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Get Smart

Graham Hanson Design creates an intimate exhibit around the Smart car for an office building in New York.

Sheila Kim-Jamet -- Interior Design, 8/25/2006 12:55:00 PM

First introduced to the public in 1997, the Smart car practically became an overnight icon, zooming straight into the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But how does one plan an exhibition around the nifty auto? Graham Hanson Design got the environment just right with “Think Modern. Think Classic. New Design Paradigms.” A temporary installation inside the pristine lobby of 340 Madison (a newly renovated office building in New York), “Think Modern” opened in early 2006 to showcase the car’s “smart” marriage of form and function.

The exhibition design team, led by the firm’s principal and show co-curator, Graham Hanson, marked the entrance to the building with a single Smart car, elevating it 8 inches from the ground on an aluminum platform, as if to suggest its value as a work of art as opposed to a simple automobile. The firm emblazoned graphics of the 340 Madison logo and the exhibition’s title text onto the car’s windows, windshield, and a door via adhesive vinyl. Just beside the entrance, scrims in the window featured collages of some 50 images—stock photography ranging from manmade structures to nature—demonstrating how design can be found in even seemingly ordinary things and places when viewed from a different perspective.

Inside the building, the 1,600-square-foot lobby greeted visitors with a cool and clean palette of Indiana limestone—a result of the recent renovation by building owner Macklowe Properties and architects Moed de Armas & Shannon and Gensler. Graham Hanson Design, as it did with the car outside the entrance, treated the objects on display, including four actual Smart cars, as icons by using floor and ceiling-suspended platforms within this minimalist backdrop. Miniatures of the Smart, as well as other celebrated designs, including Vespas and the Panton chair, rested on acrylic displays that were suspended from the ceiling via flight-line cables. “The idea behind scaling these objects down to fit into the size of your palm, and elevating them on a platform, was to take the objects outside of their usual context, so that the viewer can focus on their details instead of the everyday context in which the objects are ordinarily seen,” says Hanson.

The Smart car most central to the space was elevated on a special aluminum platform, rising 3 feet from the floor. This car was shown deconstructed, with its outer shell removed in order to give observers a glimpse of the car’s mechanics. The driver-side door of yet another car was completely removed, inviting the public to sit behind the wheel and feel as if they were about to give it a test drive. Scrims hung in the spaces adjacent to three of the car displays: One at the front, presenting an introduction for the exhibition, another featuring a quote by legendary designer Charles Eames, and a last banner with an anonymous quote speaking on innovation—a word that amply sums up the creation of the Smart. “Products like Smart,” says Hanson, “prove that designers who ask out-of-the-ordinary questions can arrive at out-of-the-ordinary solutions that improve the way we live.”