"This is a field in which one does one’s work and it will be obsolete within 10 years."

– Steve Jobs, 1994

Cooper-Hewitt has just acquired its first piece of code. Although the collection has objects that are the end result of algorithmic processes, notably Patrick Jouin's 3D printed chair, Solid C2, this is the first time that code, itself, has been collected.

Almost all contemporary design practice involves digital processes—from the ubiquitous Adobe design software to CAD packages used by product designers and architects, to the simple day-to-day office management and accounting software—it would be difficult to find a designer who lives entirely 'off the grid.’ Despite this, design museums have been slow to start to add software to their permanent collections.

Some of this reticence to collect digital objects stems from deep uncertainties as to how to preserve and present such objects to future visitors and future scholars. But for Cooper-Hewitt these uncertainties have been a strong driver to experiment.

So, here we have Planetary.

Planetary is an iPad application written in C++ using the Cinder framework. Planetary offers an alternative music player application for the iPad that visualizes your music collection as a series of celestial bodies. Songs are moons, albums are planets, artists are suns—and the orbits of each are determined by the length of albums and tracks. Their brightness represents their frequency of playback.

It is an elegant interactive visualization produced as the first product by Bloom, a San Francisco startup founded in 2010 by Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, and Jesper Andersen, to explore new forms of data visualization and interactive products. In the company’s introductory blog post in 2011 Cerveny wrote:

“We’re building a series of bite-sized applications (instruments) that bring the richness of game interactions and the design values of motion graphics to the depth and breadth of social network activity, locative tools, and streaming media services. . . . These Bloom Instruments aren’t merely games or graphics. They're new ways of seeing what's important.”

Planetary was the first of those instruments, written alongside artist/coder Robert Hodgin who joined for the duration of the project, and to date it has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times.

We have acquired Planetary both as an example of interaction design and interactive data visualization, but by acquiring its source code—including its changes between versions—we are also able to reveal the underlying design decisions made through its creation and evolution from its first public release in 2011 to the last public version of 2012.

The acquisition of the source code also allows us to do something else very important.

Preservation

Like all software, Planetary has been skirting obsolescence almost from the moment it was released. Software and hardware are separate but inescapable companions that exact a sometimes profound and warping, and sometimes destructive, influence on one another.

(in-app planet texture detail)

Software written for the first iPhones, released only six years ago in 2007, no longer works on today’s iPhones. It might be because the operating system was taught a fresh new way of thinking about things. It might be because new hardware was invented that is foreign to and misunderstood by the past. Often it’s both.

Tom Carden has written:

“Planetary was written for iOS 4.3. Since iOS 5 was released it has had bugs and glitches interfacing with the music player code/library provided by Apple. We reported the bug but it has not been fixed yet. I hold out hope that it will be fixed in iOS 7. In 4.3 all music was local to the device. Since 5 (I think) it's been possible to have various forms of streams and clouds from the same API, which is now a creaky/leaky abstraction.”

“Planetary is the last of a generation of OpenGL apps to benefit from the fixed function pipeline. From here on out the future is shaders, in all their abstracted/obtruse glory. So much more power but also takes a lot more time and effort to wrangle an expressive framework. Further, it's fascinating to me that everything I learned about OpenGL on a $5000 SGI workstation in 1999 was relevant (still basically current) on the $500 iPad in 2011.”

This is okay. It’s the price of living in the present. But it does make our jobs as cultural heritage institutions harder.

Museums like ours are used to collecting exemplary achievements made manifest in physical form; or at least things whose decay we believe we can combat and slow. To that end we employ highly trained conservators who have learned their craft often over decades of training, to preserve what would often be forgotten and more quickly turn to dust.

But preserving large, complex and interdependent systems whose component pieces are often simply flirting with each other rather than holding hands is uncharted territory. Trying to preserve large, complex and interdependent systems whose only manifestation is conceptual – interaction design say or service design – is harder still.

As daunting a task as that may be, we choose to see opportunity.

With Planetary we are hoping to preserve more than simply the vessel, more than an instantiation of software and hardware frozen at a moment in time: Commit message fd247e35de9138f0ac411ea0b261fab21936c6e6 authored in 2011 and an iPad2 to be specific.

In order to do this, or fail trying, we are open sourcing the code that runs Planetary.

Although Bloom folded in 2012, its three principals have not only gifted the code for Planetary to Cooper­-Hewitt they have also given us explicit permission to publicly release the source code under an open source (BSD) license, and its graphical assets under a Creative Commons (non-commercial) license.  

The source code is currently hosted in Cooper-Hewitt's repository on GitHub as is a second repository called PlanetaryExtras that contains images, screenshots, notes, and drafts that were made during the creation of Planetary itself. Think of that second repository as the 'curatorial folder' of all the additional materials - except that it is out in public.

(early mockup of interface)

This means that anyone can now look at, download, and play with the source code that makes this app. Not only that, you are permitted to replicate, modify, and transport it to other hardware platforms and devices.

You can even apply the concept—nested data sets visualized and behaving as celestial systems—to other types of data and contexts.

Could we, for example, depict the Enron email dataset with its half-million messages using Planetary? Or if we included Planetary in the Google Art Project (to which we contribute) could we do it in a way that both preserved its interactivity and displayed the entirety of the collections in the Art Project itself?

Of course, Planetary will still be available from the Apple AppStore for the foreseeable future although it will no longer be officially supported. Or rather, not actively supported.

Cooper-Hewitt itself will not be actively developing new versions of the application but we hope that the wider communities of developers, scholars, and enthusiasts will. Bloom’s choice to develop Planetary for Apple’s iOS operating system and the iPad (but not the iPhone) helps us to understand the technological landscape in which Planetary was conceived although it is important to realize that Planetary is not, first, an iPad application.

