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Every three years, the nation’s cutting-edge designers, artists and architects convene at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York for its triennial to interpret the creative and cultural themes of contemporary life—always with magnificent, eye-catching surprises. The latest version, a reflection on the notion of home, is no exception. From a stained-glass collage embedded with human blood cells to Lenape-inspired turkey-feather capes hung from the ceiling, the survey of 25 never-before-seen, site-specific commissions stake out an expansive, provocative stance on American design and the way domestic spaces shape our identities.
From now to August 10, 2025, “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” manifests the idea of shelter from two vantage points. American designers considered both the tangible dwellings we inhabit, as well as the abstract, experiential places that provide security and shape our values. Installed throughout wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s former mansion, a 64-room Georgian Revival on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—Cooper Hewitt’s location since 1976—the exhibition unfurls over the building’s four opulent floors.
For the triennial, the museum has also interspersed Carnegie-era rugs, drapery and upholstered furniture, reuniting the grand landmark’s present incarnation with its prior life as the Carnegie family home.
To explore the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, tribal nations and U.S. territories, Smithsonian curators distilled the themes of “going home,” “seeking home” and “building home.” For the first time, the triennial has partnered alongside another Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., for curatorial talks with triennial participants.
“We started from the place of design as something that’s incredibly complex,” says Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Cooper Hewitt curator of contemporary design and co-organizer of the triennial. “Design can mean so many different things to so many different people. We were really thinking about a theme that would allow us to talk about design and make it real and relatable to people. Home can be a neighborhood. It can be a country. It can be a feeling.”
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The triennial is the museum’s first since the Covid-19 pandemic forced so many Americans to shelter in place, work from home and remotely educate children. The idea of home resonated even more throughout the pandemic, as the curatorial team invited contributors with vastly different practices to ruminate on this year’s theme.
“Some are critical, and some are celebratory,” says Cameron. “But they are all intended to be bridges, so that visitors to the museum can see themselves, and see others, and have a perspective on how people are living in the U.S.”
In 2000, the triennial was founded to address urgent topics through a design lens. The last iteration pre-Covid-19, “Nature,” tackled the climate crisis. Designers and scientists teamed up to address plastic pollution and species extinction. This year’s installment also finds installations confronting pressing social issues. For example, mobile refuge rooms by the nonprofit and real estate collective Designing Justice + Designing Spaces presents 10-by-10-foot, modular transitional units for people leaving prison, meant to be clustered in a communal environment. Flat-pack and easy to assemble, each room is a minimal oasis with its own Murphy bed, desk and storage for clothing.
“The Architecture of Reentry refers to people who are exiting imprisonment and returning to life outside in their communities,” says Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and co-curator of the triennial. “There are all kinds of challenges they may face in terms of securing housing that gives them a sense of privacy, dignity and agency in terms of how they decorate and arrange their own living space. Instead of a shelter that may have cots for people to sleep on, this creates four walls with a sliding door that can be closed off.”
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Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg interprets home conceptually, with a science fiction edge probing surveillance and informed consent. “She’s made three new works for the installation that create one complete environment as part of her investigation trying to locate her own bio-data,” Cameron says. “Often samples of our blood or DNA are stored in bio-banks and facilities that are run by different medical institutions.”
Dewey-Hagborg embarked on finding samples of her blood, drawn throughout her life, to understand where these fundamental pieces of herself resided in her installation called Is a Biobank a Home?
“She created a stained-glass work that includes some of the glass medical samples that she received,” continues Cameron. “It’s another example of inviting visitors into a conversation about very different interpretations of what you might think of as home.”
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As an example of “seeking home,” Christina L. De León, associate curator of Latino design at Cooper Hewitt and triennial co-curator, points to Unruly Subjects, the project by artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Carlos J. Soto, who bring to life two Smithsonian collections. One is housed at the National Museum of American History: relics and masks from Puerto Rican collector Teodoro Vidal. The other is a collection of objects taken by anthropologist Jesse Fewkes, sent by the Smithsonian to Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War of 1898 to gather Indigenous artifacts from the island. Together, the artists contemplate the Smithsonian as a home for Puerto Rican heritage. “There is a series of videos which show Smithsonian storage facilities where these objects are held, along with footage of the places where these objects come from in Puerto Rico,” De León explains.
Design teams also harness traditional decorative arts techniques to magnify the tensions of establishing a home in the U.S. For The Offering, furniture designer Nicole Crowder and artist Hadiya Williams constructed a memorial to the Great Migration, in which about six million Black Americans from Southern states moved to the North, West and Midwest of the country between 1910 and 1970. In careful detail, the pair’s vignette is an enchanting and colorful dining room, with hand-sewn curtains, place mats and table napkins, alongside glassware and dishes that “you might see at your grandmother’s,” says Wilkinson. “There’s a Bible and a photo album, thinking about the way that these mementos got carried with people on their journeys.”
“We want people not only to think about the safety and comfort of home, but how people arrive at that feeling,” she says. “I think this installation is such a thing of beauty that it can affirm that hope that we have to be able to find homes.”