The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, re-opens

In an essay on the work of Charles and Ray Eames, the design critic Ralph Caplan fixes upon a quote from Charles: “The details are not the details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections.” “Connections between what?” Caplan then asks rhetorically, answering, “Between such disparate materials as wood and steel, between such seemingly alien disciplines as physics and painting, between clowns and mathematical concepts, between people—architects and mathematicians and poets and philosophers and corporate executives.”
If that’s the task of the designer, imagine the task of the design museum that must explain all the connections—a design problem itself. How to bring together building models and slide rules and folios and quill pens and executive desks from over the centuries, explain their origins, tell the stories of their use, and make a visually dramatic display, without being boring or pandering? More prosaically, how do you make people pay to see forks and phones, when we have forks at home and phones in our pockets? That’s been the struggle for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for many years. In 2011, the museum took the major step of closing its heavy front doors for what it was calling a transformation. Today, they open to the public again.

Courtesy: The New Yorker

See all at: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/new-cooper-hewitt