George Malone was a hawk-eyed patrolman of the Holmes Electric Protective Company turned dynamite snuffer. One late June night in 1915, he spotted a flame beneath the gates of the Carnegie Mansion on 91st Street—Andrew himself had left for Bar Harbor to convalesce from influenza—and put out a makeshift explosive planted by, probably, an Italian anarchist of the Bresci Circle (the same group that had conspired to assassinate another tycoon, John Rockefeller, three months prior). Had Malone’s vigilance failed him, the bomb may have blown the doors clear off the strikebreaker’s dour manse.
This year’s design triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, housed for the last fifty years in chez Carnegie, attempted its own sort of misfired explosion. (On the subject of open doors: Cooper Hewitt is the only Smithsonian museum that charges admission.) Spanning twenty-five displays across three floors, Making Home expends an inordinate amount of energy tarrying with the ghost of the Prince of Steel, as if the first step toward making the world a home for everyone were unseating him in particular. In his office hang indictments of his institutional investments; a video by Amie Siegel (all works 2024) down the hall upbraids the colonial exoticism of nineteenth-century French scenic wallpaper, which resembles paintings collected by Carnegie, and still hanging, of “unpeopled” western lands.
All this packs as much punch as the anarchists’ faulty fire stick. When the show does widen its field of vision to take in issues such as home birthing, prison recidivism, and extracted Puerto Rican artifacts, it delivers timely elaborations on the classical notion of oikos. Elsewhere, there is a curious impulse to make calamitous themes pretty: Oral histories mourning the destruction of the Everglades (AIRIE’s Ebb + Flow) become chintzy fodder fit for purchase at Crate & Barrel (designer Christina Petterson’s seat cushions in the conservatory) and veiny chaises reference, explicitly, mycelial networks and, implicitly, Carnegie’s pernicious philanthropic webs (part of Liam Lee and Tommy Mishima’s Game Room installation). Design, here, makes power analysis part of the furniture.