Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial  is the fifth installment of the museum’s signature contemporary design exhibition series. With a focus on aesthetic innovation, Beauty celebrates design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body, and senses. 

The exhibition features more than 250 works by 63 designers and teams from around the globe, and is organized around seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative.

The exhibition is installed on the first and third floors of the museum and offers an immersive, multisensory experience that guides the visitor through a dramatic procession of the individual works.  With projects ranging from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural interventions, Beauty presents works of astonishing form and surprising function while examining the essential question: “Why beauty now?”

Exhibition overview from the Cooper Hewitt website

Whether you go or not, the Beauty catalog, Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, showcases the most exciting and provocative international design created during the past three years. These pages aim not to emphasize the hidden beauty in the everyday--a beloved teapot or favorite shoe--but to locate transformational beauty in contemporary design that is exuberant, ethereal, atmospheric, experiential, exceptional or sublime. Tthe book is itself a tactile, fluid and provocative interpretation of beauty, the design providing unexpected points of entry, playing with the concepts of beauty by using reflective surfaces, hot pink thread weaving pages together and a "heart" of the book, from which all else flows.