’s own way of underscoring that the room his furniture is now installed in was once at the epicentre of the fungal-like network that links a city’s society figures. In a city as unaffordable as New York, real estate functions as the ultimate status symbol — and while it may now operate as a museum, the Carnegie Mansion also serves to some extent as a way to see how the other half lives.
To that end, the multidisciplinary collective Concept Foreign Garments New York uses its installation, “Contrast Form Gestalt,” to document the cultural appropriation at play in the Carnegie library, a 1902 project by interior designer Lockwood de Forest. Drawing attention to the room’s wood carvings with strategically placed construction hoarding, CFGNY note that the design of the space “copies and collages details from Ahmedabad tombs, mosques, mausoleums, and domestic architecture, now placed in an elite US context.” To show how this practice also impacted 19th- and 20th-century museum collecting, the installation includes a series of unattributed objects from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection that originated from the same regions that inspired de Forest. The catch? Here, the objects are arranged into the shape of a human figure — a way to reintroduce a sense of identity into works that have been otherwise depersonalized.
II
Honouring Memories and Celebrating Culture
Ultimately, the Carnegies are just one of many families represented in “Making Home,” as other designers focus instead on honouring individuals from their own lives. Most of these tributes are part of a section titled “Going Home,” which spans the ground floor and looks at how people are shaped by domestic space. One early vignette depicts the Orlean, Virginia living room belonging to the grandparents of bass-baritone musician Davóne Tines. The installation (designed by artist Hugh Hayden) captures the singer’s homesickness during his frequent periods of touring. That feeling also informed an accompanying audio component (with artistic direction by Zack Winokur), which combines sounds like Tines’s grandmother’s humming with the familiar sizzle of bacon in a frying pan. Even for a musician, one of the greatest things to listen to is often the simple soundtrack of daily life at home. In another part of “Making Home,” designer Curry J. Hackett (who operates the practice Wayside Studio) delivers his own, equally evocative sensory experience by lining a wall with ultra-fragrant dried tobacco leaves from his family’s farmland in Virginia.
Some installations might initially seem to skew closer to the type of aspirational domestic vignettes that you’d expect to find in a contemporary designer furniture showroom. In the downstairs library, visitors can take their pick of seating by Stephen Burks, Jomo Tariku, Norman Teague and Leyden Lewis, or peek inside Kim Mupangilai’s Mwasi armoire, opened with a volcanic rock handle. But there is a deeper meaning to this arrangement of furnishings. Dubbed “The Underground Library: An Archive of Our Truth” and curated by the Black Artists + Designers Guild, the space is designed as a “21st-century refuge” for the Black community, rounded out with a full library of books, art and artifacts related to Black history and culture — a way of addressing the historic wrong that occurred when African Americans were denied the right to read under slavery. For its part, the gorgeous celestial carpet underfoot (a Malene Barnett design) gives particular prominence to the North Star, which once helped guide enslaved people to freedom.
Artist La Vaughn Belle continues this conversation with “The House That Freedoms Built” in the museum’s front courtyard. Using the shape of 18th-century houses that would have been built by formerly enslaved people in St. Croix (part of the US Virgin Islands) as a starting point, she goes on to showcase the fretwork details adopted by emancipated residents who rebuilt the town of Frederiksted, St. Croix in the wake of the fires that accompanied a 1878 labour revolt.
Saint Paul, Minnesota-based upholsterer and furniture designer Nicole Crowder and multidisciplinary artist Hadiya Williams (based in Washington, DC) team up for another historical celebration of Black identity in “The Offering” — a dining room vignette bursting with colourful patterned geometric textiles and handmade ceramics. The tablescape represents the type of “landing space” that the many African Americans who left the US South between 1910-1970 to settle in other parts of the country might have created while working to feel at home in their new communities.
