See more objects with the tag holidays, postage stamps, recycled, mail, graphic, handmade, unique.

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Object Timeline

  • We acquired this object.

1994

  • Work on this object began.

2010

  • Work on this object ended.

2015

2024

  • You found it!

Christmas Cards

This is a Christmas cards. It was designed by Heatherwick Studio and Thomas Heatherwick. It is dated 1994–2010. Its medium is cardboard, stamps, acetate, laminated veneer, resin, plywood, acrylic, ribbon.

To thank people who had supported or worked with them each year, Heatherwick Studio began sending out special cards at Christmas, looking for ways to turn inexpensive materials into mailable objects. The process and elements of mailing the cards—stamps, postmarks, addresses, and even the mailbox itself — became the cards themselves. For seventeen years, mini-production lines were set up in the studio workshop so that the making processes for each card could be repeated many times, using tools and systems invented and constructed for each year’s card.
The earliest cards were little more than decorative test-pieces. The first one came from experimenting with the studio’s new rotary trimmer, a device used to cut paper which, when used to slice card very finely, produced tiny twisted slivers. Another card was an object made by taking a stack of birch plywood strips and weaving them through each other.
Some cards were more complicated to make and mail than others and many required the assistance of the Special Handstamp Centre, a unit of London’s Royal Mail sorting office, to get the cards through the postal system.

It is credited Courtesy of Heatherwick Studio.

This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibition Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio.

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If you would like to cite this object in a Wikipedia article please use the following template:

<ref name=CH>{{cite web |url=https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/85006483/ |title=Christmas Cards |author=Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |accessdate=25 April 2024 |publisher=Smithsonian Institution}}</ref>