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Santiago Piedrafita's catalog (2000; above) for the
exhibition Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures.
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The Herzog & de Meuron In Process poster (2000; above, left), designed by
Andrew Blauvelt and graphic design intern Matthew Peterson (the museum
annually chooses two interns to serve as graphic designers at the Walker
studio); Daniel Eatock and Erin Mulcahy's poster (1998; above, right) for the design
internship program.
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"Working with the Walker is one of my all-time favorite projects,"
Carter says. Because there was a limited number of people involved in the
process, the level of communication and enthusiasm was high--and the project
eventually produced a series of eight fonts. "When I designed these
fonts, I really gave the designers a kit of tools. Everyone who uses them
makes them come out differently yet there is still this identifying element."
Carter says two qualities made the Walker a great client: the vision of
Makela and the early involvement of the design studio. "And the fact
that Halbreich thought it was an intriguing idea and got it."
When the Walker was modernized in the 1950s, it was built as a fully autonomous
entity, including a frame shop, archives, a library, a photography department,
and a design studio. "We have everything we need to do our work,"
Piedrafita says. "That generates an energetic environment in which
you understand a project fully. And because we generate the majority of
the shows here, we don't have to recontextualize stuff." But Piedrafita
likes the Walker most of all because of the opportunity to work on relevant
and challenging contemporary content. "It's also nice to be in an atmosphere
where you're actually thinking about the long term."
Piedrafita compares this to his experience at larger cultural institutions,
such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York, where he spent a year
following his internship at the Walker. The MoMA design department, he believes,
was not as collaborative as the Walker's. "We have direct relationships,
maybe because of the small scale and lack of institutional pressure. At
MoMA the curatorial staff is revered and feared. We're actual participants
here--contributors to the projects. The difference between designing a MoMA
and a Walker catalog is that here we do everything, which enables us to
look at what we're producing as an entire body of work."
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For the Idea House (1940-47), Modern exhibition dwellings like this one
(above, left) were built on the museum's grounds. The 2000 exhibition The
Home Show and Everyday Art Gallery included a full-size
recreation (above, right) of the main living space of Idea House II.
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Antenna Design originally created this digital interface (2000; above),
which is still in use, for Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty
Pleasures.
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Although most graphic design produced for the Walker is done in-house, Blauvelt
commissions outside designers like Deborah Littlejohn and Jeff Kaplan to
do interactive and motion-graphics work. "We have more complicated
technology things coming up, so they're commissioned by several departments
and run through the design department." He reserves his greatest enthusiasm
for the museum's biggest project to date: the Herzog & de Meuron-designed
expansion scheduled to begin construction next year, which upon completion
in 2005 will add more than 100,000 square feet of interior space and four
acres of new gardens.
It's a project Blauvelt relishes. Together with the heads of new media and
education, he's part of a team looking at experience planning for the new
building that will integrate technology, learning, and design in innovative
ways. "There's a lot of collaborative possibilities, but you also have
to reinvent the process of design and question what its role is in the bigger
picture. One of the things we're doing is working on prototypes, like a
telematic table, an interactive digital screen. This is a case where design
has to be part of the equation before anything gets done. The idea of introducing
design planning at a project's formation is key to my job and what makes
it different from similar jobs at other museums."
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