Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 110

fjr iwffmnimi rfmwm A DU TT A Director Passes On Her Dreams By Amei Wallach MUSEUM DIRECTOR is to a museum what Lea Iaeoeea ia to Ghrysler: ita personalising pree-e That's true even of a director like Philippe da Montebello the lateat in a long line of directors who have shepherded the Metropolitan Museum since its founding more than a century ago But particularly true of a director who starts from scratch making things up aa time goes along things like an institutional per sociality and purpose The Museum of Modem Art for instanro ia the muae urn of record for the art of the 20 Century because how Alfred Bair envisioned it in 1929 The Cooper Hewitt Museum is a breeding ground for ideas and a welcoming setting for the best and the most idiosyncratic in the world of architecture and design because director Lisa Taylor likes to get personal and loves to improvise There was an endearing air of improvisation about the Andrew Carnegie's former mansion on 91st Street when it opened as the Cooper-Hewitt the Smithsonian only branch outside Washington in the autumn of 1976 Aid while everything hums a great deal more smoothly these days you cant always guess what will happen next Who would have guessed for instance that Lisa Taylor would ever leave? But leaving she is at the age of 54 for reasons of health At 5 foe 1 1 indies Lisa Taylor has the look of a Dreoden doll the confiding manner of a coed and the determination of a Don Mattingly in the ninth inning with the bases loaded There isnt a guard that gets hired at the Cooper Hewitt who doesn't go through trial by chatty interview with Lisa Taylor A great many of the best ardiitects and designers in the world not to mention a plethora of scholars donors and lenders have tried to say no to her with fairly consistent lack of success But what she wants to talk about these days is as she puts it "the dreams that go on" The particular dream she had hoped to realise like just about every other mneeum director in the world is the dxwm of enansfam "Our collection is bigger than the collections of all the other Smith twifln ariniiTiiBtmwl collections combined" she And it is only now and then that there is room to show even an inkling of it since the Cooper-Hewitfs A first priority has always been to explore something rather than show off what it had Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates the architectural firm that accomplished the transformation of a robber baron's overbearing fantagy into a flinctional though still iring lmuetun haa produced a pm posaL in the form ofa model in Taylors office demonstrating not so much what the proposed additions would look like aa where they would be They would join a building on 90th Street which now houses museum offices to the Carnegie mansion another building would go up on the staff perking lot And the femcb-lovoaconaervap tosy would be moved to the new connecting link The projected eoet is f23 million it had been hoped that ronrroaa would pess hill anthnririnf fodnral fluids for half the mt- That hasn't yet happened The rest would be raised privately like the 66 million it took to move into the 9 1st Street headquarters in the first place Um Taylor than a hundred people in New York who could give 6115 only aadm Even if Td been well I would have left at that point 1 'It was my dream some public-spirited donor would want to give a gift to the nation for a building bearing their couragement for ocher volunteers because she quickly became the Smithsonian's first program director and soon after that its first woman museum director She tried everything orthodox and otherwise to I rh mrmftmr far um i held think-tank sessions with designers in New York and at the Louvre in Paris she asked advice of curators everywhere and than ignored most of it What she decided she wanted was not a museum as arbiter of taste but a lively museum that imparted some of the free-femll fascination ofthe design process And so the first exhibit pulled together a consortium of international designers a great many of them unknown to American audiences at the time but extremely well-known now like Arata Iaosaki and Hans Hollein She turned them looee in an exhibition called "Man Transforms: Aspects of which demonstrated just how bound up design is with the things we do everyday Since then Cooper-Hewitt exhibitions liave introduced us to the 17th-Century Italian architect Palladio who so influenced the look of Washington Vienna design the accoutrements of wine the inventions not necessarily pretty but uaeftil that changed our lives in this century Cooper-Hewitt only master's degree 7 a foel in order fir a director to do a better job it has to be something that's your baby And the expansion would be the baby ofthe next The Aat has been Taylor's balqr begin as a wiirtini of design and decoration in 1697 By the mid-1960s Cooper Union school downtown which housed the ta it to affect financial difficulties In 1967 the Smithsonian Insitution stepped in and agreed to take under its wing what had become one of the foremost collections from bird cages to tablecloths architectural drawings to teapots By the early 1970s Taylor mid friends persuaded the Carnegie Foundation to donate the uptown and the Cooper-Hewitt was under way Taylor had begun her career at the Smithsonian in 1965 as a volunteer She wants to point that out as en- gram in design in the country hut its playful side remains undiminished Playfulness invention spontaneity are the legacy Taylor leaves behind i i rr1 'i i vi.