The Cooper Hewitt opens 'Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial'

This month, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Andrew Carnegie Mansion will be transformed as part of the exhibition Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, which runs through August 10th, 2025.

The exhibition features 25 site-specific installations commissioned to elicit a more comprehensive understanding of the "physical and emotional realities" of the American household. Indigenous groups and their lives on Tribal reservations will be a salient, along with the domestic experience of Black Americans as this represents the first-ever Triennial exhibition to be staged in collaboration with the Cooper Hewitt’s sister institution, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. 

The exhibition, which breaks down into corresponding sections across three floors in the mansion, is the seventh Design Triennial series since 2000.

The first, Going Home, located on the ground-level and first-floor galleries considers the ways in which these spaces affect individual lives by reinterpreting a diverse range of environments and their design’s corresponding historical and personal factors.

Following that on the second-floor, Seeking Home offers a challenge to "conventional" definitions of home through four lenses: cultural heritage, the body, "imagined" landscapes, and refuge. The exhibition then culminates on the third-floor with Building Home, which is meant as a presentation of alternative models in order to redress the issues inherent in single-family construction.

A few of the familiar names you'll see in the show are Curry J. Hackett, Hugh Hayden, Ronald Rael, and Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS). Johnston Marklee was responsible for the overall exhibition design. Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial opened on November 2nd.