Instead, we believe that Planetary is foremost an interaction design that found its ‘then-best manifestation’ in the iPad. What might that choice look like today?

Three years since its first release, hardware and software environments akin to those of the first iPad are available from a variety of sources. We are hopeful that people will think that Planetary is as interesting as we do, and will consider porting the code to work on Android devices or in a web browser using WebGL or large interactive surfaces (which are increasingly indistinguishable from large desktop computers or increasingly internet-connected televisions).

While Ben Cerveny was at Stamen Design he and founder Eric Rodenbeck (also a former National Design Awards juror) developed a conceptual approach to their work centered around the idea that “data visualization is a medium”. Tom Carden has also pointed out that: Google/IBM's Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas also drove this agenda, independently, around the same time.

We agree!

We hope to use this acquisition as a vehicle to actively explore and ask the question of how we meaningfully preserve the experience of using the software.

As part of that exercise Tom Carden has agreed, for a time, to oversee and be the final arbiter of any bug fixes and updates and (hopefully) newer versions of the code that will allow the software—the interactivity—to live on beyond the iPad. Tom won’t do this forever, but by agreeing to participate for a time it will allow us to better understand how museums might preserve not only the form of the things in their collections, but their creator’s intent.

The distinction between preservation and access is increasingly blurred. This is especially true for digital objects.

We already have a number of “digital” objects in our collection, from calculators to desktop computers to iPads and iPhones, but we have only collected their physical form. The iPhone in our collection is neither powered on nor has it been kept up to date with newer software releases. Eventually the hardware itself might be considered so delicate that to power it on at all would damage it beyond repair—a curse common to many electronic objects in science and technology collections. How then do we preserve the richness and novelty of the software interfaces that were developed and contributed equally if not more than the industrial design to that device’s success?

We cannot pretend to have all the answers to these questions but we think it’s important to start making the effort to find some of them.

(Graffiti, Amsterdam, 2013, photography by Aaron Straup Cope)

Living objects

We liken this situation to that of a specimen in a zoo. In fact, given that the Smithsonian also runs the National Zoo, consider Planetary as akin to a panda. Planetary and other software like it are living objects. Their acquisition by the museum, does not and should not seal them in carbonite like Han Solo. Instead, their acquisition simply transfers them to a new home environment where they can be cared for out of the wild, and where their continued genetic preservation requires an active breeding program and community engagement and interest. Open sourcing the code is akin to a panda breeding program. If there is enough interest then we believe that Planetary's DNA will live on in other skin on other platforms. Of course we will preserve the original, but it will be 'experienced' through its offspring.

In a similar vein Wolfgang Ernst of the Media Archaeology Lab at Berlin’s Humbolt University, has said that:

“Following my definition that such items need to be displayed in action to reveal their media essentiality (otherwise a medium like a TV set is nothing but a piece of furniture), it required an assembly of past media objects which teachers and students are allowed to operate with and to touch upon—a limit for curators and visitors in most museums of technology.

“The main feature of the [Media Archeological Fundus] MAF is grounded in the materiality (called “hardware”) of media artifacts—just as the Signal Laboratory is archaeologically rooted in the source codes of computer programs (since the memory regime of media culture is both material and symbolic, both engineering and mathematics). The configuration of artifacts in the MAF, guided by rather idiosyncratic media-epistemological criteria of teaching and research, does not constitute an archive, and its online presence is not meant to contribute to audiovisual archives as represented in the Web but rather a different form of audiovisual argumentation. Rethinking dynamic digital memory requires different platforms.”

New opportunities for research and scholarship

As a research institution we are also interested in reaching new understandings of the ways designers use code that can be gleaned from the code itself.

As we are acquiring a source code from the version control system that it was managed in (also GitHub), we have been able to preserve all the documentation of bugs, feature additions, and code changes throughout Planetary's life. This offers many new interpretive opportunities and reveals many of the decisions made by the designers in creating the application.

Not only that, we are interested in the application of literary and text analysis methods to the source code which could enable future scholars to explore the 'writing style' and 'aesthetic' that the designers used in writing this application. If we were to acquire other software by these same authors in the future, would we be able to find similar linguistic practices unique to their particular styles of coding?

(Archival version of Planetary sitting on the shelf - center left - amongst other flat objects in our collection stores as DIG001)

To be safe, we have also printed out a full copy of the source code on archival paper in the 1960s machine-readable OCR-A font - meaning that should the online version of the code ever be lost or corrupted we have a 'master' copy deep inside the vault.

The future?

As more of the world we live in is designed, controlled, and surveilled by code, should the nation’s design museum not begin to acquire the underlying source code of all its objects - from CAD models of furniture, to the code that optimizes the fuel injection systems of the latest car, the to the algorithms that underpin the financial systems that drive Wall St?

The author and journalist Clive Thompson has written a lovely article about the Planetary acquisition for Smithsonian Magazine so we encourage you to have a read of that as well as Robert Hodgin’s excellent blog post, Creating new worlds, about designing and building the planets in Planetary and then explore the Github repository and help us figure out how we make the present safe for the future.

Or just go and download it and run it on your iPad.

Sebastian Chan is Director of Digital & Emerging Media and Aaron Cope is Senior Engineer in the Digital & Emerging Media unit at Cooper-Hewitt. More of their team's work is discussed at labs.cooperhewitt.org.

This children’s wallpaper illustrates characters from Thimble Theatre. Along with Popeye, Olive Oyl and Swee’Pea, the paper also shows Bluto (forever Popeye’s nemesis), Poopdeck Pappy (Popeye’s father), and Wimpy (who will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.) The scenes are arranged in a traditional figural landscape-style format with scenes taking place both indoors and out. The paper is clearly meant to entertain and amuse, from Popeye’s horsing around with Swee’Pea, to Olive Oyl’s reading of Lumber Jack Love, much to Popeye’s chagrin.

