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Design Blog Design Blog » National Design Awards

2009 Design Patron

It is with great pleasure that we announce that Reynold Levy, president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, has been selected the winner of the 2009 Design Patron Award. Mr. Levy is being recognized for his design stewardship of the Lincoln Center campus renovation project. The renovations at Lincoln Center have enhanced and added to one of New York City’s great cultural treasures with new dynamic public spaces and a greater sense of accessibility and openness to the campus. Mr. Levy, along with his board, allowed incredible new design voices including Diller, Scofido + Renfro and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, both National Design Award winners, to add their mark to Lincoln Center. The design of the new Alice Tully Hall has been met with rave critical reviews, which leaves us with great anticipation for the rest of the projects set to open later this year. All of the designers working on the renovation are bringing a new freshness to the modern 1960’s campus, always a design destination and now even more so thanks to Levy’s vision and leadership. We’ll be honoring Mr. Levy, along with all of the 2009 National Design Award winners, at an October 22 gala dinner at Cipriani in New York, as well as the White House ceremony July 24 in Washington, D.C. Don’t forget to check out details on attending the free events taking place on July 24 in Washington, D.C. – hope to see you there!

Click here for more information on the July 24 events

July 24: Design in D.C.

Plans are taking shape for the July 24th public programs in Washington, D.C., celebrating the 10th annual National Design Awards. These events will take place from 10 to 11 a.m. at museums around the Mall. First Lady Michelle Obama will host the White House ceremony for the winners and finalists later in the day.

Each designer has been paired with another designer from a different field, which will result in some great cross discipline conversations – fashion and interior design, technology and sustainability, product design and media.

• Join Francisco Costa (Fashion Design Winner) and Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown (Interior Design Winners) at the Corcoran College of Art & Design as they discuss the role of materials in their work and also share their visions, projects and inspirations.

• In the National Building Museum, you can find Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples and Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects (Architecture Design winner) and Walter Hood (Landscape Design winner) discussing how design can be used as a tool to create a sense of community.

• Don’t miss the Boym Partners (Product Design winner) and Steve Duenes of The New York Times Graphics Department (Communication Design winner) at the Smithsonian Castle, where they will discuss the relationship between current events and their diverse design process.

• Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel Inc. (Interaction Design winner) and Andrew Blauvelt of Walker Art Center (Corporate and Institutional Achievement winner) will be at the Hirshhorn Museum discussing the future of interaction design.

• Finally, at the National Museum of the American Indian, Amory Lovins (Design Mind winner) and Bill Moggridge (Lifetime Achievement winner) will discuss the relationship between technology and sustainability and the impact both will have on the future.

All the programs are free and open to the public so if you’re in the D.C. area, we hope you will take advantage of this great moment in design! Learn more about attending these programs.

Celebrate Design in D.C.


Friday, July 24th promises to be an exciting day for design fans in Washington, DC and across the country. First Lady Michelle Obama will join us in celebrating the National Design Awards with five simultaneous Public Programs followed by a White House Ceremony for the honorees. This is the 10th annual National Design Awards and we are very excited to bring several of this year’s honorees to Washington, DC to speak at free events taking place at five different museums around The Mall. The program will feature an incredible group of designers and design thinkers in conversation about the current state of design.

You can find a complete list of speakers and more information on our website. If you can’t make it to any of these events, please check back on our website for videos of these programs and more about National Design Week!

National Design Awards + Summer in NYC

If you happen to be in New York this summer (one day it will stop raining, I promise), be sure to check out these design destinations, all featuring previous National Design Award winners.

Recently opened at the Museum of F.I.T., the very beautifully installed retrospective of Toledo Studio’s designs includes The Dress (i.e., the lemongrass shift dress and jacket designed for Michelle Obama on Inauguration Day) and many other (often more compelling) explorations of the relationship between geometry and the body. Introduced with a fascinating timeline of the history of the studio and the symbiotic collaboration between Ruben and Isabel Toledo, the exhibition also includes the most iconic garments of Toledo’s career. Not least, the exhibition is worth a visit because of the relationship between the beautiful garments and the mannequins (designed by Ruben Toledo), reinforced through the datum of watercolors and sketches that contextualize the rich trajectory of garments on display. For those who can afford it, these will apparently all be available in the fall for purchase in lieu of the studio’s usual resort line.

