A new project by the Canadian design firm molo, called softshelter, considers the frightening reality of homelessness after a natural disaster, a topic which is unfortunately never too far from recent events. Only a few months ago, tornados leveled homes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the Mississippi River swelled to its highest water levels since 1937, flooding neighborhoods in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

How do public organizations respond to these unanticipated needs for mass shelter? How do families continue the routines of daily life without their homes?

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The Metropolis office was saddened this week to hear of the sudden loss of a visionary leader in the design community. Sylvia Harris, the founder and principal of Citizen Research & Design and a designer at the Public Policy Lab, passed away on Sunday. Harris is remembered for her pioneering approach to improving the usability of public spaces and programs through design.

Sylvia (center) and her team, image courtesy Citizen Research & Design.

Harris’s company—originally called Sylvia Harris LLC but recently renamed Citizen Research & Design—specialized in wayfinding graphics and improved communication in the public realm. Harris once wrote, “As citizens, we deserve public services that are efficient, effective and respectful. We need straightforward forms and publications, easy-to-use websites and call centres and clear signage and communications in public buildings.” The company’s projects prove that good design can make virtually anything easy to understand.

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Even with the necessary emphasis on LED technology and efficient materials, many lighting designers can’t resist experimenting with products that are just, for lack of a better word, cool. While strict functionalists may cringe, I admire this vein of creative conceptual design, in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural Akari lamps. Last week saw the debut of three new lighting designs that are similarly imaginative and playful, blurring the lines between lamp and objet d’art.

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I’m trying to remember, did I ever think about things like public design, civic planning, or product innovation in the eighth grade?  I’ll be honest, the eighth grade wasn’t all that long ago. I know that in language arts we mapped sentences; we learned about Julius Caesar’s murderous frenemies in Latin class. But the real-world work of designers—isolating problems, then drafting, tweaking and prototyping solutions—I don’t remember that being part of our curriculum. Lately, however, design practice, with its inherent capacity for invention, community engagement and change, is finding new relevance in K-12 classrooms.

Young designers are encouraged by institutions to participate in solving social and environmental problems. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Ford Motor Co. Fund, for instance announced, just last week, the winners of their Community Design Competition.  The competition challenged students to locate opportunities for improvement within their communities, and then brainstorm solutions.  Open to schools in Miami, Chicago, San Antonio and San Diego, the competition is part of the Smithsonian and Cooper-Hewitt’s ongoing promotion of design as valuable, educative practice for young people.  The entries attest to the creativity, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness with which the students approached their communities’ needs.

First-place glory and $5,000 was awarded to the Henry Ford Academy: Alameda School of Art + Design in San Antonio. The 9^th-grade students designed a backpack specifically tailored to the needs of the homeless, inspired by their neighbors at the Haven 4 Hope Transition Shelter only a block from their school.

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Large Baths, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli; Louis I. Kahn, 1951; Pastel on paper; 7 ½ x 8 ½ inches.

Looking through the Metropolis magazine archives, I recently came upon a quote from Eero Saarinen, “To me, the drawn language is a very revealing language; one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.”

Reading this quote, I nodded, internally, certain that I knew what he meant. Saarinen’s own sketches on the same page were composed of graceful, precise pencil lines sweeping in curves that betrayed an intimate knowledge of volume and structure. The thin strokes were surely the same ones that composed his elevations and floor-plans, because he was really an architect.

Then there is Louis I. Kahn. Visiting the collection of Kahn’s drawings and sketches at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, my expectation of rigid perspective and those thin pencil lines, that only architects use so well, expired at the door. The finality of Saarinen’s quote evaporated.

Kahn doesn’t draw like an architect. Read more…