that the forms of design that beautify the human are always popular—so that’s jewelry or
fashion—and therefore one should make sure
one doesn’t leave them out.” The show buoyed
other figures as well: Admissions revenue doubled in fiscal year 2011, and there was a 72%
increase in on-site membership sales (which
allow impatient patrons to skip the line) as well
as an 85% uptick in revenue at the museum
shop. “There’s a real irony there,” says Ric Grefé,
executive director of AIGA, “because the exhibit
may have resonated better with the public than
it would with the design community itself. That
is always a challenge in an institution like this—
for whom do we create our services? Can you
occupy the common space in the Venn Diagram
between designers and everyone else?”
On a warm day in June, Moggridge is sitting in
a bright, spacious, bay-windowed office that
was once the night nursery of Andrew Carnegie’s
daughter, Margaret. He is going over renovation
plans, wearing rectilinear spectacles and an Ole
Mathiesen watch. “When I got in touch with the
[Cooper-Hewitt] search team,” says Moggridge,
“they had these goals—both physically and
digitally.” He arrived at the Cooper-Hewitt a
little over a year ago, just enough time to get his
bearings before the museum’s scheduled closure. A major capital campaign with a target of
$54 million has raised all but the last $1.9 million, and an additional $7 million has been
raised toward an endowment goal of $10 million
to cushion the modest existing endowment of
$11.5 million. (Of all the Smithsonian museums,
the Cooper-Hewitt relies most heavily on private
funding for its operating costs and exhibits.)
The main event of the museum’s renovation
is the creation of a 6,000-square-foot exhibition
space on its third floor for what Moggridge hopes
will be “blockbuster” contemporary shows (his
curators are still researching possibilities for the
first one). But the physical transformation of the
Cooper-Hewitt—housed in a national landmark
that “was never made in God’s universe to show
things,” says Mark Robbins, dean of the school
of architecture at Syracuse University—can only
go so far. The mansion is a large house but a small
museum. In the first-floor galleries, which will
remain the same, patrons sometimes find them-
selves backing into each other, or into a fireplace
mantel, as they lean over displays in what was
once a formal dining room. The mansion’s antique
exterior cannot be changed (due to historic-
preservation rules); neither can its location (the
museum and its board considered and discarded
that option years ago). Still, Moggridge admits
that there is a younger audience he would like to
attract “who seem to think coming all the way
uptown is too far.” (The Whitney Museum is
abandoning its space on Madison Avenue and
75th Street for the Meatpacking District down-
town.) “I think that the biggest problem they have
[at the Cooper-Hewitt] is the building itself, which
is a straitjacket rather than a showcase,” says
Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Mu-
seum. “I am afraid that the constraints of the
historic building are such that it will be difficult
for them to really be the kind of public laboratory
for design that I think Bill would like it to be.”
And it isn’t only the museum’s physical limita-
tions that get in the way. Even its own name is an
obstacle. In 1994, it was renamed once more as
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smith-
sonian Institution—commas and all. All of its
materials use “Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum,” as well as the Smithsonian’s name and
sun symbol. “It’s a branding issue,” says Michael
Bierut, graphic designer, partner at Pentagram,
and cofounder of the Design Observer website.
Moggridge admits he’d like to just make the word
“design” really big and shrink everything else.
Moggridge might be
the only one who could—
or would—undertake
the redesign of an
institution with such large
ambitions and profound
personality puzzles.
To Paola Antonelli, senior curator of archi-
tecture and design at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, taking on a new name would
fit in with Moggridge’s outsize—and, to her,
admirable—aspirations. “We should call it the
‘National Design Museum,’ ” she says. “They’re
really trying to position the agenda of design
on a national level.” Grefé of AIGA, which no
longer uses the name that its initials stand for,
the American Institute of Graphic Arts, argues
for a similar solution. “I would say the National
Design Museum is the name, and at the bottom,
the tagline would be ‘The Cooper-Hewitt Collec-
tion of the Smithsonian Institution.’
“Really, it’s a matter of time,” he adds, laugh-
ing. “How long can people defend a wallpaper
collection?”
You get the sense that Moggridge is not entirely
sorry that his museum will be closed for the
next two years. For that time, at least, he gets to
slip out of the constraints of the building and,
in a way, conjure a more conceptual Cooper-Hewitt out of thin air. What does he imagine?
The museum should address, he says, “the fact
that everything is designed. We want to show
people how it happens.” So he would like to see
visitors have more hands-on experiences, where
they will “learn by doing.” A pile of Lego bricks
for aspiring architects, maybe, or computer stations where people can design something, print
a 3-D photo, and take it home. A smell lab! And
that’s just the beginning: “We create influence,
become a national resource, and expand the
virtual presence,” he says.
At times like these, Moggridge’s grand vision
goes a bit blurry. It’s hard not to wonder whether
you’re hearing about dreams rather than plans.
There has been talk of the Cooper-Hewitt serving
as the platform for a national design policy
(though its Smithsonian oversight would seem
to effectively prevent the museum from lobbying
other arms of the federal government). Mog-
gridge suggests that the museum could function
as a sort of clearinghouse, or an umbrella, for all
of the different member organizations for profes-
sional designers—AIGA, IDSA, AIA, and so on.
Yet when you ask how a clearinghouse would
work, or what exactly it would do, he says, “Well,
I don’t know! Got to figure that out.”
“I think that there may be naïveté about what
it means to be part of the Smithsonian,” says a
representative of one of those organizations
who insists on anonymity. “[Moggridge] has
run design studios, and now he gets into this
bureaucracy. He may want to be the parlor where