Children’s wallpapers first appeared in the 1870s and were originally designed to educate and not amuse the child. As notions of child development changed in the early years of the 20th century, so did wallpapers designed for children. They became less rigid in structure and it was now deemed okay to merely amuse the child and be decorative, but wallpapers could be also used to instruct children in good design. Other than the storytelling these scenes conjure, and the ensuing interaction between child and adult, this paper doesn’t offer much in the way of education. While many of the original Popeye strips were not politically correct, the scenes illustrated here are just good clean fun and after viewing this wallpaper, how could you not leave the room wearing a smile.

Popeye was created by cartoonist Elzie Segar who wrote the strip "Thimble Theatre" in the late teens and early 1920s. On January 17, 1929, Popeye made his first appearance in the strip. His first words, a reply to the question, "Are you a sailor?" were "Ja think I'm a cowboy!" Needless to say, Popeye went on to be the most popular character in the strip and one of the greatest comic characters ever. The first comic strip character to appear on wallpaper was Mickey Mouse, with Popeye following shortly after.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a style of bobbin lace commonly known as Chantilly achieved a great popularity that endured in varying degrees until the end of the century.  The town of Chantilly produced lace for the French court in the eighteenth century, but ceased operations during the French Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, lace making slowly revived, but much of the production was made for export to the Spanish market. With the support of Napoleon III and the patronage of Empress Eugénie, lace production flourished again in the region, especially for the black laces made at Chantilly as they were considered to be the highest quality with the most beautiful designs.

Detail showing the line of stitching connecting the upper and lower halves.

Cooper-Hewitt has in its collection a French bobbin lace head covering – just one of many types of black lace accessories from the period. In an elongated diamond shape with scalloped edges, its design shows a symmetrical arrangement of flowers and sprigs emerging from a vase-like form. Made of grenadine, a black non-shiny silk thread, it has a ground or mesh that is comprised entirely of the twist-net Point de Lille. Symmetrical arrangements of flowers, sprigs and ribbons were the most popular motifs, and those are worked in an open half-stitch technique known as grillé that contrasts nicely with the open Lille ground. The motifs are outlined using a heavier untwisted cordonnet that give further clarity to the design. In response to the increased demand for larger fashion accessories such as shawls and flounces, lace workers adopted the Brussels technique, meaning that lace was produced in sections by several workers and were later pieced together. The stitch used to join the sections together is known as Point de Raccroc, and often times the stitch work could be very nearly invisible.  In Cooper-Hewitt’s example, a clearly visible line of thread links the upper and lower halves together, showing how quality and production methods could vary across the region.

Graceful, swirling arcs envelop a golden-skinned, blue-coiffed woman.  Her eyes flicker back while her arm reaches forward, as if she is swimming away into the gilt turquoise surf intertwined with her cobalt locks.  Is she swimming amongst peaceful waves or against a looming kelp forest of her own serpentine locks?

This Design for a Nymph Brooch by Eugène-Samuel Grasset was conceived around 1900 as a part of a collaboration with renowned Parisian jewelers Henri and Paul Vever.  The finished brooch, realized in gold, enamel, and pearls, was exhibited at the Universal Exposition of 1900.  At the time, Grasset was nearly 60 years of age and was long-established as a designer of posters, illustrations, book-bindings, fabrics, and furniture.  Along with his jewelry, Grasset’s tapestries, stained glass, and chromo-lithographs were also on display at the Exposition.

An active art teacher and theorist, Grasset once mused that his art was “the opulence of shape added to the purely useful aspects of objects.”[1]  Born in 1841 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Grasset originally trained as an architect before moving on to illustrations and design.  His gradually codified style, the result of a lengthy and varied career, can be seen in its mature state in Design for a Nymph Brooch. 

In true Art Nouveau fashion, Grasset’s brooch reflects a range artist movements, trends, and influences that came to a head at the turn of the twentieth century.  The sweeping curves of the brooch’s pearl-tipped waves suggest the vegetal ornamentation of Japanese Art, while the bright blue hues-achieved with painted enamel during the production stage, illustrate a fin-de-siècle trend of moving away from strict reliance on precious stones and metals in fine jewelry.  Echoes of the Gothic Revival style and its champion, Viollet-le-Duc, manifest themselves in the mysterious maiden.  Delicate, ethereal, and enigmatic, she embodies the Art Nouveau paradigm.  The prevalence and supremacy of female subjects in Art Nouveau reflect both the Symbolist movement –which emphasized the gothic, mythic and otherworldly, and signify the complex and unsteady role occupied by women at the turn of the century.  At once creatures relegated to the domestic sphere and prized for their physical appearance and subservience to men, women were also experiencing the changing sociological tides that came with a burgeoning middle class and an emboldened advertising industry.  The result was an idealized, exaggerated creature, more fantastic than real.

England enjoyed imported indigo dye from India in the 17^th century. It wasn’t until the mid 18^th century, however, that two important innovations made delicate designs like this Bromley Hall textile possible.

Indigo dye is unique in that it is not water-soluble, so it must be chemically reduced to properly saturate fibers. The dye must be absorbed before it is exposed to air because it is then that the white dyestuff oxidizes and turns blue. This is easy enough when the substrate is submerged in a dye bath, and then removed to come in contact with oxygen in the air. But printing indigo on a surface, in the open air, was initially problematic because the dyestuff turned blue before penetrating fibers.

By the 1740s, a top-secret English development called “China Blue” solved that problem. In this process, the un-dissolved dyestuff was finely ground into a printable paste. Printed fabric was then alternately submerged in baths of reducing agents, and exposed to air, to bring out that blue color that we see in our jeans today.

