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This Minneapolis--based museum has a long tradition of showing--and producing--excellent design.
By Paul Makovsky
January 2002
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Herzog & de Meuron's design for the Walker Art Center expansion and
renovation (2005; above), which will nearly double the size of the
existing facility, integrates indoor and outdoor space through openings
in the facade and terraces.
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Graphic design interns Sean Deyoe and Matthew Peterson's poster (2000;
above, left) for Sins of Change: Media Arts in Transition,
Again conference. Matthew Carter's 1995 typeface (above, right).
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Andrew Blauvelt, design director at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis,
estimates that his nine-person studio worked on more than 500 projects last
year. "When I first started in 1998, we were running at 70 projects
a week--some long term, some short term," he says. The department produces
every piece of graphic design imaginable, from exhibition signage, banners,
invitations, and postcards to brochures, monthly calendars, catalogs, and
books.
Shortly after taking the job, Blauvelt began trying to connect the in-house
practice back to the past. Faced with a gap in the exhibit schedule, he
helped curate a show that looked at the Walker's role in the development
of modern design: The Home Show became one of the most popular exhibitions
in the history of the museum. (He's planning a follow-up exhibition, Out
of the Ordinary: Design and Everyday Life, for 2003.) Since then he
has overseen a design team that has won more than 50 awards and last year
was nominated for the prestigious Chrysler Design Award.
The Walker has a long tradition of promoting design. Before curating the
show, Blauvelt's knowledge of its history centered on the influence
of Mildred and Martin Friedman, the illustrious couple that ran the museum
as design curator and director respectively, from the 1960s to 1989. "But
I was surprised to find that in the history of the Walker, it all starts
with Defenbacher." Rising to prominence in the 1930s as a WPA art center,
its first director, architect Daniel Defenbacher, transformed it from
a formerly private collection of Hudson River School paintings and Chinese
jade to a museum fostering contemporary art and design. Some of his early
contributions included Idea House (a precursor to the Case Study Houses
sponsored by John Entenza, editor of Arts and Architecture magazine);
the ongoing Everyday Art Gallery (which promoted "Good Design");
and the Everyday Art Quarterly, a magazine founded by former Bauhaus
student Hilde Reiss that contained work by photographer John Szarkowski
(and was later renamed Design Quarterly).
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The plan for Herzog & de Meuron's expansion (2005; above).
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A kiosk for the landmark exhibition Graphic Design in America: A
Visual Language History (1989; above).
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This strong design aesthetic evolved, Blauvelt believes, largely because
the Walker has had only four directors. In the 1970s and '80s design programming
expanded under Mildred Friedman, with groundbreaking exhibitions such as
the first major retrospective of Frank Gehry, Graphic Design in
America: A Visual Language History, and the "Architecture Tomorrow"
series, which highlighted the work of then unknown architects, including
Diller + Scofidio. In the early 1990s director Kathy Halbreich shifted
the emphasis from design as a subject to design as a practice, a move that
began with the hiring of Laurie Haycock Makela as design director.
"It was a soft transition," explains Santiago Piedrafita,
a senior graphic designer at the Walker who was an intern at the time. "Laurie
was trying to redefine the idea of identity in a very postmodern way."
Instead of commissioning a new corporate logo for the museum, Makela hired
typographer Matthew Carter in 1994 to design a typeface. "If Laurie
had adopted a corporate approach and stamped some monolithic logo on everything,
it would have run counter to the whole ethos of the place," Carter
adds.
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