Designing Peace exhibition to feature Rael San Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall

POSTED ON Apr 27, 2022

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced that this June, the museum will present “Designing Peace,” an exhibition exploring the unique role design can play in pursuing peace. Organized by Cynthia E. Smith, curator of socially responsible design, with Caroline O’Connell, curatorial assistant, “Designing Peace” continues Cooper Hewitt’s humanitarian design exhibition series exploring how design can address some of the world’s most critical issues.

“As America’s design museum, Cooper Hewitt advances public understanding that design can be a force for good,” Smith said in a statement. “This exhibition will explore the role of design in building peace and resilience—and proposes that peace is not abstract and remote, but can be local, tangible and even possible.”

“Designing Peace” will feature 40 design proposals, initiatives, and interventions represented by objects, models, full-size installations, maps, images, and film. Among the projects on view are Rael San Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall, which featured three pink seesaws installed through the slats of the towering steel US-Mexico border wall to echo how movements and actions were taken on one side of the border directly impacted the other.

Ronald Rael is a professor of architecture and the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at The University of California, Berkeley. His co-designer, Virginia San Fratello, is an associate professor of design at San Jose State University.

According to Rael’s biography, he co-founded a 3D Printing MAKE tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments, and products. He is also the co-founder of the start-up wood technology company, FORUST, where he maintains a position as a design and technology consultant.

A companion to the exhibition, Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now offers perspectives on peace from activists, scholars, architects, policymakers, and graphic, game and landscape designers. Through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this publication conveys the momentum that design can generate in effecting a peace-filled future.