NEW YORK, NY.- This fall, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial.” Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, the exhibition explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the U.S., U.S. territories and tribal nations. On view Nov. 2 through summer 2025, “Making Home” is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address the most urgent topics of the time through the lens of design. “Making Home” is the first in the Triennial series to be presented in collaboration with another Smithsonian museum, in this case the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“The Design Triennial series has a long history of looking critically at issues impacting contemporary public life,” said Maria Nicanor, director of Cooper Hewitt. “By addressing topics of civic relevance in multifaceted ways—from the scale of the object and materiality to larger built and social systems—past and future Triennials take the temperature of the times by placing contemporary creators, designers and thinkers at the center of timely conversations. For this seventh iteration opening this fall, the topic of home, understood as a sense of belonging, was central to each of the installations. All of them gesture towards a greater understanding of how we are living in this nation and how design plays an active role in this shared experience.”

Installed throughout the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, each floor of the exhibition will be organized by themes that evoke experiences of home—“Going Home” (ground floor and first floor), “Seeking Home” (second floor) and “Building Home” (third floor).

“Going Home” will consider how people shape and are shaped by domestic spaces. Through reinterpretations of diverse home environments that traverse interior and exterior spaces, this section will explore the historical and personal factors that influence home design and its profound impact on people’s experiences, behaviors and values.

“Seeking Home” will address a range of institutional, experimental and utopian contexts that challenge conventional definitions of home. Installations will examine the idea of home through the lenses of cultural heritage, the human body, imagined landscapes and refuge.

“Building Home” will present alternatives to single-family construction models, expanding and redefining home to embrace community space, cooperative living, land stewardship, decolonial practices and historic preservation. Large-scale installations will explore building typologies grounded in regional histories and cultural specificity, and address contemporary issues such as housing precarity, environmental advocacy, memory and aging.

PARTICIPANTS

The commissioned participants were selected over a two-year period and represent a culturally diverse roster of designers, architects, artists and their collaborators from across the nation.