Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century

Curators Cameron, De León, and Wilkinson use Making Home, Smithsonian Design Triennial, an exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, as a springboard for this thought-provoking anthology on the intersection of home and design. Bryan Mason and Jeanine Hays, co-owners of media and design brand Aphrochic, frame Black homes as sites of cultural memory that offer a reprieve from collective narratives that position the American dream and homeownership as Eurocentric. Exploring links between home and belonging, the firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces tackles the issue of housing for the formerly incarcerated with modular “Mobile Refuge Rooms,” which can be personalized by the occupant, providing a sense of agency and community that is central to emotional well-being. Elsewhere, Rania Ghosn, an associate professor of architecture at MIT, explores “eco-speculative” designs that “grapple with the climate crisis” by visualizing the harms wrought by overconsumption (landfills, space debris) and suggesting ways that such forms of waste might be repurposed. Amid the anthology’s thematic diversity, two important points emerge: that design is more than a physical place, and that home is not a preexisting concept but that which is cocreated by people, their spaces, and their environments. It’s a multifaceted meditation on what it means to be at home in the world. Photos. (Mar.)