This appraisal of Cara McCarty was contributed by Andrea Lipps, Associate Curator of Contemporary Design Cara McCarty is a curator, lecturer, and writer on modern and contemporary design. Celebrated for her multidisciplinary approach to design, McCarty began her curatorial career in 1980 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where she held several curatorial positions....
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. This post was originally published on July 26, 2015. The postwar design era focused largely on improving all aspects of life at home for those who had...
This week’s entries are dedicated to objects featured in the exhibition Thom Browne Selects, currently on view at Cooper Hewitt through October 23, 2016. Jim Dine’s impressive career started not long after he had graduated from Ohio University with a BFA in 1957. After making the move to New York in 1959, Dine collaborated with...
The Cooper Hewitt’s American Chatelaine (ca. 1860) may seem like a completely foreign object at first glance but upon further study, it is more familiar than it might seem. If we look at the history of chatelaines we see that they are part of an archetype of tools to carry on one’s person that is...
In the center of his handkerchief is a portrait of Marie Louis Jacquard (1752-1834), inventor of the jacquard loom. Patented in 1804, the loom included a punch-card mechanism for controlling the action of the warp, greatly simplifying the production of complex fabrics and revolutionizing the French silk industry, symbolized by the caterpillars and cocoons nestled...
Peeling potatoes is tedious enough without having to do battle with ill-designed kitchen gadgets. Why hadn’t these objects evolved to accommodate users, rather than the other way around? Sam Farber found himself wondering just that when he noticed his wife Betsey, who suffered from arthritis in her hands, struggling to use an old-fashioned peeler. Farber...
The postwar design era focused largely on improving all aspects of life at home for those who had maintained it during the war and those who were just returning. The remodeled electric iron was one among many postwar innovations, but this Silver Streak iron in particular epitomizes the design period. The Silver Streak’s aerodynamic form...
Cooper Hewitt curator Matilda McQuaid moderates a panel discussion about the role tools play in large-scale projects. Panelists including Paul Ceruzzi of the National Air & Space Museum, William Goodrich of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Chuck Hoberman, artist, engineer, and inventor of folding and transforming structures, provide insight into how we use powerful tools...
The Solar Wall is featured in Tools: Extending Our Reach, on view from 12.12.2014 to 5.25.2015. Video display of the Sun’s surface from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO); Satellite launch date: February 11, 2010. Courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The SketchBot interface is composed of a series of 21st-century tools, including a digital camera, computer software, and a robot. But it also makes use of a natural material older than mankind itself: sand. The sand is incorporated into a multistep process that results in a portrait that can be wiped away to make way...
How can you make a hearing aid both elegant and functional at the same time? Stuart Karten Design introduced the Zon as a way to combat the stigma that is usually associated with the traditional beige shrimp-shaped hearing aids. Often associated with age, weakness or even disability, many individuals with hearing impairments wait as long...
The Flex-Foot Cheetah incorporates untraditional materials to solve a design problem that had vexed the medical field for years: finding a prosthetic solution that allows the user to live a normal, active lifestyle. Van Phillips lost his leg below the knee at the age of 21. Unsatisfied with the prosthetics then available to him, he...
Toolboxes come in all shapes and sizes. They offer a resting place for the mechanic’s hand tools and a protective environment for the chef’s knives. Yet such toolboxes serve a select audience. In the 21st-century, the computer is the universal toolbox, used by billions of people across the globe. Early computers, including Bill Moggridge’s influential GRiD Compass...
“Escape and Evasion” maps were given to airmen during World War II to avoid capture behind enemy lines. Such maps were one of many in the military man’s arsenal, but in some respects this navigational tool represents one of the most significant products of war-era ingenuity. This Pacific Ocean “drift map,” scaled at 1:4,000,000, illustrates...
From the archives, an Object of the Day blog post on the Polaroid SX-70,. The 1972 point-and-shoot camera revolutionized instant photography. Now on view in Bob Greenberg Selects.
