This spring, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is proud to present Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser, the first full-scale museum retrospective of the pioneer industrial designer and one of the most influential figures in design of the nineteenth century. Commemorating the centennial of Dresser's death in 1904, the exhibition will feature over three hundred works from his diverse and extraordinary career, and will be complemented by an unprecedented Christopher Dresser Symposium on March 27, featuring lectures and object study sessions led by a group of internationally renowned scholars as well as Cooper-Hewitt's curatorial staff. The exhibition will then travel to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, from September 9 to December 5, 2004. According to Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Warwick Thompson, "Dresser is undoubtedly the most interesting of late-nineteenth-century designers—and the one whose work bears the most relevance to our present-day concerns with production, form, materials, and eclecticism." Shock of the Old will explore the evolution of Dresser's career–shocking because of his extraordinarily modern and innovative creations–and put forward the finest examples of his groundbreaking designs for a stunning variety of media, including fabric and wallcoverings, architectural ornamentation, furniture, glass, metalwork, and ceramics. Dresser invented an eclectic vocabulary of design forms, drawing from myriad cultural sources—including Peruvian, Islamic, Abyssinian, and Far Eastern—and from his observations of nature. Dresser's designs were heavily influenced by experimentation with pattern, symmetrical images, and geometric shapes, and his unique combination of materials and new production processes resulted in forms that are startlingly modern. The remarkable objects on display will attest to his prescient aesthetic theories, which were grounded in an astute understanding of science and a belief in industrial production techniques that called for new methods of composition. Dresser was born at the height of the industrial revolution, and he capitalized on the new technologies and mass-production methods of his time to make beautifully designed objects and interiors accessible to the burgeoning middle class. He also took advantage of his academic training in botany and at the government schools of design that had been established in the late 1830s to develop the symmetry and natural beauty apparent in his designs. Dresser was also the first European designer formally invited to Japan, and was profoundly impacted by his exposure to Japanese forms, production processes, materials, and aesthetics. Dresser advocated that American industrialists establish a formal museum dedicated to design, modelled after London's South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum), to inspire future designers. In New York City, two decades later, the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration was established by sisters Sarah, Eleanor, and Amelia Hewitt, the granddaughters of Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper. The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration was the first design museum in the United States, and the genesis of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, whose identity and mission are entirely in keeping with Dresser's inspirational life and philosophy.