Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

Description

Beauty celebrates design objects and practices that are exuberant, ethereal, atmospheric, experiential, exceptional or sublime. Objects of beauty provoke immediate reactions and demand judgment - asking us to redefine what is lovely or grotesque, formed or malformed, virtuous or subversive. They exalt experience as a living, unfolding exchange between people and things. Beauty honours the voices of designers from 26 countries around the world by conducting original interviews about their works and processes - showing that aesthetic innovation can drive change, whether materially, structurally or ethically. Beauty is an object to be touched, smelled and savoured. Each of the book's seven sections is printed on a luxurious Japanese matte paper with its own fifth accent colour. A smaller signature of pages - printed on its own creamy pink paper at the centre of the book - is called the heart. It contains front and back matter and the responses from designers to the questions: What comes to mind when you hear the word beauty? What is the most beautiful time of day? What is the most beautiful place you've visited? The authors/edited selected the designers for the book and exhibition with a group of international curatorial advisors: Adelia Borges (Brazil), Claire Catterall (England), Kenya Hara (Japan), Mugendi M'Rithaa (South Africa), Sarah Scaturro (United States), Annemartine van Kesteren (Netherlands) and Suvi Saloniemi (Finland).

Ellen Lupton is the curator of contemporary design at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, and the author of several books.

...sensation and astonishment trump function and systems. Traversing genres, Beauty - Cooper Hewit Design Triennial... showcases more than 250 works by 62 innovators from around the globe.--Diane Solway "W Magazine" [A] sumptuous catalog.--Avinash Rajagopal "Metropolis" Beautiful surprises and surprising depth.... an exquisite survey, displaying an array of design as well as challenging our definitions of beauty.--Alexander Cavaluzzo "Hyperallergic" Far from preaching a singular standard of beauty, the alluring pieces on display pose alternative, and refreshingly diverse depictions that break wide open that elusive, age-old notion. A catalogue companion to the show, itself a distinctive object, designed by Kimberly Varella of Content Object Design Studio, collects each of the featured designers' takes on the topic, many of them poetic musings.--Aileen Kwun "Dwell" The show's wide range of works - well documented in a concurrent book, Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, released November 24 [2015] - expresses that all-are-welcome moment design finds itself in right now.--Dan Rubinstein "Departures"