It’s an unprecedented time for the Smithsonian, the constellation of American museums and analysis establishments that features beloved websites such because the Nationwide Portrait Gallery and the Nationwide Zoo. Final 12 months, underneath an government order titled ‘Restoring Reality and Sanity to American Historical past,’ President Donald Trump took direct purpose on the Smithsonian, prohibiting ‘programmes that degrade American values’ – significantly in the case of variety, fairness and inclusion.
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is proving that variety, throughout medium, self-discipline and geography, is exactly what makes design within the US so distinctive. At the moment (25 February), the New York-based museum introduced its 2026 Nationwide Design Awards, one of the crucial prestigious honours in America’s artistic fields. This 12 months’s group of ten honourees work in all scales – their fields starting from structure to typography; clothes to computational analysis – and hail from locations as far-flung as Mexico Metropolis and the Appalachian foothills.
Every honoree, chosen by a jury chaired by Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Basis, shall be honoured at a gala in New York this Could, in time for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
Get to know this 12 months’s winners under.
Design Visionary: Robert Earl Paige
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Chicago-based artist Robert Earl Paige has taken dwelling the Cooper Hewitt’s Design Visionary award, an honour that recognises ‘a person, firm or organisation that has made a profound contribution to advancing the sphere’.
Earlier than Paige was an artist, he labored within the Chicago workplace of SOM. However company structure wasn’t for him, so he moved into product and trend design for varied corporations, together with, notably, Sears, the place he launched mainstream shoppers to vibrant African-inspired equipment and decor. Paige is a pioneering determine within the Black Arts Motion and is right this moment identified for his joyful mixed-media works, which he creates from his studio on Chicago’s South Facet.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Local weather Motion: UCSD Neighborhood Stations by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
The Nationwide Design Award for local weather motion is bestowed to practitioners who’re on the forefront of the worldwide local weather disaster. This 12 months, it goes to Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, each professors on the College of California, San Diego, who developed a community of civic ‘stations’ on either side of the US-Mexico border wall. Every house is positioned in a low-income neighbourhood and seeks to spark dialogue about resiliency and local weather change.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Rising Designer: Mattaforma
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Every year, the Cooper Hewitt recognises a designer who demonstrates ‘profound expertise within the early levels of their profession’. This 12 months, that honour goes to Lindsey Wikstrom, founding father of the New York-based follow Mattaforma. The studio works on the intersection of structure, coverage and sustainability, with a selected give attention to sustainability by means of improvements in mass timber, crops and different plant-based supplies. Mattaforma’s initiatives vary from elegant desert residences to greenhouses, together with an area for crops on the Brooklyn-based efficiency house, Public Data.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Structure: Frida Escobedo Studio
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Since establishing her studio 20 years in the past, Frida Escobedo has not solely established herself as one of the crucial influential architects working in Mexico, but in addition on this planet, by means of initiatives that vary from a brand new wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, to the renovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her Mexico Metropolis and New York-based studio is understood for its delicate method, leveraging elemental kinds and natural supplies present in her native Mexico, throughout initiatives spanning ground-up buildings and furnishings in addition to analysis, publications and exhibition design.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Communication Design: Thought Matter
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Along with constructed work, the Nationwide Design Awards additionally recognises innovation in ‘data sharing, messaging and total communication’. This 12 months, the award for Communication Design goes to Thought Matter, an unbiased New York-based design studio led by designers Tom Jaffe and Jessie McGuire. Working underneath the tagline ‘We imagine creativeness is a radical act’, Thought Matter has used design not solely to create impactful model messaging for big-name shoppers, like Procter & Gamble and The Met, but in addition as a political device, by means of campaigns selling free speech and social justice. ‘We imagine in design as a power for connection, collaboration and questioning the established order – a power that conjures up folks to interact, replicate and act,’ the studio says.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Digital Design: Laura Kurgan
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
The Cooper Hewitt’s award for digital design goes to ‘a person or agency for the progressive design of digital merchandise, environments, programs, experiences and providers’. This 12 months, that’s Laura Kurgan, a digital designer whose work leverages information visualisation and cartography to show inequality. By pioneering makes use of of instruments like GIS, Kurgan, who was skilled as an architect and is at present a professor at Columbia GSAPP, has make clear urgent subjects together with mass incarceration, migration and concrete violence. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Structure Biennale.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Style Design: Josh Tafoya
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
In case you consider the type of the American Southwest, you sometimes consider cowboy particulars like fringe, pearl buttons and plaid. Textile artist Josh Tafoya, the recipient of the Nationwide Design Award for trend design, is difficult these notions by means of the lens of his Genizaro, Spanish and Chicano heritage. Tafoya reduce his tooth in New York, however returned to Taos, New Mexico to launch his personal label, mixing strategies discovered from his grandmother, a weaver, with a recent sensibility. In accordance with the Cooper Hewitt, Tafoya’s work is notable for ‘celebrating cultural heritage whereas embracing a uncooked, grungy spirit’.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Inside Design: Charlap Hyman & Herrero
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Since founding their agency in 2014, Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero have turn out to be one of the crucial talked-about names in inside design for his or her deeply researched but surrealist method to house. With workplaces in New York, Los Angeles and Mexico Metropolis, the agency’s work is decidedly interdisciplinary and spans all the pieces from buildings to units and a ruffled doghouse slipcover. Particularly notable are Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s interiors for personal residential shoppers and labels, together with Thom Browne, Batsheva and Aesop. ‘By a rigorous artistic course of, the agency poetically engages with reminiscence and the hidden histories of interiors, whereas producing radically placing, distinctly up to date areas,’ the Cooper Hewitt says.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Panorama Structure: Ten Eyck Panorama Architects
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Yearly, the Cooper Hewitt spotlights a panorama architect for his or her ‘significant contributions to the combination between the constructed, city and pure environments’. Award-winning Austin-based agency Ten Eyck Panorama Architects (TELA) match the invoice this 12 months. The agency was based by Christine Ten Eyck, who was impressed to start out her personal follow after a memorable rafting journey down the Colorado River. TELA has since centered on how water conservation, native crops and man-made design can work in tandem. The agency’s work enhances faculty campuses, non-public residences and public parks for shoppers, together with the San Antonio Botanical Backyard and the Resort Saint Augustine in Houston. ‘Our method evaluates panorama by means of a holistic lens, creating environments which are traditionally and ecologically delicate whereas fostering a resilient and accessible future for all who inhabit them,’ the agency says.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Product Design: Berea Faculty Pupil Craft
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
Berea Faculty, based mostly in Kentucky’s famed Bluegrass area, has the excellence of being the primary co-educational and interracial faculty within the South when it was based 170 years in the past by abolitionist Reverend John G Charge. Central to its mission was craft, consistent with its wealthy Appalachian heritage, an ethos that’s maintained right this moment by means of its Pupil Craft programme. At the moment, college students are given design coaching and the chance to check and develop their very own merchandise, which ends up in some 4,000 objects every year, starting from blankets to devices to pottery, that are launched to the general public in small-batch ‘drops’.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
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Supply: Wallpaper