III
Confronting Current Realities
The mood grows heavier throughout much of the exhibition’s second section, “Seeking Home.” While everyone deserves a home, not everybody gets to enjoy one — and as places like L.A. and Gaza demonstrate, a home can be a very fragile thing. To wit, “Patterns of Life” features architectural models developed by SITU Research and data journalist Mona Chalabi that depict a trio of homes in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Each one has been destroyed by domicide — “the widespread and systematic destruction of housing due to military conflict, urban development, or social upheaval.” Built in collaboration with the original residents of these buildings, the models incorporate cutouts filled in by transparent sheets of paper that display illustrations of furniture and personal possessions — reflections of everything that has been lost. (Strangely, this is as close as the show comes to confronting homelessness, which can feel like the elephant in the room throughout much of the show. Maybe that conspicuous absence is intentional — a way of reflecting that people often take home for granted once safely sheltered inside one of their own, perhaps — but it nevertheless overlooks the important design work being done to address this crisis.)
Another urgent installation, “Birthing in Alabama: Designing Spaces for Reproduction,” commemorates Dr. Yashica Robinson’s reproductive health clinic — a home in the sense that it was a form of safe haven — which closed in 2022 when Alabama banned abortions. (Robinson now operates a wellness and birth centre, both of which provide home healthcare services as a way to address racial and economic injustices in the hospital system.) Staying in the realm of healthcare, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg turns a corner room into a biobank lined in cryotube shelving units filled with mock blood. Asking “Is a Biobank a Home?,” Dewey-Hagborg draws attention to the many blood samples belonging to any one individual that could be being housed in facilities without their explicit knowledge. She documents her process trying to track down her own biological specimens (including the “blood spot card” collected when she was a newborn to screen for disorders) from various blood banks like the one on view. Where is our DNA living — perhaps without our consent?
IV
Navigating Different Needs and Construction Methods
The exhibition’s final section, “Building Home,” models alternative models for living. In one corner, that idea takes the form of a senior’s home mockup designed by Baltimore firm Hord Coplan Macht to showcase how such residences must grapple with the physical and cognitive impairments that accompany aging. A senior-friendly lounge chair offers one solution, proportioned to make it easier for someone with shaky knees to stand back up. In another installation, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) mounts a prototype of a rehabilitative modular housing unit designed for people transitioning out of prison — part of the firm’s work to end mass incarceration.
Just as ways of living evolve, construction methods evolve, too — and although that may mean incorporating new materials like mass timber, it can also mean returning to more time-honoured techniques. With that in mind, a wooden shell structure by Honolulu-based After Oceanic Built Environments Labs and NYC’s Leong Leong Architecture demonstrates contemporary adaptations of traditional Indigenous Hawaiian hale and canoe construction, using cords to secure wooden components together. Similarly, in “We:sic ’em ki: (Everybody’s Home),” NYC designers Aranda/Lasch collaborate with Arizonan master basket weaver Terrol Dew Johnson to turn a tree into a desert shade structure inspired by traditional Indigenous homes in the Tohono O’odham Nation.
V
Living Together Under One Roof
Throughout the entire exhibition (which also includes feather cape sculptures, a magical ceiling scape designed to deflect malevolent spirits, and so, so many other installations), display elements by exhibition designers Johnston Marklee serve as a unifying element, adapting the familiar pitched roof emoji-style representation of home (and several other common house silhouettes) into sculptural wooden podiums that display exhibition text. (Ben Ganz, for his part, led the exhibition’s visual identity.) It’s a clever strategy. As much as “home” might seem like a straightforward concept, the minute that someone steps into another person’s abode, it becomes clear that no two individuals have the same understanding of the space that they return to each night. One person’s comfortable Gilded Age mansion can just as easily be another person’s symbol of economic inequality. “Making Home” may lead with Robert Frost’s definition of home, but as visitors return to their own domestic environments, they will no doubt be prompted to wonder what home means on their terms.
The Cooper Hewitt Heads Home with the Smithsonian Design Triennial Exhibition
“Making Home” fills an NYC mansion with 25 site-specific installations that speak to the comforts and complications of domestic life.