The weekend before last, we went to the
Cooper Hewitt Museum for “Kid Made
Modern,” a hands on workshop with Todd Oldham, the hip clothing and furniture designer
as well as television personality. This
was DIY for the third grade set. Some
naysayers told me that Oldham himself wouldn’t show up, but the effervescent
designer not only lead the group, but really propelled the whole event. He was
full of nothing but praise, encouraging the kids while distributing helpful
advice. I spent most of the time working
with my eight-year-old daughter on a bike messenger bag made out of high
performance Tyvek envelopes and colored duct tape. I started to lose patience when the younger
kids at my table had a lot of trouble cutting the duct tape so it wouldn’t
crimp and crinkle, but Oldham came to the rescue, revealing a nice ripping
action best executed with a forceful twist of the wrist. Our finished bag looks like a cross between a
Freitag bag and a home plumbing job. But the two people next to us (both adults)
ended up with bags that Bloomingdales would be proud to sell.
I congratulated Oldham on the success of the
event and leafed through his recent publication, Kid Made Modern. He assures me that the crafts in it use
common household items—alas, we don’t have zebra print duct tape at home, but I
suppose the standard grey kind would work too.
I was also interested to hear about OIdham’s latest project, a study of
the mid-century designer Alexander Girard; indeed Oldham spent a chunk of time
last summer at the Vitra Museum in Switzerland, working in their archives and
learning more about the designer.
My only qualm about the event was how the
project was marketed by the Cooper Hewitt.
Announcing that we’d be creating “modern design pieces from everyday and
recycled materials,” I expected that we’d be using materials like used coffee
cups and bicycle tires. But when I got home, I started to wonder if I
was being churlish. And then I noticed a
stack of old FedEx envelopes made of Tyvek; thanks to Oldham, what I was
previously looking at as trash suddenly begun to look like the beginnings of an
elementary school craft project. . .