Additionally, in the 1750s, the invention of copper plate printing allowed for fine intricate lines that traditional block printing could not produce. This fabric is a result of what where then novel technologies.

Carly Lewis is currently earning an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons. She has a B.S. in Textile Design from Philadelphia University and is focusing her studies on gender issues in regard to textile design practices in the 20th century. 

For many of us residing in New York City, we quickly become accustomed to living in small apartments. Yet, through design, decoration, and furnishings we do our best to make our sometimes-cramped quarters as practical, comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing as possible. In the 1930s, American-born designer Donald Deskey, inspired and influenced by European design of the period, created apartment interiors that were functional, sophisticated, and modern.

According to Deskey, architecture and design in the 1930s had to “meet the needs of a new day and a new mode of life.”[i] Apartment living increased the need for compact, multipurpose, and easily maintained furnishings; rooms were often combined; spaces less cluttered; and the new status of women meant that decorating was less feminine and more impersonal than it had typically been.

Deskey designed the interiors, furniture, and fittings for the Rands’ apartment that would later be described as an “ultra modern luxury studio.”[ii] Socialites George Curtis Rand and Eleanor Post Hutton (daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post, at one time the wealthiest woman in America) were married in May 1934 and their apartment was a converted two-story stable at 46 Washington Mews, a cobblestoned, gated street in Manhattan. While Deskey designed for his client’s lifestyle and the era in which they lived, many of his concepts remain relevant to apartment living today. He divided rooms with glass brick walls, which functionally separated spaces and provided aesthetic illumination. He used sliding furniture compartments for additional storage space, and incorporated everyday objects, such as the large numberless clock affixed to the bedroom wall, for decorative effect.

Although Deskey catered to high-end clients, he sought to create a modern American style that would be available to all, for design was a way to improve the quality of contemporary life. Today, shrinking apartment sizes, changes in social values, and shifts in demographics continue to challenge designers. Fortunately for us city-dwellers, many of them follow in Deskey’s footsteps, using innovative solutions to make small living spaces comfortable, functional, and elegant, and good design accessible and affordable.

The marriage between art and music has always been a richly fabled romance.  In the modern era, graphic designers have had a particular knack for fusing these two mediums by imbibing their personal passion for music into their work.  Consider for instance Reid Miles typographic album covers for the jazz label Blue Note in the 1950s or Wes Wilson’s psychedelic concert posters for Bill Graham presents in the 1960s. Each designer’s individual taste helped signify the way we see music.

Swiss graphic designer Niklaus Troxler’s first love was jazz.  Since the mid 1960s he has produced concerts in his hometown of Willisau.  In 1975 he founded the Jazz in Willisau Festival.  Since then, Troxler has created close to 100 posters for each show, with a style that is unique and singular to each event, ever fluid and often challenging, like jazz itself.  In a 2007 New York Times interview, Troxler described his influences.  “I never wanted to look like a typical Swiss graphic designer. My influences come more from Pop Art, different art styles and of course, the music.  I always wanted to get sound into my posters, and also movement and rhythm.”

The notion of movement and sound is absolutely apparent in this poster from 2007.  To advertise the Ellery Eskelin Trio, Troxler accentuates the corner of each letter with a yellow circle.  At first glance this calls to mind an almost crude molecular structure, however with each fuzzed out bip and bop, we begin to hear and see the keys of Eskelin’s chief instrument - the saxophone.  The notes pulse and reverberate down the instrument, playing a song while cryptically telling us the message of where to be.

Troxler’s ability to draw the abstract values of music is remarkable throughout his cannon of posters for the Willisau festival. His design’s use of measured space— crescendos and pauses as well as spontaneous line and repetition are truly sensed beyond the visual.  His work, whether abstract or literal, reminds us how elemental the relationship between art and music can be.

Turkey red refers to a brilliant scarlet dye for cotton, or more accurately, a process for dyeing cotton red. As suggested by the variety of names used --Turkey red, Adrianople red, rouge des Indes—the technique was practiced throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but was completely unknown in Europe before the eighteenth century. In order to discover the secret process, textile firms in England and France began sending industrial spies to Turkey and Greece. Other companies, particularly in the cotton producing centers of Rouen and Mulhouse in France and Manchester in England brought master dyers from Turkey or Greece to Europe to teach them the technique.

Once the secrets were revealed, however, European dyers were not too pleased with what they learned. The process was terribly labor-intensive and difficult. Recipes called for 15 to 20 steps, including multiple baths in lye, rancid olive oil, sheep dung, and ox blood. Drying the oil-soaked cloth created a fire hazard, so special drying towers had to be built away from the dyeworks. Furthermore, the process was not adaptable to the printing process, but could only be used for dyeing yarns, or, with some difficulty, whole cloth. This sample book, for example, contains twenty-eight solid red samples on varying weights of cotton cloth, from batiste to canvas.  Traditional resist patterning could not be used, because no resist paste could withstand the many aggressive steps required to achieve the color.

So dyers began experimenting to simplify the process, and so to understand how the chemistry of the Turkey red process worked, and which steps were strictly necessary (the blood, it seems, was not). This led to a series of incremental improvements in dye technology, including the standardized use of alum as a mordant, and the addition of a brightening or “gladdening” bath in tin salt after dyeing.[i] The technique of discharge printing, or creating pattern by selectively bleaching the color out of selected areas, was developed largely to print Turkey red dyed cloth. Finally, alizarin, the organic compound which gives Turkey red its color, was the first natural dye to be synthetically reproduced, in 1869, bringing the tale of Turkey red mostly to a close, although some Turkey red dyeworks persisted until the early twentieth century.

When I first saw this console by the Japanese-American master woodworker and furniture maker, George Nakashima, I was, and still am, struck by the wonderful twelve-foot long expanse of wood that is the console top. It seems to be a celebration of the material, of the tree it came from—a warm-toned surface with a silky, nuanced grain and soft contoured edges, a surface that invites you to look, study, touch and run your hand along to feel it, even to tap it, hear it.

