About the Immersion Room

This interactive space, formerly Margaret Carnegie’s bedroom, offers a unique experience: the ability to view Cooper Hewitt’s extraordinary collection of wallcoverings as never before.

You can select wallpapers from the Museum’s permanent collection and see them projected on the walls from floor to ceiling—for a vibrant, impactful, immersive experience. You can even play designer by creating your own designs, or just stand back and watch as the wallpapers unfold across the room.

More than just entertainment, the Immersion Room provides the first opportunity to discover Cooper Hewitt’s wallcoverings as they were intended to be viewed.

To complement the experience, a number of wallpapers are accompanied by audio clips. When you select one of these designs, an audio recording plays through speakers in the room, giving you additional information about that particular design or designer.

The experience is yet another way the new Cooper Hewitt is remaining true to the vision of its founders, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, who intended it as “a practical working laboratory,” where students and designers could be inspired by actual objects. Their 1897 vision of a museum and collection “for anyone who wanted to use it as a place to work and learn” seems radical, even by today’s standards, but it has guided the transformation of Cooper Hewitt into a design museum for the 21st century.

Highlights

Some of the wallpapers on view in the Immersion Room include:

• A damask-style sidewall design called “City Park” (2007) that contains strikingly modern imagery, including a fire hydrant, parking meter, pidgeons and rats
• A 1928 sidewall design called “Sahara” that depicts mounds of desert sand interspersed with camel caravans
• A fuzzy flocked op art sidewall entitled “Razzmatazz”
• A German sidewall from 1820 with a luminous gradation of colors
• A 2010 sidewall designed by Javier Mariscal, featuring a tangle of chair line drawings
• A sidewall design entitled “Hunt Trophy and Floral Arabesque” (ca. 1785), acquired by founding Cooper Hewitt collectors Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt

Sponsors

Digital Experience supported by

The Immersion Room is made possible by major support from Amita and Purnendu Chatterjee.