Heading slightly downtown and west, arrive at the elevated park otherwise known as the High Line. While we might be best advised to avoid the subplots of pie-eyed developers trying to capitalize upon the still-moneyed classes of the far west side, there was a more than healthy crowd waiting to climb aboard on a suddenly sunny June weekend afternoon this past Sunday, and everyone in the park would seemingly agree that it was worth the wait. As the intern for the exhibition that features this project pointed out, even the water fountains were integrated as a design idea. Go now before the charge to keep it simple, wild, slow, and quiet become quaint aspirations.

Moving further east and slightly south, the about-to-be-completed new building for Cooper Union features the aggressively robust architecture of Morphosis and the deliberately distorted signage of Pentagram. Previewed in the New York Times last week as a “tough and sexy statement,” the building embraces its context while, somehow, seeming decidedly of its time. A bold move for a consistently radical institution that has been able to test boundaries and foster dialogue at the edge of disciplines in a 19th century building before now. There will likely be no doubt about when this new iteration was built (or commissioned), but the role of the public spaces within and the “vertical campus” promised by its atrium both propose a building that will radicalize the relationship between student and public while capturing the spirit of dialogue and collaboration that is endemic to the institution.

Design: Creativity in Service of Others

As a member of the 2009 National Design Awards Jury, let me first and foremost congratulate all of the winners and finalists. It was an exciting, exhausting, and inspiring process to review all the submissions and debate the merits and accomplishments of each. As a designer who has spent most of my career in the digital realm, I found it fascinating to delve into the categories that I am less familiar with as a practitioner: landscape architecture, fashion, and architecture. And my fellow jurors, each experts in their own fields, were so generous to the rest of us, sharing their insights into the peculiarities of their own discipline, and putting the many different portfolios into a larger context.

Let me make an admission: as a designer of software and products driven by technology, I have a bias towards functionality. Working at Google for a few years has certainly made that bias more pronounced. I enjoy intellectual design, and the kind of work that blurs the lines between art and design, but I also am fairly adamant that chairs should be comfortable to sit in; cups should have reasonably ergonomic handles; and shoes…well, I do love beautiful shoes, and in this realm I foolishly let go of my bias to favor style over comfort. But in most respects, and certainly in my work at Google and YouTube, I am a Bauhaus girl. So what philosophy is right? Does great design have to be functional? Is communicating an idea enough to make a product well designed?

There were certainly interesting exchanges about these timeless debates during our two days of deliberation: what distinguishes design from art? I’ve thought a lot about this since the jury convened, and I’ve come up with something I know to be true for myself. As a designer, my goal is to take my creative faculties, and those of my team, and use them in service of others. When I reflect on the impressive array of candidates for this year’s award winners and finalists, I was so inspired by the many ways these master practitioners have succeeded in improving the lives of people in so many ways. It could be through putting technology to work for humans, and not the other way around; creating spaces for living and working, both indoors and out, that bring out the best in ourselves and in each other; producing housewares that are a pleasure to hold and behold for decades; creating exquisite clothing that makes the wearer feel beautiful; taking complex issues of the day and helping us understanding them better through visual explanations; and finally, using design to prompt humankind to care for the fragile resources of our planet.

And what about beauty? The Shakers thankfully gave us the greatest lesson on how to marry design and art: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”

I am proud to count myself among the community of terminally curious, compulsive problem-solvers that make up the design world. And I look forward to watching new designers emerge in the years to come who will brazenly tackle the problems that, though we may not recognize today, will undoubtedly impact our future.

Margaret Gould Stewart
http://fountly.blogspot.com/
User Experience Manager, YouTube/Google
2009 National Design Awards Juror