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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

National Design Awards and the New York Waterfront

South Street Seaport
Credit: SHoP Architects

I have been looking at this image from SHoP’s submission for quite some time without really understanding what the firm is proposing. Somehow, I managed to largely miss the announcement of the plan of General Growth Properties (GGP) to completely transform the area known as the South Street Seaport – an increasingly residential area characterized largely by a large mall on Pier 17 that is almost always empty. SHoP’s proposal for the area includes a reconceptualization of Pier 17 as an open public space with smaller retail and hospitality around it. The Tin Building would be renovated and moved onto Pier 17, allowing Beekman Street to flow directly onto the pier rather than hitting a dead end at South Street and, additionally, letting the East River Esplanade to continue without interruption. The glowing tower at the center of the rendering above is SHoP’s proposed new tower, a 495-foot mixed use building that consists of three stacked volumes held together with a net-like exoskeleton. SHoP’s proposal has been met with some controversy, even though it does embrace some of the sensitive treatment of the waterfront seen in their highly praised proposal for the East River. It will come as no surprise to anyone who actually lives in New York City that the archipelago has a fairly contentious relationship to its waterfront. Thanks to the infrastructural ambitions of the 1930s, most neighborhoods that should have access to the waterfront can barely even see it. SHoP’s proposal here accepts the fact of the hard edges of the waterfront while finding discreet ways to bring people to the water – visually, literally, psychologically – across the length of the FDR.

Lincoln Center
Credit: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

In the meantime, despite the deafening silence of building cranes throughout the city, there are some exciting developments courtesy of previous National Design Award winners that are worth keeping an eye on. Michael van Valkenburgh’s Brooklyn Bridge Park has finally broken ground. Hopefully, portions of Pier 6 will be open later this year but, while you are waiting, here is an interesting walkthrough with the designer. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s transformation of the Highline is underway and their highly acclaimed recently completed renovation of Alice Tully Hall will be joined later this fall by a new visitor’s center – replacing the old Harmony Atrium and its climbing wall – designed by Tod Wiliams and Billie Tsien. Morphosis’ dizzying new building for Cooper Union will also be completed this fall, all in time for the launch of our exhibition celebrating the past decade of the National Design Awards, Design USA: Contemporary Innovation.

National Design Awards + Objectified

Gary Hustwit’s latest film, Objectified is playing at the IFC downtown for a limited run. Hustwit himself is seemingly traveling along with the film to nearly fifty venues between now and mid-summer, so both he and the film are likely coming to a venue near you if you happen not to be in New York. The poster, seen here, and the very large milled piece of Corian that appears in the opening sequence of the film were designed by Michael C. Place. Like Helvetica, it’s an engaging and imminently personal account but rather than focusing on a single font, Hustwit’s latest film scans the current climate of industrial design. It also serves as a mini-reunion for many of the honorees of the National Design Awards. Included are this year’s finalists, Smart Design, as well as this year’s Lifetime Achievement winner Bill Moggridge, and Andrew Blauvelt, the Design Director and Curator at the Walker Art Center. Previous honorees with similar star turns include Karim Rashid, Paola Antonelli, David Kelley, Jonathan Ive, and former jurors Chris Bangle and Tim Brown. (We also suspect that the Director of Photography, Luke Geissbuhler, is related to Steff Geissbuhler, partner at C&G Partners, Communication Design finalists in 2007.)