Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial Critiques American Power but Is Shy on Solutions

When the Cooper Hewitt introduced its triennial design series, in 2000, the goal was straightforward: to offer a snapshot of the field that reflected, typically with an optimistic gloss, the preoccupations and triumphs of American designers. Early editions were filled with consumer products in a range of streamlined, candy-colored styles; recent shows have added healthy portions of save-the-planet ingenuity. Toothbrushes and sneakers on 1. Biodegradable tires on 3.

“Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial,” the seventh iteration, aims for something appreciably different. It explores, as the introductory text puts it, “the ways in which design is embedded in contemporary life.” The curators have commissioned 25 artists, architects and design teams to create site-specific work around the rather elastic theme of “home.”

The uneven results,which leave visitors pinballing from sharp-witted displays to platitudinous ones, from subtle expressions of domesticity to hand-holding infographics, suggest at least one practical challenge presented by the curators’ organizing conceit. If you want to illustrate how a particular object or design sensibility is “embedded in contemporary life,” you can’t show it in anything resembling isolation. You have to lug a chunk of contemporary life into the museum along with it.

And so “Making Home” offers, in one gallery after another, dense cross-sections of American life, some slipped elegantly and others rather roughly wedged inside the 1902 Carnegie mansion, at the corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue, that has been the Cooper Hewitt’s home since 1976.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic application of this slice-of-life approach, installed on the ground floor, is “Living Room: Orlean, Virginia.” To reflect the relationship between the career of the American bass-baritone Davóne Tines and his grandparents’ home in rural Virginia, where the singer’s musical talents were nourished, the artist Hugh Hayden has faithfully recreated its living room, including upright piano, sofa and chairs, lamps, end tables and framed family photographs, and set the whole scene on a plinth with giant rocking-chair legs.