George Lindemann Journal - "The Redesign of a Design Museum" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN
Andrew Carnegie used the third floor of his Fifth Avenue mansion as a gymnasium where he practiced his putting. The current owner, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, plans to put a small mini-golf green there on Tuesday when the news media gets a preview of the mansion’s nearly completed $91 million renovation.
The gesture is partly a playful way to honor a piece of the building’s history. But it also represents a larger message that the museum is trying to send as it reopens later this year after three years of being closed: This institution, which highlights the importance of design in everything from architecture to umbrellas, can be fun for all kinds of visitors — not just specialists.
The reconditioned building, at East 91st Street, seeks to present an interactive experience — not just artifacts in glass cases — to draw more people in the door and keep them coming back.
“We’re really taking the dust off the place and making it an exciting destination for people,” said Caroline Baumann, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the building. “We want to open our arms and say welcome to Cooper-Hewitt, and to build audience.”
Marketing the Cooper-Hewitt as “an exciting destination” can be a challenge, given the museum’s home, the Carnegie Mansion: a turn-of-the-century gem, but not a natural setting for cutting-edge contemporary design. But with its renovation — the largest in the museum’s history — the Cooper-Hewitt is trying to counter a fusty image. It’s also rebranding itself, with a new font and a new name: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
The third floor — which had housed the research library and was not open to the public — has been transformed into a signature 6,000-square-foot gallery for temporary exhibitions. The newly landscaped garden, with seating for 180, will be free to the public — with a new canopied entrance on 90th Street — and Ms. Bauman said she hoped to open it in the early morning before museum hours as a place to enjoy coffee and pastries.
The new second floor features “the immersion room,” where visitors can pick from 500 examples of the Cooper-Hewitt’s 10,000-piece wallcoverings collection — or design their own — and the pattern will be projected on two walls. “We expect a long line outside this gallery,” Ms. Baumann said.
And then there is the pen. The museum plans to encourage each visitor to use a special electronic pen that can collect information from works on view by tapping wall labels. The information can later be downloaded for additional study, and the system will remember patrons the next time they visit.
“It’s an entire record of what you did at Cooper-Hewitt that day,” Ms. Baumann said. “Our ambition is to make people repeat users: You’re creating and collecting throughout your experience at Cooper-Hewitt.”
Introducing the pen, the immersion room and croissants in the garden in an institution that has positioned itself as the national authority on design may raise questions about whether the museum is resorting to gimmicks. But design experts said the museum needed to take steps to cultivate repeat visitors and international tourists, among whom the museum is not always a popular destination — particularly because it is at the north end of Museum Mile.
“People tend to go there once a year,” said Karim Rashid, the industrial designer. “They need to have revolving, frequent, high-profile shows that bring people there every couple of months.”
Museum officials said that they viewed the pen, in particular, as a useful tool to gauge — and respond to — the viewing habits of visitors. “What are you looking at; what are you not looking at?” Ms. Baumann said. “It helps us better tweak the visitor experience.”
“It’s a global first,” she added. “We don’t know if it’s going to work.”
Through such efforts, the museum hopes to raise its annual number of visitors to as many as 500,000, compared with 225,000 in the 12 months before it closed in 2011 (which in itself was unusually high because of the Van Cleef & Arpels show that spring). By comparison, the Frick Collection, also in a Beaux-Arts mansion, had 420,000 visitors last year, and the Guggenheim, just down the block from the Cooper-Hewitt, had 1.2 million.
The Cooper-Hewitt also wants to increase its revenue. Being closed has cost the museum income and momentum. With the renovation, the institution’s annual budget has grown to $18 million from $16 million, and the Smithsonian, its parent, covers only 30 percent; the Cooper-Hewitt has to raise and earn the rest.
And the museum wants to double its endowment, to $20 million ($8.4 million of the additional $10 million has been raised so far).
When the renovated museum opens, by the end of the year, it will have 60 percent more gallery space for temporary exhibitions and shows of the permanent collection, which contains 212,000 objects. There will be new sunlit stairwells, with oversize numbers clearly designating each floor, and a new delivery entrance for art coming into the museum. (When the museum exhibited a Tata Nano automobile in 2010, it had to roll the podlike car up a ramp through the front door).
The project’s budget rose to $91 million from $64 million in 2008, partly because of additional work in the garden. The Cooper-Hewitt received about $14 million for the project from the city.
The museum enlisted several design firms in the effort, including Gluckman Mayner Architects, for the mansion’s overall interior renovation, in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle; Hood Design, for the landscaping; Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for the new retail space, entrance and some exhibitions; Local Projects, for the interactive media; and Pentagram, for a new graphic identity.
Every millimeter of the mansion has been restored, from the Caldwell & Company light fixtures to the oak walls, and almost the entire building has been turned over to galleries. (Offices that were there have been moved to the Cooper-Hewitt’s two adjacent townhouses on East 90th Street, which have also been renovated).
“You build audience by improving the quality and the number of exhibitions, and they can do that now,” said Richard Gluckman, one of the lead architects on the project. “It’s become a more flexible building.”