Trained as an architect, Nakashima traveled and worked abroad, spending time in France, North Africa, Japan, and India, before returning to the United States in 1940. He began teaching woodworking while making his own furniture. During World War II, Nakashima was confined to an internment camp, where he met Gentaro Hikogawa, who trained him in traditional Japanese carpentry techniques. In 1943, after a former employer sponsored his release, Nakashima settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and eventually started a studio. There, drawing on Japanese design and woodworking practices along with his knowledge of Modernist style, he created a body of work significant to American postwar design.

Nakashima is known for his reverence for materials; he had great respect for wood, nature, and spirituality, which were central elements of his philosophy. He said “We work this material to fulfill the yearning of nature to find destiny, to give this absolute inanimate object a second life, to release its richness…to read its history in life.”[i] He believed that wood was alive, so constantly reacting, always influenced by weather and other conditions. Each piece of wood that he incorporated into a piece of furniture needed to be understood so that it would function properly within the piece.

The console now in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection started as a piece commissioned in 1958 by the donor and her husband for their home. Nakashima worked with them to design this capacious storage unit, and his notes are still clear on his design drawing, which the Museum acquired with the console.

Drawing: Design for Sideboard. George Nakashima,1958.Graphite on cream paper, 15 x 22.8 cm (5 7/8 in. x 9 in.). 2006-18-2.

The proportions are long and low, helping to make the piece inviting rather than monumental. The simple form puts emphasis on the materials, walnut wood and light-colored contrasting pandana cloth behind the vertical elements of the simple sliding panel doors. After more than fifty years, the piece still draws the viewer in to enjoy the natural materials on many levels.

[i] Moonan, Wendy. “Antiques: A Reverence for Wood and Nature,” New York Times, November 7, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/books/antiques-a-reverence-for-wood-an....

Weaver, refugee, designer, poet, teacher, entrepreneur, immigrant, innovator:  Trude Guermonprez.  Along with contemporaries Anni Albers, Dorothy Liebes and Marianne Strengell, Guermonprez was in the vanguard of the American modernist weaving movement, producing both functional and decorative textiles, and experimenting with industrial synthetic fibers. Co-founder of the Pond Farm Workshops, Guermonprez is most remembered for her novel three-dimensional fiber “space hangings” and poetic wall tapestries. Through Pond Farm, Guermonprez received numerous architectural commissions, including three ark curtains, or parochet, for newly-built synagogues, structures that reflected the broader modernist architectural spirit in post-World War II America.

Claude Stoller, architect of the Rodef Shalom (Keepers of Peace) synagogue in San Rafael, California, said he had always had Trude Guermonprez in mind for the ark curtains, and gave her free artistic reign. Devoid of icons and letters, the curtains were non-objective, a Bauhaus-inspired, geometric design of polychrome squares.The concentration of yellow, pink, orange and purple squares at the top dispersed as the eye lowered, giving way to a tranquil, tonal shimmering cloth of white and gold. Guermonprez advocated that the eye needed a place to rest. The tapestries embodied both the historical ritual of protecting the Torah, and the artistic and religious freedom of the new world. Deviating from the old-world practice in which female members of the congregation together embroidered the ark curtains, Guermonprez hand-wove the parochet, merging a traditional plain-weave technique with an experimental synthetic metallic yarn. No longer extant, this trial is all that remains of the commission, along with a drawing also in the Museum’s collection. Rodef Shalom was a progressive endeavor, each artisan hand-selected by Stoller, and linked in some way to Guermonprez herself:  Bella Feldman (copper menorah), Ann Knorr (burning bush stained glass), Jane Slater Marquis (stained glass panels representing the twelve tribes of Israel), Victor Ries, co-founder of Pond Farm Workshops, (the bronze olive branch), and Edith Heath (triangular floor tiles in the entry).

Today is the first day of Rosh Hashanah

When 20-year old Bernice Smith Tongate walked into a California Navy recruiting office in 1917, and proclaimed “Gee, I wish I were a man, I’d join the Navy!,” I’m sure she was blissfully unaware of the impact she was about to have on the American Navy and women’s equality.

Illustrator and artist Howard Chandler Christy (1873-1952) was in earshot of Smith when she announced her wishful declaration. While she was denied admission to the Navy (this time), Christy recruited her to playfully pose in a white cap and sailor blues for this poster urging young men to serve their country. Christy was a renowned magazine illustrator in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was a combat artist and war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. Yet, he was most famous for the “Christy Girl,” a depiction of his vision of the idealized American woman. Just like Smith, she was beautiful, modern, and educated, and she loved the outdoors and sports.

Christy was committed to assisting the war effort and many of his Christy Girl paintings were reproduced as posters promoting recruitment, bond sales, victory loans, and service organizations.[1] Posters were a vibrant means of mass communication during World War I and played an essential role in mustering national support. They were designed to inspire, inform, and persuade their audience and to ultimately encourage patriotism and sacrifice.

Alluring and romanticized images of women were often used to encourage young lads to enlist. However, they also motivated women. Just ten days after Smith posed for Christy, her wish to join the Navy came true. She was the first woman from California conscripted as a Yeoman (F) in the American Navy, and by the end of 1918 there were more than 11,000 active female sailors.[2]

As Christy’s image of Smith infiltrated popular culture it not only enthused young men to sign up, but it also opened the doors for more women to serve in the American Navy, despite one disgruntled colonel who retorted: “First the women wanted to vote. Then Alice Roosevelt started them smoking cigarettes! Now they’re talking about being soldiers. Next thing we know they’ll be cutting off their hair and wearing pants!”[3]

Rebecca Gross is a graduate student in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons The New School for Design. She is a freelance researcher and writer with an interest in twentieth-century American design and culture.

