Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 84

41' 4 wiw'-- The Fifth 'Avenue mansion built by Andrew Carnegie and new home of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design S'" Jimdiy Photo to Stan WoUfeon 1 3 ii I I fc v- s' dollars was started in '1837 by Sarah Eleanor and Amy Hewitt They were the granddaughters of inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper who in 1859 opened an educational facility called the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art It had a free-tuition school a library and a lecture forum and became a renowned center for learning and debate The Hewitt sisters added the museum modeling It on the South Kensington Museum (which is now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London and the Musee des Arts Decocatifs in Paris" It was to bo a museum of design a museum that professionals could use to research a fabric pattern er the turn of a chair leg That it has always remained even in its darkest days and one of Mrs mhainm is to expand the ways in which designers can use it The museum got a head start when Rerpont Morgan presented it with three European tortile collections that immediately put it on a par with European museums in that field Then it acquired the Italian architectural and decorative drawings that once had belonged to the Cavaliere Giovanni Piancastdli curator of the Bartfiese Collection And so it went But by the 1950s and 1960s the museum had fallen on bad days Some people liked to say that it was best-kept secret in New Since it was upstairs in the school the museum all that easy to find And anyhow the Cooper Union is at As tor Place just off the Bowery which in the and '60s was hippie heaven ftnd particularly attract an uptown crowd Also new and modem was the password for students tilings of the past seem to have muchaHure So when the school (tiiicb is still tuition-free) ex- perienced a financial pinch in 1963' the logical thing seemed to be to sell the museum collection The Metropolitan Museum was all set to buy i the best of it" with the rest to be dispersed whena- said enjoying the idea one recent morning at the museum a show that will illustrate her idea that this national museum of design and the decorative arts will "not be limited to the products of design but extend to the process of design: why things look the way they do how they function and particularly how they affect people physically psychologically and practically1 a show that will demonstrate how a square of cloth becomes a sail a flag or a dress How it can be painted on embroidered be jeweled Thera might even be a holographic 3-dimensional impression of a flag There will certainly be a survey ot 150 forms of daily bread from muffins to bagels to rhallah There will be design maps of seldom-seen systems such as city sewers and electrical lines Buckminster Fuller will as he put it design the universe On a smaller scale an exhibit of the mu- Mums famous fantasy birdcage collection (including a 17th Century Spanish one of a woman whose skirt is the cage) will lead to photographs erf a view of the cage That view' is always the same: Bara And the bars will he extended by pho- tognphs to Show the prisons humans unknowingly build for themselves The (how will be a bridge between the real world people 'live in and the' largely very precious world in our collection Mrs -Taylor kaid "You have to have a certain background to understand or even like Meissen porcelain There certainly are Meissen figurines in the collection along with hundreds erf thousands of oth-' er items from wallpaper to textiles furniture glass and architectural details Not to mention more than 1J million photographs and reproduction 30000 drawings a vast library and 442 Winslow Hamers (22 paintings 287 drawings and 133 prints) The collection which spans 3000 years of civil I- ration arid is valued in the hundreds of millions of 1 By AuieS Wnllaeh Newsday Cultural Affairs Specialist ne'v home for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design the United first national museum of design and the Smithsonian first museum outside Washington is about td open to the public for a sneak preview The gargantuan oak-paneled hall in the Fifth Avenue mansion that Andrew Carnegie had built for himself in 1901 is still covered with plaster dust Scaffolding stands under the ceiling which was hand-carved long ago in Scotland But the wisteria he had planted in 1908 is in bloom cm the bride walls outdoors and 30000 new tulips are growing in the garden On Wednesday a day before the sneak preview begins the doors of old mansion will open as the new headquarters a dream 13 years in the Disking An invited black-tie crowd will get Wednesday the first glimpse of the renovated ground floor of the 64-room grandiosity that stands on the block between 90th and 91st Streets along Fifth Avenue The rich the talented and the social will be dancing their way through a preview of items that the museum hopes will be worth 3100000 when it auctions them off May 25 with First Lady Betty Ford as honorary patron Then comes the sneak preview: For $1 or the purchase of a $5 catalog anyone can take a look from May 20 through 'noon of May 25 or attend the auction itself And then on Oct 6 the museum will open with its-first exhibit temporarily titled and prepared under the direction of Viennese architect Hans Hollein with a consortium of 11 international designers Ngw York magazine gave the director Lisa Taylor -its Demented Courage Award for that complex undertaking an honor was richly deserved1 die.