Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum at the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 Smithsonian Institution museums and one of three Smithsonian facilities located in New York City, along with the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in Bowling Green and the Archives of American Art New York Research Center in the Flatiron District. Unlike other Smithsonian museums, Cooper Hewitt charges an admissions fee. It is the only museum in the United States devoted to historical and contemporary design. Its collections and exhibitions explore design aesthetic and creativity from throughout the United States' history.
History
Early history
In 1895, several granddaughters of the politician and businessman Peter Cooper—Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Amy Hewitt Green—asked the Cooper Union college in New York City for space to create a Museum for the Arts of Decoration. The museum would take its inspiration from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and would serve as a place for Cooper Union students and professional designers to study decorative arts collections. Cooper Union's trustees provided the fourth floor of the Foundation Building. It opened in 1897 as the "Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration". The museum was free and open to the public three days a week. The Hewitt sisters donated some of the objects that they owned to the museum.Early in the museum's history, the Cooper Union Museum received three textile collections from J. P. Morgan and drawings by Giovanni Baglione. The three sisters served as directors of the Museum until Sarah Cooper Hewitt died in 1930. After her death, four directors were appointed to run the museum. Constance P. Hare served as chair. In 1938, Edwin S. Burdell became the director of the Cooper Union. The museum became his responsibility. The board of directors was abolished and an advisory council was established. Through the mid-20th century, the museum's collection came to include furniture, wallpapers, leatherwork, millinery, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and media such as drawings and prints. The museum had begun to decline by the 1950s and 1960s, in part because it was in a hard-to-find location, and Cooper Union students preferred modern art over the museum's dated collections.
Threats of closure
By the 1960s, the museum and college started to distance themselves from one another in regards to programming. Other departments of the Cooper Union were making financial demands. The Cooper Union announced in June 1963 that it was considering shuttering the museum completely, and the museum closed on July 3, 1963. In explaining the closure, the college said that the museum was far from other visitor attractions, the museum space was too small, and it was seeing declining use. Cooper Union officials also said their endowment could not fund the museum's continued operations. This prompted concerns that the museum's collection could be dispersed. A Committee to Save the Cooper Union Museum, formed by Henry Francis Du Pont, threatened to sue to prevent the museum from closing. The committee requested that the Cooper Union's trustees split the museum off from the college's main operations. Another organization, the Greenwich Village Committee, was also formed in July 1963 to try to prevent the proposed relocation of the museum's collections.The museum reopened September 16, 1963, with its future still uncertain. That November, the Cooper Union accepted the American Association of Museums' offer to conduct a study on the future of the museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was located nearby, offered to take over all of the museum's holdings. By 1965, the Smithsonian Institution had begun negotiating to take over the museum from the Cooper Union. At the time, the institution was rapidly expanding the number of artworks and artifacts in its other museums.
Smithsonian operation
1960s and 1970s
On October 9, 1967, Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley and Daniel Maggin, the chair of the board of trustees, signed an agreement turning over the collection and library of the museum to the Smithsonian. As part of the agreement, the museum was to stay in New York City permanently and would remain in the Cooper Union's Foundation Building for three years. Even before it had finalized its acquisition, the Smithsonian was negotiating to lease the Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side as the collection's new home. The mansion was five times as large as the museum's Cooper Union space. The New York Supreme Court approved the agreement on May 14, 1968. The museum was officially transferred to the Smithsonian on July 1, becoming the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, and Richard T. Wunder was named as the director. Wunder planned to obtain objects from around the world. Despite being part of the Smithsonian Institution, the Cooper Hewitt still did not have enough cash to sustain its own operations.In 1969, it was renamed again to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design. Ripley leased the Carnegie Mansion from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in September 1969. Lisa Taylor became the Cooper-Hewitt's director that October, the first woman to serve in that position. The museum, which was the first Smithsonian museum outside of Washington, D.C., moved to its home at the Carnegie Mansion in 1970. The museum obtained the mansion outright in 1972. During the early 1970s, the museum was temporarily closed while it relocated from the Foundation Building to the Carnegie Mansion. During this time, it hosted exhibits at venues such as the Seventh Regiment Armory. By the middle of the decade, the collection had grown to 250 pieces of furniture, 500 glass objects, 1,500 ceramic objects, 6,000 wallpaper samples, 18,000 textile samples, and 30,000 drawings. The museum had 35 paid staff and 72 volunteers by 1976, and it received $258,000 annually in federal funding. In addition, the museum planned to raise money through events, donations, and membership fees.
