Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection – opens 26 June

Images: Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection, photo credits by Kelly Marshall

Design Across Time brings together thirty centuries of objects from the National Design Collection at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Spanning product and graphic design, fashion, textiles, digital design, wallcoverings and architecture, the exhibition is conceived as a living installation – one that will continue to evolve across its three-year duration through a flexible display system designed to accommodate change and rotation, allowing the museum to reveal the breadth of its permanent collection over time.

The exhibition design responds to the unique condition of the museum as both a national institution dedicated to preserving collective memory and a historic domestic setting shaped around the rituals, objects and atmospheres of everyday life. At the heart of the design response is the Carnegie Mansion’s Conservatory – a daylit room positioned at the end of the enfilade of ground-floor galleries that operates simultaneously as interior and opening onto the wider world.

Originally conceived as a place of gathering, cultivation and display within the home, the Conservatory became the conceptual starting point for the exhibition design. Its openness, changing natural light and qualities of exposure, establish a framework through which to think about the collection itself: as something to emerge from the darkness of storage and be presented outwardly to the wider world.  

And so, light is embraced as a medium through which time becomes visible. The tonal and luminous qualities of the Conservatory are drawn through the sequence of galleries via illuminated casework, reflective surfaces and a material palette that establishes continuity across six architecturally distinct rooms, while complementing the existing moments of radiance and material richness found throughout the mansion – from stained glass and chandeliers to reflective gilded surfaces and natural daylight.

The exhibition opens with a constellation of spotlit objects – a cross-sectional snapshot of thirty centuries of design presented in the round. From this concentrated moment of light and collection, the display disperses through the sequence of galleries, anchored by two large sculptural triangular vitrines lit from within. Arrays of softly lit objects extend through the mansion, drawing visitors between the openness of the Conservatory and the more intimate atmosphere of the Music Room.

Set against the rich, varied and detailed interiors of the Carnegie Mansion, the exhibition is rooted via a contemporary architectural language that operates in dialogue with the existing house. In doing so, the design transforms the mansion into an environment where objects from across thirty centuries are gathered together through shifting atmospheres of light, reflection and time.

Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection opens 26 June in NYC