The ephemeral Midtown Manhattan edifice of the American Folk Art Museum, once described as a “handsome flake of metallic crystal glinting on West 53rd Street,” lives on thanks to sketches like this one, donated by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA) to Cooper Hewitt shortly after the building was completed in late 2001. Unveiled “at...

At the end of the introduction to the Multiple Choice exhibition, the curator reflects that, “as contemporary design industries move to open-sourcing and electronic formats for the marketing of their products, physical samples may soon become obsolete.” From a future academic and archival view point, this is a sad possibility, as material sampling formats contain...