Smithsonian Design TriennialCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum2 East 91st StreetNew YorkOn view through August 10Triennials have to cover a lot of ground. They only happen every three years, so the pressure is on. They attempt to distill the mood and happenings of the time into something digestible, and they must say something about whats to come. When they resonate, whatever they proclaim is often taken as a trustworthy prediction. Curators are aware of themselves as readers who encapsulate a moment, so exhibition themes are chosen with these dynamics in mind as much as anything else. At Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Making Home, though its initial conception began prepandemic, seems to draw from our cooped-up recent past. We are still reckoning with the sense that weve all spent much more time at home in the last three years than we did before or will in the future and that this has scrambled our relationship to home itself, and to ourselves. As a premise, this is amply resonantI was captivated before I even walked in. Of course, Cooper Hewitt occupies the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, so when I arrived, I entered what was once a home, though one decidedly different from any Ive ever lived in. (Walking up the stairs I couldnt help thinking they took up more space than my entire living room.) The triennial, curated by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and Christina L. De Len of Cooper Hewitt, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson of the National Museum of African American History, is divided into three sections: Going Home on the ground and first floors, Seeking Home on the second floor, and Building Home on the third floor.Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Exhibition design by Johnston Marklee. Graphic design by Office Ben Ganz. (Elliot Goldstein Smithsonian Institution)Installation of Welcome to Territory by Lenape Center with Joe Baker in Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Ann Sunwoo Smithsonian Institution)In the first of these three, artists took advantage of the subtle disorientation created by the enormous mansionboth hemmed in and emphasized by Johnston Marklees exhibition design, which brought contributions into transitional spaces like stairs and hallway ceilings and opened the typically closed windows to allow natural light into the galleriesto varied, and mostly fascinating, effects. For example: Upon entering, visitors will find Joe Baker and the Lenape Centers Welcome to Territory, a set of three feather capes hanging from the ceiling and facing the main entrance, a stirring evocation of the specter of colonization. The rooms along this row contain an embarrassment of riches. In the next room, Living Room, Orlean, Virginia, by Davne Tines, Hugh Hayden, and Zack Winokur, sets Tiness grandparents living room furniture arrangement, low-pile beige carpet included, on a rocking plinth and pipes in the sounds of home: a humming grandmother, sizzling bacon, doors opening and closing. Photo frames that appear inlaid with silver paper actually contain images that can only be discovered when viewed at the right angle and suggest impermanence, the impossibility of returning home, and the fleeting, imperfect nature of its memory. Other rooms conjure similarly huge ideas. Ebb + Flow, at the easternmost end of the enfilade and organized by Artists in Residence in Everglades, plays through headphones into an otherwise empty and quiet glass-enclosed roomand a cold one, on the days I visited, which created an interesting contrast. Oral histories of the area, deftly incorporating the enormity of climate-change catastrophe with its effects on individual lives, filled my ears. In the other direction, Vues/Views, by multimedia artist Amie Siegel, explores the legacy of 19th-century French panoramic wallpapers, popular in homes belonging to members of the U.S. ruling class, that depicted scenic tableaux to exoticizing and voyeuristic effects. Vues/Views is a double work shown on the same medium: On one side of a hanging projection screen, a film explores the uses of panoramic wallpaperit takes viewers, for example, into Andrew Jacksons Hermitage homeand on the other, Siegel has assembled a composition from found rolls of the paper whose gaps highlight the inherently mythologizing nature of the decorative material. The film side of the screen faces a blind wall, and the room is kept darksmart curatorial choices that allow for full immersion in the work.Installation of Vues/Views by Amie Siegel in Making Home Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Elliot Goldstein Smithsonian Institution)On the other side of that blind wall, Liam Lee and Tommy Mishimas Game Room traces the many influences of Andrew Carnegie on nearly every facet of American life via a series of obsessive flowcharts by Mishima connecting Carnegies philanthropies to universities, banks, foundations, and other similarly society-shaping institutions. In the center of the room, a game derived from Monopoly turns these connections into clever entertainment, and around the perimeter, Lees pieces of meticulously needle-felted furniture in near neon shades of lavender, lime green, and hot pink draw a stark formal contrast with the rooms deep, rich shades of wood, producing an unsettling effect befitting the rooms themes.Installation of So That You All Wont Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia by Curry J. Hackett, Wayside Studio in Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Elliot Goldstein Smithsonian Institution)Walking out of Game Room, I felt I had seen enough. There was substantive critique and self-awareness of the fact and implications of the Carnegie connection; there were nontokenizing contributions by artists from historically marginalized communities; but most of all, there was a sense of the complex and unfinished nature of home, the way that it draws us in only for us to take flight, the impossibility of both return and remembrance, andbecause this is Cooper Hewitt, after allhow design complicates all of the above. I couldnt escape a sense of disappointment, then, walking through the second and third floors and feeling like those ideas were starting to become diluted. In Curry J. Hackett and Wayside Studios So That You All Wont Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia, I felt pleasantly assaulted by the smell of dried tobacco hanging from the walls of the small room and then unpleasantly assaulted by the AIgenerated videos looped on a small TV mounted among the leaves: I couldnt shake the feeling of an unwelcome inhuman presence within a highly personal work. The second floor also houses perhaps the most ambitious and research-informed works in the show. Patterns of Life, by Mona Chalabi and SITU Research, consists of models of homes destroyed by domicide using U.S.-manufactured weapons in Manbij, Syria; Mosul, Iraq; and Gaza, Palestine. They were developed in collaboration with the people forcibly displaced from these homes. Birthing in Alabama: Designing Spaces for Reproduction, by Lori A. Brown, Trish Cafferky, and Dr. Yashica Robinson, presents exhaustive histories of birth in Alabama as well as design proposals for improving the experience. The sprawling Unruly Subjects, assembled by Sofa Gallis Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, and Carlos J. Soto, brings together video, archival materials, and archaeological artifacts to question and reimagine the role of the Smithsonian Institution as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage. And Heather Dewey-Hagborgs Is a Biobank a Home?, with its rows upon countless rows of vials of unconvincing fake blood, dares to ask, though not necessarily answer, its huge titular question.Installation of Patterns of Life by Mona Chalabi and SITU Research in Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Elliot Goldstein Smithsonian Institution)Birthing in Alabama: Designing Spaces for Reproduction by Lori A. Brown, Trish Cafferky and Dr. Yashica Robinson in Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Ann Sunwoo Smithsonian Institution)There is so much here, and even more as one scales the last set of stairs to witness works addressing reentry from incarceration, sustainable desert living, and agingthe latter felt more like an advertisement for a living arrangement for my parents or, sometime down the line, for myself. I noticed that I couldnt find mention of refugees or homeless people, nor of the issue of housing affordability. The fact of these omissions, amid such thematic abundance, leaves the curators vulnerable to critique: The inclusion of these topics wouldnt have necessarily made Making Home better, but the sheer volume of pieces lends a sense of diffused attention and also raises questions about why certain topics are missing.Still, this triennials vastness manages to help it capture something ephemeral: the simultaneous specificity and universality of the idea of home, a sense of excess tangled up perfectly and inextricably with one of insufficiency.Marianela DAprile is a writer in Brooklyn.