For much of the twentieth century, telephones were standard issue, designed for durability and function rather than consumer appeal. After 1953, color transformed the telephone from a basic technology into an alluring consumer product. AT&T ran ad campaigns encouraging women to see the phone as an element of home decoration. What if new phone models...
Henry Dreyfuss’s earlier Model 302 was a beautiful sculptural object, but it had usability problems. The triangular profile of the handset caused the device to turn when cradled against the shoulder—the design didn’t account for people’s intuitive desire to talk hands-free. Dreyfuss addressed this issue with the Model 500, introduced in 1949. To create the...
In the 1930s, Bell Labs asked Henry Dreyfuss to create a new telephone set, to be used across AT&T’s vast phone system. Dreyfuss was a young man and an emerging voice in the field of industrial design. Designers including Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague were reinventing the point of contact between people and...
Can you explain the type of work you do with Cooper Hewitt? As the youth programs manager, I arrange all of the workshops, college tours, and studio visits for DesignPrep, Cooper Hewitt’s free teen programs. Our programs connect high school students to professional designers in different disciplines who lead hands-on workshops. Students tackle design challenges...
a sampler might say “noli timere” be not afraid. but this sampler says “love unites us” in the end, we are all alone. but somewhere we also learn the elusive truth that there is love. love of life and beauty, knowledge and kindness. love unites us is not a bad thing to read on...
The two greatest children’s books of all time. They transcend time and place and age. They are wise and funny. You will be grateful to read them every few years. When you hold a (real) book in your hands, the molecules in your body rejoice. They are flooded with peace and expectation. Nothing else gives that feeling....
It is very comforting to come home in the evening and turn on a light. ideally, it is not a fluorescent hanging from the ceiling. something soft and gentle. something to welcome in the night. something with a dimmer switch to modulate the mood. i love light bulbs. they tell a very straightforward story. they...
Another sour puss. What is this show? Does it feel more real to pout than to preen? She was devastated when her beloved Albert died. It feels as if she never laughed again. But she had a job to do. It is important to have work. Someone can sell buckets. Someone can be Empress of...
This chair is not comfortable to sit on, which defies the idea of a chair. But it is sublime and necessary. What is the obligation of the designer? What are we supposed to feel or do with the things around us? Reitveld was rigorous about what he would allow in a room. That is a...
The phone rings. In 2011 I was invited by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City to curate an exhibit based on their collection. Like a shopper in some great, mad department store that housed many centuries’ worth of objects, I browsed and inspected their archives for a year or so. The...
The Temple of Vesta in Tivoli is one of the most illustrated and visited of the ruins of antiquity. It featured heavily in paintings and engravings as well as being the subject of model making. One important example, is a cork model a recent addition to the models collection at Cooper Hewitt, made in either...
Anyone who has seen Inspector Morse or Lewis pursue the latest murder in the academic city of Oxford, England, will recognize this beacon of academia rising up amidst the Gothic colleges of Oxford University. Centrally located it is an important architectural landmark, designed in baroque style with Palladian elements to be the university’s Radcliffe Science...
This model, like some of the others in the Cooper Hewitt collection, is from the compagnonnage tradition in France that taught design through drawing and model making. The degree of complexity of the curved and bentwood framing of the staircase itself, combined with the second level that reverses itself rising to a balcony, make this...
There are many types of staircase models in the Thaw collection, much of which was donated in 2007 to Cooper Hewitt, to coincide with an exhibition Made to Scale: Staircase Masterpieces The Eugene and Clare Thaw Gift that I was lucky enough to curate after studying their significance for the acquisition. Joan K. Davidson, whose...
I fell in love with this model the first time I saw it, and every time I see it I still smile. With its sophisticated use of materials, including that of Sèvres busts, and the humor of juxtaposing the two great French philosophers of the eighteenth century, Voltaire and Rousseau, it displays itself as a...
