Cooper Hewitt Design Museum : Why Design Now

Yesterday, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt design museum . It was something I had been
wanting to see for a long time and so I was glad to have to opportunity to finally do so.

One of thing I loved about the museum maybe even more then the stuff on exhibit was the design of the museum itself. It is located in the former home of Andrew Carnegie which is a beautiful beaux-art mansion. It has all sorts of cool stained glass windows and carved wooden rooms and interestingly patterned wall paper and a lovely glass conservatory.

The furniture has been emptied out of the museum and it is currently filled with examples of design. The top floor was full of industrial and day to practical design.
A really cool thing was a desk which allowed children to fidget, apparently based on studies which found that fidgeting was actually conducive to children studying.
I was shocked by the amount of things that were made from recycled sewage or sheep's poo. Actually it was just two things but still. There were bricks made from 30% processed sewage, which were then used to make weird hobbit like domed houses. And there was paper made from radiated sheep's poo.

Some of my other favorites included the bio coffin, and eye glasses which cost only 19 dollars (and were aimed at the third world were people have a hard time affording eyeglasses) and were the strength of perscription was adjusted by injecting a syringe of saline into
the glasses. A side room was full of architectural models my favorite being something called a loblolly house, which was a prefabricated house on stilts.

The ground floor leaned a little bit more toward the decorative arts starting with crocheted coral reef by the entrance, where all the seperate strands of coral were individually crocheted. There were some pieces of clothing that weren't all that practical to wear. Then there was the gift shop which was a museum in itself only a more tantalizing one maybe because you could buy what you saw ranging from a 20 dollar japanese pocket knife to a 4,000 one of a kind scone lamp made from a igloo cooler and sculpy.