Come June 16th the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the only museum in the United States devoted solely to historic and contemporary design, will welcome a new director, Caroline Baumann. Baumann, who has served as acting director of the museum since September 2012, in her new role will primarily oversee the renovation of the museum and the reinstallation of its galleries, scheduled to open in fall of 2014. “The new Cooper-Hewitt visitor experience—physical and digital—will be a global first, a transformative force for all in 2014 and beyond, impacting the way people think about and understand design,” announced Baumann in a press release. (Photo: Erin Baiano)
Cooper-Hewitt Announces 14th Annual National Design Awards Winners
Studio Gang Architects won in the architecture category. This is their design for a Lincoln Park Zoo pavilion in Chicago. (Steve Hall / Courtesy Cooper-Hewitt)
Acting director Caroline Baumann of The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has announced the winners of the 2013 National Design Awards. The 14th annual Awards program continues the practice of acknowledging excellence and innovation across an array of disciplines. This year’s winners will be recognized during a gala dinner on Thursday, October 17 at New York’s Pier 60 in conjunction with National Design Week, where they will be presented with trophies created by The Corning Museum of Glass.
Obit> Bill Moggridge, 1943-2012
“Few people think about it or are aware of it. But there is nothing made by human beings
that does not involve a design decision somewhere.” -Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and an outspoken advocate for the value of design in everyday life, died September 8th, 2012, following a battle with cancer. He was 69. Designer of the first laptop computer and co-founder of the renowned innovation and design firm, IDEO, Bill pioneered interaction design and integrated human factors into the design of computer software and hardware.
Bill was a Royal Designer for Industry, a 2010 winner of the Prince Philip Designers Prize, and a 2009 winner of Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. He described his career as having three phases: first, as a designer; second, as a leader of design teams and; third, as a communicator.
Diller Scofidio+Renfro Take on Exhibition Design at the Cooper-Hewitt
A billboard announces the Cooper-Hewitt museum is under renovation.
Design studio Diller Scofidio+Renfro (DS+R) has certainly had a very good week. As we noted yesterday, the firm’s designs for the Columbia University Medical and Graduate Education Building in Washington Heights have just been released, and now today, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has announced that DS+R will be working with museum staff on the redesign of the museum’s exhibition spaces that are currently under renovation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
SHFT+ALT+ DEL: June 1, 2012
D.B. Kim has joined Daroff Design as a principal and will lead the firm’s luxury hotel and resort practice. Kim was previously at Pierre-Yves Rochon and prior to that at Starwood Hotels and Resorts.
Design Trust for Public Space‘s executive director Susan Chin was elected Vice President of the 2013-2014 AIA National Board at the recent national convention in Washington, D.C.
While the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s headquarters at the Carnegie Mansion is under renovation (set to reopen in 2014), the museum is popping up in locations across New York City to keep design in the eyes of the public. In the digital world, the Cooper-Hewitt launched its new online store, allowing design enthusiasts to bring a curated selection of products into their homes. The site was launched on Monday by Cooper-Hewitt director and famed industrial design Bill Moggridge at a swanky party in Manhattan’s Norwood Club hosted by the museum and party aficionado and Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby. The Cooper-Hewitt also recently launched a website detailing events happening at Design Week NYC.
Cooper-Hewitt Releases 2012 National Design Awards
Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center and Davis Garage at Wellesley College. (Timothy Hursley)
And the winners of what wants to be the Academy Awards of design are as follows!
The Cooper-Hewitt’s ’s 2012 National Design Award in Architecture goes to Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam in Atlanta. We love the factory for Herman Miller and the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center for Wellesley College is very cool, too. The Landscape Design award goes to Boston-based Stoss Landscape Urbanism whose interest in infrastructure at such projects as Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee—part-civic, part-storm-water drainage—is so on message. Totally groovy LA architect Clive Wilkinson Architects wins for his interiors; his clients—Google, Nokia, 20th Century Fox, Disney—are running the world of infotainment!
On View> Cooper-Hewitt on Designing Lasting Solutions with the Other 90%
Favela Painting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Courtesy Haas&Hahn)
For a long time in the West there has been a common misgiving that aid is about patronage. The Cooper Hewitt’s latest exhibition, Design with the Other 90% : Cities, which opened this weekend at the United Nations Visitor’s Center, rebukes this notion by spotlighting communities in the southern hemisphere who are taking the initiative, harnessing local resources to solve their own problems. In the show, designers and architects are tapping into existing currents of change.
Eavesdrop NY 13
COOPER SCOOPER
Eavesdrop held a glass to the emergency-exit door of the Cooper-Hewitt and heard rumblings that a ten-member, Smithsonian-led committee was about to announce a new museum director to succeed Paul Warwick Thompson. It sounded as if the committee was down to two candidates—Paola Antonelli and Aaron Betsky. The latter volunteered to a source that he was not in the running, but we think he was merely trying to throw us off the scent. Our olfactory sense is too highly tuned to be distracted. Expect an announcement any minute. Read More
Cooper-Hewitt Director-in-Waiting
Smithsonian Sec Wayne Clough, Design Award winner Scott Stowell, Cooper-Hewitt trustee John Maeda, then deputy director Caroline Baumann, design award winner Charles Harrison, and chairman of the board Paul Herzan at October's gala for the Natinal Design Awards.
Last November, Paul Thompson announced he was giving up directing the Cooper-Hewitt and heading back to London to take over at the Royal College of Art. Ever since then, the speculative interest has been anything but wild, and frankly tepid, about who was going to lead the nation’s only and reputedly arduously bureaucratic National Design Museum, the only New York museum in the Smithsonian’s crown. MoMA’s Paola Antonelli? Cincinnati’s Aaron Betsky? Design’s Everywoman Chee Pearlman? Why not, Mark Robbins? Those who have been watching were expecting an answer, after hearing for months about the interviews. Well, we can now wait some more as the museum has just announced that longtime deputy director Caroline Baumann, who joined the museum as development director in 2001, has been named acting director, effective July 13.
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