Historically, wallpapers were rarely designed to be used alone, and wallpapers would always have been paired with at least one border. Along with the multiple patterns on the wall it was also fashionable to paper ceilings from about 1850 up into the 1950s. The use of a single wallpaper in a room, or just papering one wall, is a fairly recent notion.

In 2010 the Museum received a gift of two collections of French art deco wallpapers, one from 1928 the other 1929. While each of the collections is a mix of bold, intensely colored patterns along with more traditional designs, both collections illustrate the manufacturers’ intent for multiple patterns to be used together on the wall.

The two patterns I’m showing here are a stylized floral design and a stripe. The floral design is printed in five colors: dark and medium reds, yellow, green and white, while the stripe pattern is printed in the same lighter red, green and yellow. Both are printed on identical embossed brown paper. The use of like colors creates a visual harmony, and while both patterns are strong in themselves, the extra colors on the floral along with its larger scale prevents them from clashing. The varying sizes of the cabbage roses and the small polka-dot pattern in the background create a nice sense of depth without being too heavy visually.

Sidewall. France, 1928-29. Produced by J. Grantil Company. Gift of Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz, 2010-31-106

Illustrations of room interiors show the more dominant pattern, in this case the floral, being installed as a border or frieze at the top of the wall. This allows one’s eyes to focus on the more sedate stripe paper, and makes it easier to hang artwork or photographs. While this fashion for using multiple papers in a room continued into the 1950s, the disparity between the two designs became more contrasting. The one pattern became mostly textural printed in tone on tone colors, while the companion paper would consist of a more robust pattern printed over this same textural design. While many wallpapers are beautiful by themselves, pairing them with companion papers and complementary borders brings out their true colors and adds a greater sense of depth to a room.

This beautiful folding fan is one of a pair of similar fans in the Art Nouveau style in the collection of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.  The silk net leaves of both fans are decorated with cotton needle and bobbin lace embellished with shiny steel spangles.  The sticks are identical in both fans and are made of tortoiseshell embedded with steel spangles.  The guard sticks have a wavy, serpentine form and there is a glass stone at both rivets.  Both fans depict elegant floral motifs, irises in one and thistles in the other that appear to be growing out of the foundation of the dark brown sticks.

Folding Fan. France, ca. 1901. Leaf of silk net with applied lace and steel spangles; sticks and slips of tortoiseshell embedded with steel spangles. Gift of Dorothy Warren, 1987-43-2

The Art Nouveau style of the fans suggests that both fans are close in date to the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which featured this new modern and decorative style.  The Art Nouveau style is distinguished by sinuous curvilinear forms, often based on nature.  Objects of all types, as well as art works and interior design were extremely popular in the exhibition, as seen in an interior by architect Louis Bigaux, which includes a fan-shaped decorative element above one of the doors.

An article from the March 1901 edition of Les Modes provides further confirmation of the date of both fans. The article, entitled, “The Ornament of Women: Fans,” shows the fan with a thistle motif.  The article playfully asks whether fans are “weapons or toys” for women.  It suggests that the use of fans has gone beyond the practical purpose of creating a cooling breeze; fans have become an indispensable aspect of a fashionable woman’s attire, a prop for demurring in public, and skillful gesturing with a fan can communicate a range of unspoken feelings. 

Les Modes, March, 1901, Smithsonian Institution Libraries

The Les Modes article identifies the thistle-motif fan as coming from the famous Parisian fan house, Develleroy, still in existence today.   In fact, both Cooper-Hewitt fans have the name of the Parisian fan house, “Duvelleroy” inscribed on the back of one slip, which is the slender end of the stick where it extends beyond the leaf.

1953-148-18 (left) and 1987-43-2 (right): Details of slips with inscribed name, Duvelleroy

These two elegant fans are compelling examples of the popularity of the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the 20th century.

The Oritani frieze is one of a number of wallpapers in the Cooper-Hewitt collection that contain a printed inscription in the selvedge that reads: "Antiseptic Pat'd 8-9-04". This was a patent filed by the William Campbell Wall Paper Company in 1904 that was said to prevent the absorption of germs into the wallpaper’s pigment. This patent notification appeared mostly on children’s wallpapers but the process was also used on papers for more general use. Prior to this patent, if a person in your home had a contagious disease, when they recovered, or not, the homeowner was advised to strip off the wallpaper, sanitize the walls, and then reinstall new wallpaper. This was due to the fact that wallpapers could not be cleaned as they were printed with water soluble pigments. The first truly washable wallpaper was not developed until 1934.

The late nineteenth century saw a great rise in sanitary concerns and wallpapers seemed to bear the brunt of this concern due to the fact they could not be cleaned. To help curb this proposed threat to public health, many cities as well as states adopted ordinances prohibiting the use of more than a single layer of wallpaper on the wall at a given time. Before a new paper could be installed, the old paper needed to be scraped off the wall. This became a major issue for the tenement houses in large cities. This practice later became a detriment to historians and homeowners who logically thought the paper installed closest to the wall was the original.

Fortunately, around this time several washable wallcovering options were developed. The first was Lincrusta-Walton, developed in 1877 by the man who invented linoleum. This was a linseed oil-based solid material with a relief surface. It could be left natural, painted and or gilded, and was a beautiful and durable product. Sanitas was another washable product introduced in 1903. This was an oil-impregnated fabric with a paper backing that could be hung like ordinary wallpaper. Sanitas retained the texture of the fabric which was a much desired effect at this time.

Due to the tremendous size and resolve of the wallcovering manufacturers at the turn of the twentieth century, as problems and obstacles arose, new solutions were developed which offered the homeowner a greater variety of wallcoverings to satisfy their individual needs.

