About the Museum Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Calendar of Events Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Special Events Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Press
Exhibitions Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Collections Online Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Education Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Visit Cooper-Hewitt Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Join & Support Cooper-Hewitt Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum National Design Awards Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum The Shop at Cooper-Hewitt

Design Blog Design Blog » Design for a Living World

“Green” Exhibition Design



Most people go to exhibitions to look at the objects. Eggheads go to read the labels. Design geeks (and museum professionals like myself) want to study the installation itself. How are the platforms and cases constructed? How are the texts laid out? How are supplementary graphics handled?

Cooper-Hewitt’s new exhibition Design for a Living World was designed by Pentagram. The design team sought to make the exhibition conform not only to fire codes, ADA guidelines, and museum conservation practices, but to make the installation sustainable as well. Here’s how they did it.

How are the photo panels printed?
The exhibition features dozens of original images by photojournalist Ami Vitale. The photos are printed on aluminum panels that magically reflect light. Museums usually print photographic enlargements on paper or vinyl and mount them to foamcore or Sintra (a hard plastic). These materials are not biodegradable, and they can’t be recycled or reused. Pentagram used a process called direct-to-substrate dye-sublimation printing: when the ink is heated and transferred to the material, the ink embeds into the surface of the metal. The resulting print is durable and scratch-resistant, and each panel can be recycled (like a soda can).




How were the overlapping panels designed?
Overlapping the panels adds dimensionality to the graphics. The technique makes reference to shingles, a vernacular building method used around the globe. Jeremy Hoffman, a graphic designer on the Pentagram team, created paper models of all the shingled wall montages in order to test and calculate the overlaps.

Is this process significantly more expensive than using Sintra?
Direct printing on aluminum is slightly more expensive than traditional techniques, but it may be less expensive in the long run. Printing directly to a rigid surface eliminates the use of adhesives and a paper or vinyl substrate. It’s an almost a flawless process, so you avoid rejecting panels that have imperfections resulting from all of the handwork that comes into play with mounting and trimming traditional output.




What material is used for the casework and scaffolds?
The exhibition is designed to travel. Instead of creating solid temporary walls, most of the wall structures are made with exposed wood studs, reducing the use of materials. The open scaffolds also reference informal building techniques seen in many parts of the world. The wall structures and the legs of the casework are made of FSC-certified Spanish Cedar harvested from Bolivia. The wood thus comes from forests that implement sustainable logging practices.




What else makes the exhibition sustainable?
The aluminum panels are made from 94% recycled aluminum, and the decks of the cases are made of Medite II, a medium-density fiberboard manufactured from 100% recycled or recovered wood fibers bonded with formaldehyde-free resin. (Cooper-Hewitt often uses this material.) The exhibition catalog was produced with sustainable materials as well; for more info, see Chul R. Kim, “Green” Publishing.”

Exhibition photographs by Paul Warchol and Brian Raby

Exhibition Design: Pentagram Design / Abbott Miller, Brian Raby, Jeremy Hoffman, Kristen Spilman
Exhibition Fabrication: Design and Production, Inc.
Graphic Production: Mega Media
Lighting: Jeff Nash Lighting Design

“Green” Publishing


On May 14, 2009, Cooper-Hewitt opens Design for a Living World, an exhibition developed by The Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s leading conservation organizations.

As part of our partnership with TNC, Cooper-Hewitt met the challenge of publishing a companion book that would emphasize the exhibition’s principal themes: sustainable design and materials, and responsible conservation of our environment. After researching more than a dozen printers, we chose Engelhardt und Bauer, a printer in Karlsruhe, near Baden-Baden, Germany, to help us accomplish our goal.

E&B’s printing processes are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which ensures that E&B’s practices contribute to conservation, responsible management, and community-level benefits for people who live near the forests that provide their paper. For this book, we chose soy-based, rather than oil-based, inks, with no real loss of color quality in any of the 326 images, many of which are lush landscape photos by award-winning photographer Ami Vitale. E&B’s printing plant is powered entirely by solar and wind energy. And to make our project “carbon-neutral,” we purchased carbon credits equivalent to a total of 16.6 tons of CO2 emissions. Finally, E&B helped the Museum research and source an eco-friendly, 100% recyclable shrinkwrapping for our books.

Design for a Living World
Edited by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller
Designed by Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman, Pentagram
Text and images © The Nature Conservancy, all rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-910503-88-4, 200 pages, 326 illustrations, $40.00

Download a sample PDF of the book (14 MBs).
Available May 14 at The Shop at Cooper-Hewitt.

Check out nature.org/design for more information about the exhibition.