About The Carnegie Mansion | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design ...

History of the Mansion

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is housed in the former home of industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. The 64-room mansion, built from 1899 to 1902, is an impressive testament to the desire of Carnegie and his wife, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, to build a spacious, comfortable, and light-filled home in which to raise their daughter, Margaret. The architectural firm of Babb, Cook & Willard designed the mansion in the solidly comfortable style of an English Georgian country house. When Carnegie purchased the land for the house in 1898, he purposely bought property far north of where his peers were living. The relatively open space allowed him to build a large garden—one of the few private enclosed green spaces in Manhattan—that is still a beautiful oasis today.

The house was also planned as a place where Carnegie, after his retirement in 1901, could oversee the philanthropic projects to which he would dedicate the final decades of his life. Over the course of his lifetime, Carnegie directed the donation of some $350 million to education, cultural institutions, and the promotion of world peace. From his private office in the mansion, Carnegie also donated money to build a network of over 1,500 free public libraries in communities across the country and to the improvement of communities and educational institutions in Great Britain.

The house is a fascinating study in innovative design. It was the first private residence in the United States to have a structural steel frame and one of the first in New York to have a residential Otis passenger elevator (now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC). Other innovations included its central heating, a precursor to air conditioning, and a cellar coal car that traveled over a miniature train track to transfer fuel from a storage bin to enormous twin boilers.

The building received landmark status in 1974 and in 1976 opened as the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. In 2014, the museum was renamed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

LEED SILVER CERTIFICATION

In 2015, the mansion and Cooper Hewitt campus earned LEED Silver certification from the United States Green Building Council. The LEED rating system is the foremost program for buildings, homes, and communities that are designed, constructed, maintained, and operated for improved environmental and human health performance. The project to attain certification for Cooper Hewitt, which first began with the renovation planning stage in 2006, involved optimizing the mansion’s energy performance, purchasing “Green-e” certified electrical supply, water use reduction, community connectivity, and many other enhancements of the museum campus.