Life of a Mansion tells the story of the building that Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum calls home. It details how Andrew Carnegie's grand but functional Fifth Avenue mansion--which was pioneering in its design, with an electric elevator and modern steel-frame construction--was constructed. The book features the rooms in which Carnegie conducted his business and philanthropic endeavors, and where the family and staff lived and entertained throughout the mid-twentieth century. It also surveys plans for the 1976 renovation by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer (when Cooper Hewitt first opened as a public museum) and the building's latest extraordinary renovation by Gluckman Mayner Architects, executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle and world-renowned Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, which has positioned Cooper Hewitt as a truly twenty-first-century design museum. Upon completion of three years of intense work, the new building has been LEED certified, and has gained an additional 6,000 square feet of gallery space. With an engaging narrative illustrated by 200 photographs, maps, floor plans and letters, Life of a Mansion chronicles the 110-year history of the National Landmark building, as well as the evolution of the museum from its establishment by the Hewitt Sisters in 1897 to its status post-renovation in 2014 as the site of the nation's design authority.

Life of a Mansion: The Story of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Tools celebrates the richness of the human imagination through a surprising range of juxtaposed and seemingly disparate objects. Accompanying an exhibition of the same name that celebrates the fall 2014 reopening of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Tools is unprecedented in its composition of collaborators--the exhibition is Cooper Hewitt's first pan-institutional show, spanning ten Smithsonian museums. From the earliest times to the present, tools have been at the frontier of design, demonstrating how technology and culture are inextricably linked. Consider, for example, that hand axes remained the dominant tool for 1.5 million years before any significant change was made to the human toolkit, and that the range of tools began to expand only 10,000 years ago. It is notable that the design of our basic tools--hammers, saws, screwdrivers, drills--has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, indicating not only their continuity of need and function, but also the effectiveness of their design solutions. Their various incarnations and histories link us to the past. Other tools highlight new technologies and scientific breakthroughs that have opened new worlds to us. Through lush images, authoritative essays and superb design, the book shows the interconnectedness of scientists, designers, historians, anthropologists, engineers and artists through design-thinking and problem-solving, while also looking at various design perspectives and methodologies. Tools explores the world of design ideas while celebrating human ingenuity across cultures and over time.

Tools: Extending Our Reach

Religion & Spirituality

With its unique focus on visual language, Ellen Lupton's How Posters Work is more than another poster book. Rather than provide a history of the genre or a compilation of collectibles, the book is organized around active design principles. Concepts such as "Simplify," "Focus the eye," "Exploit the diagonal," "Reverse expectations" and "Say two things at once" are illustrated with a diverse range of posters, from avant-garde classics and rarely seen international works to contemporary pieces by today's leading graphic designers. Illustrated with over 150 works from the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, How Posters Work provides a stunning education in seeing and making, demonstrating how some of the world's most creative designers have mobilized principles of layout, composition, psychology and rhetoric to produce powerful acts of visual communication. Ellen Lupton (born 1963) is an acclaimed writer, curator and graphic designer. She is Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Design Thinking. As Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002) and―most recently―Beautiful Users: Designing for People (2014). Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the US.

How Posters Work

Lupton, Ellen

Individual Artists

Half the world's population now resides in cities, which are expanding at an unprecedented rate. Close to one billion people live in crowded, unhealthy, informal settlements--commonly referred to as slums--many of which lack security of land tenure, adequate housing, sanitation, clean water and electricity. Experts estimate that by 2030, more than two billion people will be living in these slums. In 2007, Design for the Other 90% explored design that helps provide better access to food, water, shelter, health, education and energy to those who most need them. Design with the Other 90%: Cities is the second installment in Cooper-Hewitt's ongoing and acclaimed exhibition and book series. It looks at some of the myriad challenges created by accelerated urban growth and presents design solutions that address the consequences. Exploring the multidisciplinary, overlapping relationships between urban planning and design, education, social entrepreneurship, climate change, sanitation and water, migration, public health and affordable housing in these communities, Design with the Other 90%: Cities looks at the efforts of international and locally based organizations, designers and communities collaborating with settlement residents to give them a chance at a more prosperous life.

Design with the Other 90%: Cities

Cynthia E. Smith

Painter, textile and stage designer and co-conspirator (with her husband Robert Delaunay) of the Orphist movement, Sonia Delaunay is a heroine of early modernist art and design. Known primarily as an abstract painter and colorist, Delaunay applied her talents and theories to all areas of visual expression, including graphics, interiors, theater and film, fashion and textiles. A characteristic of Delaunay's work is a vivid sense of movement and rhythm through careful color combination. Color Moves: Art &amp; Fashion by Sonia Delaunay focuses not only on her art but also her avant-garde fashion designs for her Atelier Simultané in Paris during the 1920s, as well as textiles she designed for the Metz &amp; Co department store in Amsterdam in the 1930s. The book features essays by Delaunay experts Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti, Matilda McQuaid and Petra Timmer, accompanied by more than 300 paintings, drawings, designs, textiles, garments and photographs. Born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern, in the Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was raised in St. Petersburg, in Russia. After a brief period of study in Germany, she moved to Paris in 1905, and began painting in the Fauve style of Matisse and Derain. In 1909 she met Robert Delaunay, and together they devised a brighter version of Cubism that their friend, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, termed Orphism. Also among their friends was the poet Blaise Cendrars, and one of Delaunay's best-known works is her 1913 accordion-fold artist's book collaboration with Cendrars, La prose du Transsibérien. In addition to her prolific 75-year painting career, she created brilliant textiles and fashion works for nearly three decades.

Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay

Petra Timmer

Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti

Graphic Design

Since its opening on the place Vendôme in Paris in 1906, renowned jeweler Van Cleef &amp; Arpels has played a leading role in setting style and design trends in luxury jewelry and in the development of the art of jewelry design. Van Cleef &amp; Arpels pieces have been worn by such style icons as the Duchess of Windsor, Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor, and the company's prestige has spread throughout the globe, thanks to an unending list of prominent commissions issued by royal and imperial courts and the world's rich and famous. Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef &amp; Arpels explores the historical significance of the firm's contributions to jewelry design in the twentieth century, including the establishment of Van Cleef &amp; Arpels in New York in 1939. The book features more than 350 of Van Cleef &amp; Arpels' most celebrated works from museum and private collections worldwide, including jewels, timepieces, fashion accessories and objets d'art, focusing on those created exclusively for the American market. Six accessible essays accompanied by nearly 400 photographs, including previously unpublished design drawings from the Van Cleef &amp; Arpels archives, examine the precious pieces through the lenses and themes of innovation, transformation, nature, exoticism, fashion and personalities.

Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels

Coffin, Sarah

Menkès, Suzy

Peltason, Ruth

Why design now? As issues of ecology and sustainable living continue to gain in urgency and topicality, design has come to the forefront of the arts as the discipline best equipped to meet today's challenges. Designers around the world are rising to this clarion call by creating products, buildings, landscapes, messages and more that address important social and ecological problems. Why Design Now? National Design Triennial accompanies the fourth installation in Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's acclaimed National Design Triennial exhibition series. Designed by Michael Bierut, a partner in the award-winning design firm Pentagram, Why Design Now? is the first Triennial book to be truly international in reach, with 134 designers and projects in more than 44 countries. With eight essays by four Cooper-Hewitt curators, project profiles and more than 350 color illustrations, many of which have never been published before, Why Design Now? offers a glimpse into contemporary innovation, and an up-to-the-minute survey of what progressive designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and citizens are doing in diverse fields and at different scales. Many of the featured works have influenced other designers by proposing new methodologies or by pioneering new techniques; also included are practical solutions already being implemented as well as experimental ideas designed to inspire further research. Each of the selected works--from a soil-powered table lamp to a post-petroleum urban utopia--celebrates the transformative power of design.

Why Design Now? National Design Triennial

Smith, Cynthia

Decorative Arts & Design

Design for a Living World was developed by The Nature Conservancy, one of the world's leading conservation organizations, in order to raise global awareness about the impact and promise of sustainable sourcing. Ten prominent designers, including Kate Spade, Issac Mizrahi, Yves Béhar, Hella Jongerius and Ted Muehling were invited to create objects using only sustainably grown and harvested materials from some of the world's most beautiful and ecologically precarious places. Each of these landscapes supports its own distinct ecosystem and provides crucial livelihoods to local communities; each one is threatened by the effects of climate change and global economics--deforestation, overdevelopment and other destructive forces. Design for a Living World illuminates the complexity and vitality of raw materials at their source, including the people and cultures that actually produce them. The above designers were selected for their willingness to experiment and for their record of active engagement with issues of sustainability and social justice. In addition to presenting the designers' sketches, models and finished objects, Design for a Living World features original photographs by award-winning photojournalist Ami Vitale, who traveled around the world to document the many landscapes explored in this volume.

Design for a Living World

Felt is the oldest fabric known to mankind; its earliest examples date back to 6,500 B.C. In recent years, the fabric has found contemporary applications in an extraordinary range of fields, including product design, fashion, architecture and home furnishings. Felt's first revival in modern times occurred as a part of the fiber-arts movement of the 1970s; the 1990s saw a surge of innovations in its production, triggering the current resurgence of interest in the fabric. A combination of scholarly research into its history, the exploration of its technical applications and sustainability issues have inspired many leading artists and designers to work with felt. Fashioning Felt examines this recent explosion of interest. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, it presents handmade and commercially produced designs for felt, and explores through essays and full-color illustrations the material's rich history.

Fashioning Felt

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

BROWN, SUSAN

McQuaid, Matilda

Dent, Andrew

Martens, Christine

Antiques & Collectibles

In the nineteenth century, it became fashionable for aristocratic and upper-class homeowners in Europe to commission watercolor paintings of their domestic interiors and to collect them in albums. House Proud: Nineteenth-century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection commemorates the recent gift of 85 nineteenth-century watercolor interior drawings--the largest collection of its kind in America--to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum by Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw. Essays analyzing these beautiful, exquisitely detailed watercolors and their significance to the Museum's collection, accompanied by the watercolors and related objects from the permanent collection, document the evolution of the domestic interior in the nineteenth century, revealing the impact of economic, social, and political developments on the concept of the home.

House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection

Gere, Charlotte

Davidson, Gail

McCarron-Cates, Floramae

Painting

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Books by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum