Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Landscape architects and 2025 National Design Award winners TERREMOTO discuss their newly released principles of radical gardening, a practice-wide commitment to creating “omni-positive” gardens that are deeply empathetic, ecologically restorative, and thoughtfully designed to support all living things at every scale. TERREMOTO is a landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and Berkeley, California founded in 2012 with the intention of building gardens and landscapes that were explorations and investigations into ideas and culture. They create site-specific landscapes that respond to client needs while challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials, and formal conventions. Spanning projects of diverse scales and typologies, TERREMOTO’s portfolio reflects a belief that gardens can respond to the needs of all, and that this expansiveness gives rise to novel forms of beauty. Kasey Toomey and Story Wiggins from TERREMOTO is joined by Billy Fleming, interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and design, for a conversation about how they translate their values into practice through landscapes that embrace process-based stewardship, closed-loop systems, and care for both human and non-human communities. Together, they will explore how gardens can serve as powerful tools for imagining a radical future built and tended with love. More about National Design Awards: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/national-design-awards/ Biographies: Kasey Toomey is a landscape architect and principal at TERREMOTO, where he co-leads the studio’s Bay Area practice. His work is shaped by an interest in where materials come from, local ecologies, and how much—or how little—is needed to make a place meaningful. Trained in landscape architecture and sculpture, he works across gardens, public spaces, and objects with a focus on hyperlocal plants and materials. He values resourcefulness over refinement and collaboration with the people who build and care for gardens. Kasey believes in non-human centric design solutions and iteration. He received a BSLA with Distinction in Research from Cornell University and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania. Story Wiggins is landscape architect with a background in historic preservation and land stewardship. As a principal at TERREMOTO, she leads projects of various scales and types, including residential, commercial, institutional, and agricultural. Through her intuitive approach to design, she aims to honor the land, exercise restraint, and allow for evolution through stewardship. Her recent work has explored design illegibility within the cultural landscape of the Sea Ranch, and bioregional and cultural specificity with Ohlone leaders at the mak-warép Land Conservancy. She has also led TERREMOTO’s ‘Land and Labor’ internal working group, which advocates for the building and gardening trades and the tradespeople that make design tangible. Story received an MLA from UC Berkeley and a BA in Historic Preservation and French from the College of Charleston. Billy Fleming (moderator) is an interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and design. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Fleming was the inaugural Wilks Family Director and founder of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an urban policy advisor to the Obama administration. He is the author of Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (2026) and coeditor of Design with Nature Now (2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (2021).

Graphic and information designer Ladislav Sutnar designed the visual identity and store graphics for Carr’s shopping plaza in New Jersey in 1956. Through color, symbols, movement, and paper cutouts, Sutnar shows how play can spark creativity and guide the design process. Explore Cooper Hewitt’s Archives and discover how designers bring ideas to life through creative strategies like play, tweak, repeat, simplify, show off, and transform. The Archives contain sketches, prototypes, drafts, and other materials that reveal the creative process behind 20th-century American design. These records span many disciplines such as architecture, graphic design, furniture, industrial design, interior design, lighting, textile design, and wallcoverings. Music: TolsetMusic - Jazz Trio (Piano Jazz Background Music), Free Music Archive TolsetMusic - Jazz Trio (Piano Jazz Background Music), Free Music Archive

In 1967, graphic designer Roger Cook and his firm partner Don Shanosky worked with the Department of Transportation and the American Institute of Graphic Arts to create universal symbols for airports and train stations ahead of the U.S. Bicentennial. Cook’s design process is especially visible in the many versions of the Lost and Found symbol. These drawings show how the symbols we use every day have been refined through experimentation, countless iterations, and small tweaks. Explore Cooper Hewitt’s Archives and discover how designers bring ideas to life through creative strategies like play, tweak, repeat, simplify, show off, and transform. The Archives contain sketches, prototypes, drafts, and other materials that reveal the creative process behind 20th-century American design. These records span many disciplines such as architecture, graphic design, furniture, industrial design, interior design, lighting, textile design, and wallcoverings. Music: TolsetMusic - Jazz Trio (Piano Jazz Background Music), Free Music Archive PulseBox - Piano Jazz, Free Music Archive

Join MTA Arts & Design and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for a special conversation celebrating the opening of MTA Arts and Design’s In Service: MTA Photographs by Christopher Payne and the closing of Cooper Hewitt’s Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne. Photographer Christopher Payne will discuss his process and share stories behind his explorations of the New York transit system, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the craft, curiosity, and precision that define his work. Fascinated by complex systems and spaces of making and doing, Payne captures the choreography of labor and machinery that usually happens out of sight. Payne will be joined in conversation by MTA Arts & Design Director Tina Vaz, and Cooper Hewitt Chief Curator Michelle Millar Fisher, will moderate. The program will take place in the In Service gallery space at Grand Central. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about this new body of photographs and see a featured selection of images from the exhibition.

In this guided tour of Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, photographer Christopher Payne will take visitors through the exhibition, highlighting some of his original photographs of industrial manufacturing across the United States. From candy to pianos to humanoid robots, Payne’s photographs capture the ingenuity and diversity of products made in America, and the skilled workers who make them.

In conjunction with Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk on the critical role photography has played at MillerKnoll across the histories of both Herman Miller and Knoll. Whether documenting manufacturing processes or creating images for advertising, photographs of MillerKnoll’s furniture and textiles have shaped our understanding of American design for over seven decades. Amy Auscherman, MillerKnoll’s Director of Archives and Brand Heritage, will share how the company continues to adapt to rapid changes in labor, materials, and technology, with an eye toward the future. Following the lecture, Auscherman will be joined by Christopher Payne for a conversation about Payne’s recent work photographing the manufacture of MillerKnoll’s iconic Eames Lounge Chair, and what documenting this company means to him within the larger context of his project to capture the history, present, and future of manufacturing in the United States. The conversation will be moderated by the curator of Made in America, Susan Brown.