The year 2010 begins with an important news: Bill Moggridge, a founder of the design firm IDEO, has been named director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in New York, to be effective by March 2010 – see the “New York Times” article.
While it certainly marks a significant change in the history of this institution, which for decades has repeatedly tried to establish its identity as a museum of design, this event can be looked at as a signal to the wider world of design museums.
As it is known, the origins of the Cooper-Hewitt museum date back to the late nineteenth century, when the Hewitt sisters – nieces of the iron magnate Peter Cooper, who had already set in Manhattan, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art – founded in 1897 a museum of applied arts. Like many museums of applied arts born at the time, however, the Cooper-Hewitt was soon to face the difficult relationship between its historic collections and the development of contemporary production of goods, in a society that was growingly turning to industry. In its past, then, this institution often had to come to terms with its identity and its role, and in some way with the meaning of its existence.
The 1960s marked a particularly difficult time. In June 1963 the “New York Times” ran an article, Cooper Union Plans to Close its Museum, which underlined that the museum «does not contribute substantially to Cooper Union’s broad education program in engineering, science, art and architecture».(1)
As Russell Lynes has noted, in his book on the history of the museum, More Than Meets the Eye, during the Sixties art and architecture were taught in an atmosphere permeated by the influence of the Bauhaus, consequently museums with historical collections were often seen as enemies of the individual expression, and as the longa manus of the past.
As far as the museum of the Cooper Union was concerned, in fact it was closed four days after that article appeared; but this decision raised a series of protests, and two committees were formed to save the museum. In the end, an agreement with the Smithsonian Institution was reached, that the holdings of the Cooper Union Museum were to be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution with the provison that they remained in New York and supported by private funding. In 1968 the Museum was granted the use of the Carnegie building on the 5th Avenue, and the museum was named “Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design”.(2)
But, as we understand, “design” can be given diverse meanings, and in the case of the Cooper-Hewitt this term had (and still has) to cover and justify a range of diverse historical collections. Thus, despite a series of exhibitions in the gallery devoted to contemporary design, from bags to posters, the museum still remained a decorative arts museum, and design was mainly read in this direction.
When in 1994 the museum commissioned its new corporate identity, changing the name to “Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution”, it seemed that the museum still felt the need to clarify its role: «We’re telling people what they need to know first [...] This is a design museum», as stated by Susan Yelavich, then assistant director for public programs.(3)
Apart from this change in the name of the museum, actually a significant shift in the Cooper-Hewitt strategy occurred in the nineties, thanks to the directorship of Dianne Pligrim – since 1991. Distancing the museum from the traditional art-history-approach and the aesthetic consideration of design, Pilgrim aimed at exploring the cultural and social values of design, investigating the uses and consumption of products, the identity and the role of objects in everyday life.
The first exhibition of pieces from the collections of the museum, under her directorship, The Cooper-Hewitt Collections: A Design Resource (1991), was organized with the intent to present to the public a “library of visual design”. As Pilgrim clarified, curators «did not impose an art-historical structure on the exhibit because we are not an art museum», while they wanted to suggest the cultural and social value of the artefacts, regardless of their artistic quality – thus also proving that historical collections are not as such an impediment to produce new interpretations and new content. In line with this reading, in 1994 the museum organized the exhibition Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, curated by Ellen Lupton. Lupton proposed a feminist reading of design, looking at design from the perspective of consumption and of use of products, rather than repeating the history of their “invention” and production by male designers and entrepreneurs. Such an approach obviously meant that lesser-known stories were explored and that objects on display were only one component of the exhibition, which was necessarily enriched with images, advertisements, videos, texts.(4) Interviewed in late nineties by Steven Heller, Lupton reported:
«It was definitely design from a sociological point of view, as opposed to design from the point of view of aesthetics or technology or invention or the designer. It focused on objects insofar as it dealt with aesthetic issues, like the use of color and form in the telephone, or streamlining in the washing machine. I tried to see the cultural implications of that, as opposed to looking at that as an end in itself».(5)
Definitely this was a promising direction for discussing and representing design history and design culture in museums, a perspective which was probably able to reach and attract a different audience than the public of hard-core design fans and of people just interested in design as art. Also, this is a perspective that requires the overcoming of retrograde categories and hierarchies of material culture, drawing from diverse disciplines (history, material culture studies, gender studies, sociology, etc.), and that is not easy to pursue for curators. No surprise it is certainly the less traveled by museums dealing with design, as it also appeared from the period of directorship of Pilgrim’s successor.
Under Paul Warwick Thompson, former director of the Design Museum in London, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum proceeded in quite a different direction. Probably it is significant that in 2006 Thompson declared: «We’re a design museum, we’re not a social history museum». A statement that showed again the perceived need for the museum to clarify its identity, to differentiate and mark its territory in comparison to other institutions and other fields. Yet, it would be hard to say that Thompson’s directorship succeeded in his aim.
It is interesting to read again what Thompson said to Steven Heller in 2002, just one year after his appointment as director of the museum:
«[SH:] England has long held popular culture and applied design as national treasures and has the museums to prove it, including your former venue, the Design Museum London. How do you feel the US compares? In other words, does the US have more or less of a commitment to preserving and exhibiting the relics of everyday life?