The craft of sewing is over 20,000 years old. The first needles were made of bone, antler, or horn, used to stitch together animal hides with thread-like sinew. Over time, thread and woven textiles became prevalent and there were advances in sewing tools—the earliest iron needles date from the fourteenth century, and the eyed needle was invented in the fifteenth century—but one thing remained constant: all sewing was done by hand.

This changed with the invention of the sewing machine in the late eighteenth century. The device would enable the mass production of clothing, and lead to the development of the clothing industry. By the mid-nineteenth century, early home sewing machines promised a revolution in household labor. Called “The Queen of Inventions,” by Gody’s magazine in 1860, the sewing machine offered women relief from the hours and tedium of hand sewing. Early manufacturers, such as the I.M. Singer Company, recognized this potential market and promoted their machines as modern women’s conveniences that, while expensive, were worth the savings in time and drudgery. The machines could be purchased on monthly installments, making them available to an ever expanding domestic market. Home sewing machines came in table-top models and treadle-powered versions on their own stands. The metal housings were often embellished with elaborate scrolled decoration, and the stands echoed this motif in their curving cast iron bases.

Among a group of miniatures in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection, this highly ornamental and delicate example in the shape of a treadle-powered sewing machine is made of filigreed silver wire. Filigree is a labor-intensive metalworking technique in which fine wire, usually gold or silver, is shaped and soldered into an openwork pattern or form. The technique is primarily used in jewelry and the ornamentation of small objects such as this one. Here, the fine wire has been curved and twisted to form a sewing machine on a rectangular stand with a treadle in the base, and a circular hand crank on the side. Like it’s full-size counterparts, this sewing machine has moving elements: the treadle, crank and slotted arm. While the form is similar to sewing machines of the mid-nineteenth century, foot-treadle machines of this type existed well into the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, until the advent of the electric-powered sewing machine.

Today is Sewing Machine Day

It is difficult to imagine that something as ubiquitous as the I Love New York logo was designed completely for free. But that is exactly what graphic designer Milton Glaser did in 1976 when he created his first simple sketch with red crayon on the back of an envelope for the New York Chamber of Commerce. The final logo, set in a rounded slab serif font aptly named American Typewriter, would ultimately become one of the most internationally recognizable icons. I Love New Yorkhelped boost the city from its infamous 1970s image as dark, dirty and dangerous to a popular (and profitable) campaign that New Yorkers and tourists alike could identify with.  

A similar spirit of compassion and patriotism embodies I [Heart] NY More Than Ever. Glaser, a National Design Award winner (2004) who has worked nonstop for over six decades, reinterpreted his original design after the tragedy on September 11, 2001. Scarred with a small black smudge on the heart with the added words “more than ever,” this poster represents the injury inflicted upon a community. Further text at the bottom reads, “Be generous. Your city needs you. This poster is not for sale,” alluding to the proceeds that are entirely donated to New York charities supporting those affected by the events.

The concept came to Glaser just one day after the attacks in a reaction meant to revive a shaken community and begin the city’s physical and emotional restoration. It was printed in the New York Daily News and subsequently broadcast on WNYC as a fundraiser, garnering $190,000. But it was Glaser himself who encouraged it to be reprinted widely and freely distributed --a testament to the design’s cultural impact. With his heart in the right place, Glaser’s revision renders the celebrated symbol even more intimate twelve years later as a city’s collective heart continues to heal. 

When do graphic design and textile design merge and overlap? The great mid-century designer Alexander Girard is best known for his work as founding director of the Herman Miller Textile Division, a post he held from 1952 through 1973. There, working alongside such design legends as George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, he created a vast range of textiles that complemented and completed the era’s groundbreaking furnishings. Although nubby textures and neutral stripes abound in Girard’s textile oeuvre, his most memorable designs are distinctly graphic in character.

Alphabet, designed in 1960, features a densely packed jumble of randomly sequenced characters. The quirky, blocky text defies reading but functions beautifully as a texture, its forms melding into an overall pattern with a hard-to-find repeat. The design is at once gridded and organic, orderly and irregular.

Alexander Hayden Girard, Names, 1957. Relaunched by Maharam in 2004.

Lettering also appears in Girard’s Names, a textile built from lines of handwriting whose loops and curlicues make it impossible to decipher. Both Alphabet and Names were released by Maharam under license from the Girard Studio in 2004.

Creating text that you can’t read is the goal of most pattern designs built out of letters. Such designs aim to channel the abstract qualities of type—their lines and curves, their individuality, their family relationships—into fields of graphic marks liberated from the task of direct communication.

Alexander Hayden Girard, Sky, digital typeface. Created by House Industries, 2009, based on Girard’s lettering for Braniff International Airways.

Girard was a skilled graphic designer who could communicate when he chose to. His far-reaching corporate identity project for Braniff International Airways in the mid-1960s encompassed everything from interiors and textiles to the airline’s logo and ad campaigns. In 2009 the Delaware-based type foundry House Industries released a series of digital fonts drawn from Girard’s lettering work, including Sky, based on the tech-inspired Braniff alphabet, and several of the designer’s loopier, softer lettering motifs.

Poster: Herman Miller Inc., Textiles & Objects, 1961 Designed by Alexander Hayden Girard, John Neuhart, 1961. Gift of Marilyn and John Neuhart, 2004-13-1.

Girard, who was an avid collector of folk art, toys, and popular artifacts, founded the store Textiles & Objects with Herman Miller in 1961. His shop featured pillows and other goods made from Girard’s signature fabrics as well as house wares hauled back to New York from the designer’s travels around the world. The store didn’t last long, but its spirit lives on in the lifestyle collections of Jonathan Adler and other twenty-first century designers who have drawn ideas and inspiration from Girard’s bold, witty application of bright color and snappy graphics to objects for daily use.

Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee, Alexander Girard, 2011. Ammo Books.

Among Girard’s contemporary admirers is the multidisciplinary designer Todd Oldham, who published a lavish monograph on Girard in 2011. Gracing the book’s cover is the famous Alphabet pattern. Slotted into the pattern are the letters of Girard’s name; they quietly announce themselves from within the vibrant, noisy crowd.

For craftsman and industrial designer Russel Wright (1904-1976), flatware was not just a tool for the tabletop. It was a tool for easier living. From the late 1920s through to the 1960s, Wright introduced Americans to modern, practical, and easy-to-care-for homewares and furnishings suited to a more informal and sociable way of life.

“Highlight/Pinch” flatware, manufactured by the John Hull Cutlery Corporation, embodied Wright’s unique sense of craftsmanship and industrial design. As a craftsman, Wright held great appreciation for the materials he worked with and an understanding of the subtlety of organic design. To make cutlery that felt good in the hand he designed softly contoured flatware with attenuated necks and depressed handles for comfortable and efficient use. Yet, as an industrial designer, Wright wanted to make affordable products that were available to everyone. With no intricate ornamentation, “Highlight/Pinch” was designed to be produced in stainless steel with a brushed satin finish. It was a carefree, and tarnish-proof alternative to silver and silver-plate cutlery, and in 1951 it debuted in Macy’s at a reasonably priced $6.95 for a five-piece setting.

Wright, and other designers of the era, blended beauty and usefulness to revolutionize flatware design in the 1950s. Their new elegant and affordable tools made from stainless steel quickly became acceptable and popular in kitchens, dining rooms, and on patio tables across the country.

In 2011, Wright’s “Highlight/Pinch” flatware was commemorated on a series of U.S. Postal Service ‘Forever’ stamps that celebrated twelve American industrial designers who helped shape the look of everyday life in the twentieth century. The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Philbrook Museum of Art organized an exhibition in conjunction with the release of the stamps. “Stamps of Approval” displayed nine of the objects featured on the stamps including Wright’s flatware and this presentation drawing of “Highlight/Pinch.”

Rebecca Gross is a graduate student in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons The New School for Design. She is a freelance researcher and writer with an interest in twentieth-century American design and culture. 

Arabia Felix was quite unique for the time in which it was created as it is nearly 10 feet in length and lacks a vertical repeat. The design contains cloud-like shapes totally void of color against a printed background that shades from a darker spotted blue at the top to white at the bottom. The density of the cloud shapes is greatest where the background is darkest, becoming less dense as the background color decreases, disappearing totally where the background ceases to have color towards the bottom of the wallpaper. This creates a very strong visual interest while the dotted background creates a greater sense of depth. This wallpaper was part of a collection produced in 1992 called Zeitwande which contained designs by many renowned artists and designers including Natalie Du Pasquier, Borek Sipek and Alessandro Mendini among others.

Sottsass, architect and designer, was the founder of the Memphis Group in 1981. The Memphis Group was an international collective of architects and designers known for its bright and whimsical designs, elements that appear in Arabia Felix. Its lack of continuity keeps the viewer guessing as their eyes work their way around the design. While Memphis brought Sottsass much name recognition he was perhaps best known for his bright red “Valentine” typewriter, designed for Olivetti in 1969. It came with a matching carrying case, and was popularized by its bright color. He continued designing for Olivetti until 1980.

This wallpaper was commissioned by Rasch & Company, founded in 1896. Since its founding Rasch has consistently employed the work of artists including Jean de Botton, Cuno Fischer, Salvador Dali, and Natalie Du Pasquier to create wallpaper designs, and was the producer of the first collection of Bauhaus wallpapers in 1929.

Today is Ettore Sottsass’s birthday.

While the primary goal of a conservator continues to be the documentation and preservation or retardation of deterioration, conservation practices and materials have evolved over the years. For example, cellulose acetate was used to store museum collections in the 1940s and 1950s. At the time, it was a great solution and protected fragile objects in transparent encapsulation mounts. The plastic film was thought to be a stable material, but we now know that it has an approximately 50-year lifespan. When the plastic loses its chemical stability, it becomes acidic, embrittled, yellowed, and distorted, causing physical strain on the textile and exposing the fibers to the acidic off-gassing. Through hydrolysis, cellulose acetate generates a damaging acetic acid and the associated tell-tale smell, known as “vinegar syndrome.” In addition to endangering the textiles, this method of housing hampers the curators’ ability to study and share these unique objects with the public and scholarly researchers.

1902-1-284-b Before Treatment. Object in yellowed and distorted cellulose acetate encapsulation. Courtesy of the author.

The Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund funded a grant focused on the removal of cellulose acetate from Cooper-Hewitt’s textile collection with the goal of improving the preservation environment and enhancing safe accessibility. A group of 258 textile fragments were removed from cellulose acetate encapsulations and rehoused in a variety of new custom archival mounts. In this representative example, the textile was stitched into a cellulose acetate encapsulation. The plastic deteriorated and curled along the edges. The textile conservator carefully removed the fragment and constructed a new storage mat with viewing window out of archival materials.

1902-1-284-b After Treatment. Object in new storage window mat. Courtsey of the author.

Like many others that underwent re-housing treatment, this textile is from the 1902 J.P. Morgan gift which forms the core of Cooper-Hewitt’s collection of early woven silks. In addition to 14th century Italian silks, textiles from the 3rd to 17th century represent examples of Coptic, Islamic, and European art. Also preserved were a large group of 18th and 19th century Chinese and Japanese woven silks, fragile fragments from Egypt and India, and a variety of other textiles. Thanks to CCPF’s generous funding, a great number of these treasures are newly accessible on Cooper-Hewitt's online collection database.