Making Home – Smithsonian Design Triennial
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
November 02, 2024 – August 10, 2025

“Making Home – Smithsonian Design Triennial” features 25 debut commissions that illustrate the ways design is embedded in contemporary life. Ranging from domestic objects to built environments to social systems, the exhibition considers home as an expansive framework with varying cultural and environmental contexts and “making home” as a universal design practice. Organized in collaboration with Sthe mithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the seventh iteration of Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial series will be on view through August 10, 2025.

Installed throughout the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, the exhibition explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional experiences of home across the U.S., U.S. territories and tribal nations. The museum floors are organized by familiar interactions – “Going Home” (ground and first floor), “Seeking Home” (second floor) and “Building Home” (third floor) – interpreted in 25 installations by designers, architects, artists and their collaborators from across the nation.

“Making Home” engages directly with the domestic history of Cooper Hewitt’s own home in the Carnegie Mansion. The exhibition design by architects Johnston Marklee draws inspiration from the building’s early 20th-century interiors, anchoring each floor with a central gathering space. Aspects of the Carnegie-era interior – from area rugs to drapery, upholstered furnishings and brocades – are reintroduced through techniques of scaling, patterning, color saturation and trompe l’oeil in contemporary industrial materials.

The visual identity for “Making Home,” developed by Office Ben Ganz, contrasts bold designs with intricate details that reflect the mansion’s craftsmanship and decorative motifs. Reconnecting the building to its history as a home, exhibition texts and signage are deployed on reimagined home furnishings in the shape of folded screens and playful plinths.

On the first and ground floor of the museum, “Going Home” considers how people shape and are shaped by domestic spaces. Through reinterpretations of diverse home environments that traverse interior and exterior spaces, this section explores the historical and personal factors that influence home design and its profound impact on people’s experiences, behaviors and values.

“Seeking Home” on the museum’s second floor addresses a range of institutional, experimental and utopian contexts that challenge conventional definitions of home. Installations examine the idea of home through the lenses of cultural heritage, the human body, imagined landscapes and refuge.

On the museum’s third floor, “Building Home” presents alternatives to single-family construction models, expanding and redefining home to embrace community space, cooperative living, land stewardship, decolonial practices and historic preservation. Large-scale installations explore building typologies grounded in regional histories and cultural specificity and address contemporary issues such as housing precarity, environmental advocacy, memory and aging.

Over the full course of “Making Home,” Cooper Hewitt’s dynamic public programming will expand on the topics of the exhibition with talks, performances, screenings and hands-on workshops. Programs will invite all audiences – adults, families, teens, and visitors with disabilities – to explore the contemporary U.S. experience from cultural, environmental, and historical vantage points. The quarterly “Making Home Saturday Series,” launching November 2, features two in-person program segments, including special guests, curators and Triennial participants. Programs take place at Cooper Hewitt and expand beyond the museum to off-site programs at select organizations across New York City, as well as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

more. www.cooperhewitt.org