Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

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).

Reviews

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"

Author Bio

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