[PWT:] Yes, the decorative and ‘useful arts’ were of course championed by Prince Albert and Henry Cole. But now, I think Britain has a confused relationship with the applied/decorative arts and contemporary design. Like other countries, applied arts and design in the UK fall on the wrong side of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts divide. In order to get column inches or gallery space, you have to press the ‘design as art’ button – then audiences and journalists feel comfortable, or worse still, press the ‘design as retail opportunity’ button».(6)
But was design really on the “right” side of the high/low divide under Thompson’s directorship? As regards the activities of the museum between 2001 and 2008, it seemes that the collections were brought at the heart of the museum’s policy, trying to cover the gap accumulated during the twentieth century, when acquisitions focused on the past rather than on contemporary productions. Also the aim appeared to create bridges between past and present – yet this often meant that the meaning of the word “design” was kept open or stretched, by exploring the formal and stylistic links between history and current practice, as in exhibitions devoted to Giovanni Battista Piranesi as designer and Rococo. The Continuing Curve (2008),(7) but it also led, for instance, to re-discover «one of the first industrial designer», Christopher Dresser, in Shock of the Old (2004).
The same commitment on the collections has led to the organization of exhibitions with objects from the collections, selected and arranged by invited designers or artists, as well as to commission contemporary designers the realization of pieces inspired by the collections of the museum (a practice that was quite usual in applied arts museum of the 19th and early 20th Century). In this sense, the interpretation of the museum’s role as a bridge between past and present given by Thompson is definitely different from the one of the previous director of the Cooper-Hewitt – if the museum of Thompson was not a social history museum, it often resembled an art museum.
Meanwhile a growing interest was shown towards contemporary design, through the work of curators like Ellen Lupton, curator of Contemporary Design, Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director and head of the Textiles department, and Cynthia E. Smith, curator of Socially Responsible Design – see exhibitions like Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (2005), and Design for the Other 90% (2007) as well the most recent Design for a Living World (2009).
This is the state of the art. In 2008 Thompson announced his resignation as director of the Cooper-Hewitt, to become the new rector of the Royal College of Art in London. Following his leaving in Summer 2009, Caroline Baumann was acting director for some monhts, and finally Bill Moggridge was appointed in January 2010.
In 2008, one member from IDEO, Tim Brown, already was invited to represent design thinking by selecting and displaying some pieces from Cooper-Hewitt’s collections in the small exhibition IDEO Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection. Yet the task facing Moggridge is a greater deal and opportunity: will he help clarifying what it means to be a design museum and to be «the only museum in the nation [USA] devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design», as reads the institutional statement from the museum? Maybe a new awareness will pervade museums claiming themselves to be “museums of design”: an awareness of what design has been, what it is today and what it may be in the future.
Indeed the appointment of a designer like Moggridge at the Cooper-Hewitt might have its pros and cons.
Being a designer actually involved in innovation as well as engaged in design education, he certainly has a close and deep understanding of where design is going (and should go), hopefully well beyond canons of “good design” and glittering trends for design addicted; on the other side, for the same reason, there is a risk that he will tend to address designers and design students, rather than bringing the awareness of design’s social and cultural role and of design history to the general public. Also, being used in working with large team and people, he will probably be prepared to face the organisational tasks the directorship will pose. Yet, not only will he have to face the re-organisation of the museum, with the architectural renovation that shall finally provide the museum a permanent gallery and temporary exhibition spaces from 2013; he will have to deal with the tradition of a museum in which, so far, only one curatorial department is dedicated to product design, while the remaining others are devoted to Decorative Arts, Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design, Textiles, and Wallcoverings; he will have to ponder on the position of the Cooper-Hewitt, of its collections and curatorial strategy, not only within the Smithsonian Institution, but in the museum world of New York – where the Department of Architecture of Design at MoMA, led by Paola Antonelli, is already well engaged with contemporary design, while other institutions like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Metropolitan and the Noguchi Museum all have design collections and offer exhibitions of design –; finally, he will have to consider the position of the Cooper-Hewitt in the wider, international, world of design museums – where new institutions and departments have emerged recently (see the department and the new curator at the Chicago Art Institute, and the Design Museum in Holon, Israel, to be inaugurated on January 31st), while new plans are going on in older institutions (see the discussions at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich, concerning the strategy for the collections of design, and the plan of the Design Museum in London to move to a larger premise).
Notes
(1) Russell Lynes, More than Meets the Eye. The History and Collections of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design, New York, Smithsonian Institution, 1981, pp. 38-39.
(2) Sanka Knox, Smithsonian Takes Over Cooper Union Museum, in “New York Times”, 10 October 1967, p. 41.
(3) A Graphic Change for Cooper Hewitt, in “The New York Times”, 22 September 1994, p. 11.
(4) For a critical review and for the quotation from Pilgrim see Susan Sellers, Mechanical Brides: The Exhibition, in “Design Issues”, vol. 10, 1994, n. 2, Summer, pp. 69-79.
(5) Ellen Lupton on Curating Design, in Design Dialogues, ed. by Steven Heller, Elinor Pettit, New York, Allworth, 1998, pp. 117-132: 124.
(6) Paul Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, interview by Steven Heller, March 2002, http://www.typotheque.com.
(7) For a review of the exhibition Rococo see Andrea Renner in “Design and Culture”, vol. 1, 2009, n. 9, March, which is available online from Berg Publishers.