A soft opening for the museum took place in May 1976. The museum opened to the public on October 7, 1976, with the exhibition "MAN transFORMs". Other museums around the city hosted exhibitions to celebrate the Cooper-Hewitt's opening. Taylor and renovation architect Hugh Hardy planned to convert the mansion's basements into exhibit space, and they also planned a new auditorium, galleries, classrooms, and screening rooms. A conservation laboratory was opened in July 1978. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation funded the lab and it focuses on textile and paper conservation. At the time of the Cooper-Hewitt's reopening, it was the only museum in the U.S. that was dedicated exclusively to design.
1980s and 1990s
The Cooper-Hewitt launched a master's degree program in conjunction with the Parsons School of Design in 1982. Under Taylor's leadership, the museum also began offering additional educational programs both for adults and for children. In the eight years after the Cooper-Hewitt reopened, it hosted over 100 temporary exhibitions. Lisa Taylor announced her retirement in 1987, and the Cooper-Hewitt celebrated the tenth anniversary of its occupancy of the Carnegie Mansion shortly thereafter. At the time, in contrast to most Smithsonian museums, the Cooper-Hewitt relied on the Smithsonian for only one-third of its annual budget. Dianne H. Pilgrim became the director in 1988, and the museum was again renamed to Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that year. According to Pilgrim, the name change was intended to reflect the Cooper-Hewitt's purpose as a "design museum" that focused on the process of design, rather than a "museum of design" that focused on objects.The Smithsonian bought the McAlpin-Minot House at 11 East 90th Street in 1989 for $3.6 million, and it connected that house to the Carnegie Mansion and 9 East 90th Street. An archive of African American designs was created at the museum in 1991. Pilgrim hired James Stewart Polshek Partners to devise plans for a further renovation of the Cooper-Hewitt buildings. The project was initially planned to cost $10 million, but Smithsonian secretary Michael Heyman placed the plans on hold in late 1994 due to cost overruns. The budget ultimately increased to $20 million; this consisted of a $13 million allocation from the Smithsonian and $7 million from private sources. The museum's logo was changed in late 1994 to emphasize the word "design".
Pilgrim announced in May 1995 that the exhibition galleries in the Carnegie Mansion would close for renovation, and the renovation commenced that August. The Carnegie Mansion's first-floor exhibit space reopened in September 1996, Work on the passageway and design resources center continued through 1997, and the renovation was not completed until 1998.
2000s
Pilgrim retired from the museum in 2000, and Paul W. Thompson was named as the new director later that year. At the time of Thompson's appointment, the New York Times described the Carnegie Mansion as "an almost impossible venue for staging exhibitions on modern design" because the mansion was so much smaller than other museum buildings. Upon becoming the museum's director, Thompson sought to display modern design pieces at the Cooper-Hewitt. Thompson expanded the museum's board of trustees from 18 to 23 members, and the amount each trustee was expected to donate was increased from $10,000 to $25,000. He also planned to increase visitor numbers by one-third, to 200,000. Following the September 11 attacks, the Smithsonian ordered the Cooper-Hewitt to downsize, and Thompson eliminated four senior staff positions in June 2002, a move that prompted complaints from employees. In addition, over a dozen senior staff members resigned during 2001 and 2002, citing dissatisfaction with the work culture. Museum staff told The New York Times that passersby often did not know of the museum's existence or assumed it was affiliated with the Spence School on the same city block.Thompson originally did not want to expand the museum, but he changed his mind after the museum experienced staffing, budgetary, and exhibit shortages. The museum announced plans in mid-2003 to rearrange galleries, and several members of the museum's board indicated the same year that they would host a master plan competition, in advance of an expansion. News media reported in February 2005 that the Cooper-Hewitt was considering a $75 million proposal by Beyer Blinder Belle to expand the museum buildings. The basement levels would also have contained a restaurant, conservation rooms, and exhibit-preparation areas. Beyer Blinder Belle proposed a revised plan in 2006, which was to cost $25 million. That year, the museum launched a capital campaign to raise funds for the renovation and the museum's endowment; it had raised $21.5 million by April 2007.
The Cooper-Hewitt hired Gluckman Mayner Architects to design the renovation, along with Beyer Blinder Belle as preservation consultants. By October 2008, the cost of the project had increased to $64 million. The Smithsonian began renovating the two townhouses on 90th Street in 2008, with plans to relocate the museum's offices from the mansion to the townhouses. In July 2009, Thompson left the museum to become the rector of the Royal College of Art.