Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Design museum in Upper East Side, Manhattan, United States
Cooper Hewitt is a design museum in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, housed in a former early twentieth-century mansion. The collection includes more than 215,000 objects spanning thirty centuries, among them textiles, furniture, wall coverings, and digital works.
Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper Hewitt founded the museum in 1896 as part of Cooper Union to create an educational collection for artists and craftspeople. The Smithsonian Institution took over the museum in 1967 and moved it into the building on 91st Street.
The name honors founders Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt, who conceived the institution as an educational resource for craftspeople and designers. Visitors today can see how the museum presents everyday objects from different eras, focusing on their form and function.
The museum sits on East 91st Street near Fifth Avenue and can be reached by subway or on foot from Central Park. Interactive tools in the galleries allow visitors to collect and save information about exhibited objects during their walk through the rooms.
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie commissioned the building in 1902 as a private residence, and many of its original rooms and details remain visible today. The structure combines these historical elements with modern exhibition spaces for contemporary design objects.
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