“Skin:Surface, Substance + Design” will open at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum on May 7,2002, and continue through September 1 5,2002.“Skin” highlights the responses of designers from around the world to a culture obsessed with physical appearances and transformed by biotechnology. The exhibition focuses on works designed between 1997 and the present and features products, fashion, furniture, architecture and media that are expanding the conventional definition of surface.

Every object has a skin.Thick or thin, smooth or rough,porous or impermeable, skin is the line between a hidden interior and a visible exterior. Reflecting the convergence of natural and artificial life,“Skin ” demonstrates how designers today manipulate the relationship between the inside and outside of objects, garments and buildings to create surfaces that both reveal and conceal:skins that have depth,complexity and their own behaviors and identities.“‘Skin ’ shows the breadth of design thinking today,which encompasses the engineering of new structures as well as the fabrication of seductive forms and metaphors,” Museum Director Paul Warwick Thompson notes.“The exhibition is smart, sexy and provocative.” The rise of digital media over the past decade has changed the practice of design,providing tools for making objects and buildings that resemble living creatures — with complex curves and soft, responsive surfaces —but remain distinctly artificial. “Skin” features the work of such notable designers and architects as Greg Lynn, Petra Blaisse, Morphosis, Ross Lovegrove, Marcel Wanders and many others. The exhibition shows how enhanced and simulated skins are found throughout contemporary life, from clothing, products and buildings to our own living skins.

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