Making Design 

The second floor features four exhibitions highlighting aspects of Cooper Hewitt’s renowned collection, including “Making Design” (on view Dec. 12, 2014 through 2015), which brings together more than 350 objects for the museum’s first long-term survey of works from its collection. Installed in a suite of renovated galleries on the second floor, “Making Design” features furniture, lighting fixtures, tableware, clothing, jewelry, books, and posters that provide an overview of five key elements of design: color (red, for this initial installation), form, line, pattern and texture. A provocative visual feast of extraordinary objects, juxtapositions include the red of Jonathan Ive’s design for the iPod Nano compared with the red of the Campana Brothers’s Vermelha chair upholstered in cotton rope, the undulating form of an Alvar Aalto glass vase compared with Tinker Hatfield’s contoured sole for the Nike Air Jordan sneaker, and the water pattern of a late 19th-century Japanese fabric compared with the wavy pattern of Bob Dylan’s hair in a 1966 poster by Milton Glaser.