A visit to the Cooper Hewitt Museum
- My collection: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/visits/y2cv/
I went to the cooper hewitt museum on July 9 with my mom. She is an architechture and interior designer so she enjoys these cultural activities even more than I do, which is incredibly useful because I get to learn or pay attention to more things that I would probably not do if not.
So far this museum, and the MOMA (to which I should go back to) are my favorites. When I went there I thought it was going to be really boring or not in sinc to my notion of design, because other smithsonian museums can be so traditional . However, from the moment I entered through the gift shop I realized how wrong I was. Everything was a design masterpiece, and I really wanted to get every single book there was from architecture-related, to the evolution of fashion.
Even more, I found it extremely interesting how they manage to make an innovative museum experience out of a creative design, because when you enter it, you are given an electronic pencil that interactively allows you both to record a collection of your own for later retrieval online (which comes in really handy), and to play along with the screens that are display around the museum to design whatever you might want, and even get inspired in infinite pictures that just float around those screens for the visitors use.
As for the exhibitions, it is incredible how they actually cover every aspect of design, either it is animation, product design, fashion with quite a modest amount of pieces, in contrast to the MoMa for instance. Also, I was surprised to notice a lot of modern-looking designs that were from de 4Os or older, it caught my attention the fact that there was armony in their simplicity and they look as if they were just another ordinary massive production object but at the same time, the fact that they were dated so long ago shows the imagination of the designers who projected their ideas so further into the future plus the lack of actual tools that must ha
ve made their works a lot challenging.
Finally, another thing I would like to highlight, is how it refreshed me what I was about to go
through in the program. On the one hand, the importance of the process (reflected on the exhibit of sketches and written concepts), the little steps on the daily basis for the creation of an outstanding design.
Like Melissa Becca, who came to tell us abot her recently parsons graduate experience, it is crucial to first brainstorm, then go to a second stage of prototyping and feedback, and finally materializing your product, and that takes a lot of time and effort. Finally, I saved on my collection an XO laptop amd the work “Scale model, architeture is everywhere” because they englobe the concept of having design everywhere, and everything being an inspiration for your work, the first one because that is actually a laptop that was given to me in Uruguay and I always found it annoying or really dull because of how it functions, but I never gave much thought about how it was probably the result of a hardwork design. As for the second piece, it was mind blowing to get an insight into that architecture’s mind, how he makes an interesting relation of objects out of a simple match box or anything.
