Challenging and wide-ranging conceptions of “home” underpin the design projects on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. The seventh edition of the recurring survey of contemporary design practices, Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial features 25 site-specific projects, all new commissions, that reconceptualize “design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities” associated with home. Faculty, alumni, and affiliates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) are core participants in the exhibition, which investigates the historical power dynamics and contemporary political economies that structure domestic space. Michelle Joan Wilkinson, a 2020 Loeb Fellow and curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC, organized the exhibition with a team led by co-curators Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and Christina L. De León. Isabel Strauss, a 2021 MArch I graduate and curatorial assistant at NMAAHC, also worked as a curatorial assistant on Making Home.
The theme of the triennial was especially apt given its setting. The Cooper Hewitt occupies the former residence of Gilded Age steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The grandiose turn-of-the-century mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side often serves as a foil for triennial projects that propose more democratic ideals of domesticity. This rethinking begins with the exhibition design by Johnston Marklee, the firm led by GSD design critics in architecture Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee. Tasked with negotiating the public mission of a Smithsonian institution, the historic private home that serves as the setting, and the domestic themes of the triennial, Johnston Marklee’s interventions aim to “dismantle the social and spatial hierarchies built into the mansion’s architecture,” according to a gallery text. Accessible, cushioned seating creates inviting spaces amid the imposing halls. Expansive area rugs with bold geometric patterns recalling linoleum floors playfully exaggerate the scale of the interior spaces, while wood veneer exhibition furniture, evoking everyday cabinetry, contrasts with the mansion’s ornate carved-wood details.
The installation “Ebb + Flow” by Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE), part of the exhibition’s first section, “Going Home,” feels subtly integrated into the mansion’s glass-enclosed conservatory even as it foregrounds historically marginalized perspectives. Germane Barnes, winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize and an alumnus of the AIRIE program, designed listening stations with headphones that visitors can use to hear a soundscape that includes recordings of Everglades preservation advocates Daniel Tommie (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, and Dr. Wallis Tinnie. Now threatened by development, the Everglades are a unique ecological system and the site of Indigenous cultural traditions, scenes of which adorn cushions that line the room. The sculptural objects Barnes created for the listening stations are “inspired by the Freedman lineage of movement and resourcefulness,” a reference to the African American communities that found freedom from slavery in the Everglades and other marshy locations beyond the reach of plantation owners.
The AIRIE project was one of several in the exhibition that feature Indigenous perspectives on home environments. In the exhibition’s first gallery, a display of vibrant turkey-feather capes, by the Lenape Center with Joe Baker, serves as an opening acknowledgement of the Lenape people as stewards of the land on which the museum sits. On the museum’s top floor, in the exhibition’s “Making Home” section, Indigenous building practices from the Hawaiian Islands inform “Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes,” a project by After Oceanic Built Environments Lab, led by 2015 MDes graduate Sean Connelly, in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture. The designers employ the lashing techniques of canoe construction (wa‘a) to create the structure of a large hale, or traditional building. An accompanying video details how the structure and building techniques are grounded in the Native Hawaiian concept of ʻāina, or land “that which feeds.”
In a nearby gallery, “We:sic ’em ki: (Everybody’s Home)” by Terrol Dew Johnson and Aranda\Lasch, to which GSD 2010 MArch alum Joaquin Bonifaz contributed, demonstrated how traditional building, craft, and culinary techniques of the American Southwest informed the design of a home for the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Several of the participants in Making Home also contributed to the GSD’s 2023 Black in Design Conference, “The Black Home,” an event that anticipated some of the triennial’s themes. For example, Barnes participated in the keynote panel discussion while Curry J. Hackett, a 2024 MAUD graduate, led a workshop on “Archiving the Black Home.” At the Cooper Hewitt, Hackett and Wayside Studio present “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia,” part of the triennial’s “Seeking Home” section that includes projects offering utopian gestures and imaginative perspectives. Hackett’s project becomes apparent first through its aroma: he has lined a gallery with curing tobacco leaves. Amid the bunches of tobacco are “speculative objects,” including an decorated church fan and a painting by his mother. The project is a meditation on tobacco farming in Hackett’s family history –“an unlikely celebration of an otherwise haunting crop”—and the designer’s personal “speculation on what life on the land was like or could be.”
This kind of speculation can drive tangible proposals on how the basic concept of home can serve to address social inequality. Led by 2013 Loeb fellow Deanna Van Buren, Designing Justice + Designing Space produced “The Architecture of Re-entry” an installation that includes tidy enclosures, each featuring a Murphy bed, workspace, exercise equipment, and a small library. The cubicle-like interiors could be full-scale mock-ups of dorm rooms, but Van Buren’s project aims to offer a sense of stability to those who need it most, focusing on transitional housing for formerly incarcerated people. The semi-private living spaces are envisioned as elements within larger open structures that include space for supportive programs and shared facilities. The proposition is that a well-designed space, however modest, can have life-changing effects as a source of attachment and dignity.
The notion of “home” that emerges from the triennial is an unsettled, contested category. Within the museum’s purview of “the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations,” vastly different meanings of domesticity coexist. A source of strength, identity, and comfort, home can also represent profound loss and estrangement. In surveying contemporary designers who grapple with the dynamics of private space, Making Home effectively prompts a public discourse about what might be shared in collective visions for home while also making visible the real divisions still to be addressed.