While recent advertising has been overwhelmingly digital, the contemporary graphic designer and former National Design Award winner, Stefan Sagmeister, relishes the opportunity to use his considerable graphic talent and imagination to create posters the traditional way, through photo offset lithography. These posters are deliberately human and personal, in response to the “cold” modernist design of...

Richard Meier’s Getty Center, which sits atop a hill in Santa Monica, is, arguably, the last great building of the 20th century. While some liken the complex to a fortified Tuscan hill town, and Meier himself says that he was thinking of Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli or the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, it reminds me of another ancient hilltop complex, the Parthenon.

Among the most important 20th-century architectural drawings in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection, this work presents four sketches for a suburban Paris two-family villa, commissioned by the modern art collectors, Michael and Sarah Stein (brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein), and their close friend Gabrielle de Monzie. While De Monzie wasn’t especially interested in architecture, she still paid...

Hilaire Thierry’s exquisite drawing, Salon in the Restoration Taste, from the early 1820s, is one of more than 70 19th-century European interiors from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that are on view at the Musée de la Vie Romantique through January 15, 2013. The exhibition, Intérieurs Romantiques, highlights donations to the collection, made in 2007 and 2012,...