Cooper Hewitt is a museum in which I first had the pleasure of visiting for my Design Principles class at City Tech two years ago. Prior to that first visit, I had initially passed by the design museum while walking along Central Park’s outer perimeter and promised myself that I would design this new museum one day.  However, personally, I love any excuse to have to go to a museum.

Unfortunately, I had already revisited Cooper Hewitt a few short weeks ago with a friend.  At the time, the museum was having a family event, which offered free admission for all for a certain amount of hours during the day. Although it was nice to save some money on admission, with the museum’s expected high number of attendees, the digital pens that allow a visitor to save items from exhibits they enjoyed were not given out. They simply would not have had enough to go around and thus decided to just eliminate them as an option for that day overall.

Being able to go back to the museum within a short time frame, I was excited to be able to have another chance to see the same exhibits again and save the pieces I liked most for later.

These pseudo book covers were two paintings I had come across while waiting to use the bathroom on the other side of the museum’s cafe. At first, I though they were nothing more than paintings, until I stepped a bit closer.  I then noticed that the artist (Ellen Lupton) had used the whole canvas to enhance the illusion of what could’ve been a real book cover. The right side of the canvas even had painted lines, successfully giving the appearance of pages of a closed small work of fiction.

Never would I have guessed that wallpaper could be engineered to light up. I’ve only thought of wallpapers as being something flat and with a repeating patter, such as flowers or squares. This LED wallpaper, which I found on the main floor, lights up and shows different geometric shapes in different colors. The objects don’t fill up the whole space of the wallpaper, but it doesn’t have to in order to make this piece an amazing thing to witness.

images via Cooper Hewitt website 

Within the museum’s “Virtue or Vice” exhibit, saw this small house model. Initially, I hadn’t even realized that it was secretly a tea storage unit. If I came across such a thing in a person’s house, I would only think it was a really cool miniature model.

The thing I like most about Cooper Hewitt’s museum is the fact that they make people aware that design doesn’t just have to do with things done on a computer. It’s so much more than a computer monitor and mouse. Furniture, fashion and architecture are all a part of the design field. They have an exhibit full of different chairs, tables, scaled models of staircases, birdcages, pottery, and wallpaper, just to name a few. Overall, visiting Cooper Hewitt is always an experience that never disappoints.