One evening, while we were designing the Node chair, my wife Isa and I were musing: What if we were to peek into the classroom after hours, once the students and teachers had gone home? Could the chairs, designed to be mobile, foster collaboration and interaction, also have the same desire to connect? If they came to life, would they take on a mind of their own? The Node love story, told in film, is a playful response to our musings. Happy Valentine’s Day! Enjoy connecting!
Elger Oberwelzwas on the design team at IDEO when they worked on the Node chair, produced by Steelcase.
The Argentinean blog Ombu Architecture recently posted a wonderful animation that shows off, in alphabetical order, some of the world’s most influential architects and their greatest works. “The ABC of Architects” begins with Alvar Aalto and runs all the way to Zaha Hadid, bouncing through the list in a playfully minimal style.
In the animation, each building disappears almost as quickly as it appears, but by reducing them to their most basic elements, the buildings become instantly familiar. When the video ends, don’t be surprised if you find yourself starting all over again.
Since 2007, Metropolis, with editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy has traveled to more than 35 cities and 150 architecture firms, design organizations, and industry shows in the United States and Canada delivering the Metropolis Tour. With the help of various sponsoring companies through the years, this Metropolis-produced CEU-accredited film screening and discussion program continues to inspire, intrigue, and challenge today’s practicing professionals in architecture, interior design, product design, and engineering. Sponsors for 2013 include KI, Kimball Office and Universal Fibers.
In 2007, our editor took a close look at the winners and runners-up from our annual Next Generation Design Competition and decided that the projects, products, and ways of working submitted as competition entries were not only forward-thinking—they were inspiring, innovative, and brilliant. The magazine decided to produce a new film for the Metropolis Tour program based on these individuals and teams. In mid-2008, Brilliant Simplicity was born. The film is as inspiring now, as it was four years ago.
The film delivers an overview of what so many innovative designers are doing to have a positive impact on the world while maintaining a commitment to achieving excellence in design. It’s proof that good design and sustainability can effectively coexist on all scales. It emphasizes the necessity for research and an ever-widening collaboration that, in the most fortuitous circumstances, can lead to innovation. And today, that word, innovation, has become our culture’s mantra.
From the largest and smallest offices of Gensler, Perkins+Will, HOK, LPA, NBBJ, Leo A Daly, and SOM to the various groups at Studios Architecture, Callison, Mithun, Shepley Bulfinch, and Cook+Fox, we’ve gained insight further into our own industry, and the culture of the design firms, and we’ve learned from each audience in a different way.
In her May 2010 Notes column, Lifelong Learning editor Szenasy states that “the future is clear: designers need to learn cross-disciplinary teamwork; to create a more sophisticated understanding of sustainable design; to reach out to larger communities and groups that have a voice in reshaping the urban form; to harness a new generation’s enthusiasm for saving the environment as well as its understanding of technology and connectivity.”
The film had a slow start before the design world fell off the cliff as the 2008 recession hit. Then it picked up momentum as design firms began to redefine themselves for the “new normal” and it continues toignite conversations about the importance of research, collaboration, and innovation. LPA Architects in Irvine, CA documented the Metropolis Tour program they hosted in June:
What’s driving the $60 billion dollar interior design industry?
In September, I posed this question at ASID’s first annual State of the Industry Address, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This was an exciting day for the interior design community as we looked back on a year of gained momentum. We can now confidently look forward to a continued industry growth, new opportunities to elevate interior design, and new ways to demonstrate the profession’s role as well as its importance to the economy.
At the American Society of Interior Designers we have kept a watchful eye on how our industry has been performing in the post-recession economy. After a gloomy 2010 and an erratic 2011 affected by concerns about the Eurozone economy, stalemates in Congress over our national budget, and a rash of natural disasters that deflated client confidence, our industry has sustained positive, although modest, growth over the past ten months. A growth that’s trending above the major building and architecture indexes. Current forecasts indicate that growth will continue into the first half of next year.
As we re-engage with our federal government, in the belief that productive discourse for the good of the people and the environment may resume once more, let’s take inspiration from a moment of hope and optimism.
The year was 1962. President Kennedy challenged an intellectually agile aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later the senator from New York, to define what Americans should expect from federal architecture. Moynihan’s modest, one page document set forth the Guiding Principles of design excellence in the public realm; its words still ring true.
A short film, Democratic By Design, was produced by the General Services Administration (GSA); it’s narrated by Luke Russert who was steeped in national politics as a child by his late father, the irrepressible Tim, and who also knew the senator. In the film the Guidelines are recited by some of our best-known architects, many have built our most memorable courthouses and other public buildings through the years.
Watch the film so that you may be inspired by it like any proud citizen has the right to be. And read our November 2012 issue, starting with my Notes column, which is infused by the spirit of the late, great senator from the Empire State.
When we secured an interview with Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer, we decided to take full advantage of it. So, in September, in addition to dragging along our photographer, Webb Chappell, to the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston, Susan Szenasy and I also brought a videographer to film it. We weren’t entirely sure how we would use the resulting footage, but it seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.
We were in Boston for two reasons. Breyer has an office at the Moakley Courthouse and is usually there when the Supreme Court is not in session. Prior to being nominated to the high court, he served as an appeals judge in Boston and played a leading role in the architect selection process for the courthouse (the eventual winner, Pei Cobb Freed).
As it turns out, Breyer was an incredibly gracious host, greeting us downstairs in the rotunda, even buying the assembled crew coffee from the cafeteria. We spoke for an hour in his office, and then Breyer invited his former colleague, Judge Douglas P. Woodlocke, to accompany us on a tour of the building. Our intrepid videographer, Ken Richardson, shot as much of the courthouse as our limited schedule allowed, and then our editor, Julie Rossman, did a wonderful job of taking those images and weaving them into a compelling whole. Justice Breyer’s passion for the Constitution, for the importance of architecture in the public realm, and for good design, is palpable.
“Design directs everything and everything directs design,” says Kyle Bergman. With that in mind he set out to establish the Architecture and Design Film Festival, which recently wrapped up its 4th edition at New York’s Tribeca Cinemas.
Indeed, movie making shares some similarities with architecture and design. They’re both collaborative practices, in spite the fact that it’s mostly one person/author who gets the credit and the accolades. And they both have to walk a fine line between art and technology as they aim to express their points of view.
“Just like in a script, with each choice of material or specific relationship of public and private, architects are also telling a story, building their narrative,” Bergman told me as we sat in the theatre’s lounge on the festival’s closing day, this past Sunday. The venue was chosen so that the space and the atmosphere would be conducive to the dialogue Bergman wishes to foster with the festival. “We don’t want to just screen movies. We want to have a dialogue about them as well. We want to up the level of discussion between the general public and professionals,” he says. “Film is a great way to understand architecture even if you are not usually involved in that world.”
I first noticed Eichlers in Sunnyvale while driving around looking at homes. When I came upon them and felt like I had landed on the moon. They were the most interesting houses that I had ever seen! And I didn’t know anything about them. I immediately drove back to my real estate office and asked people what these houses were, getting mixed responses: “Oh those homes are crap!” or “What is an Eichler?” It bothered me that realtors didn’t know what I was talking about. So I started to research Eichler.
Turns out that there were 11,000 Eichlers in the bay area waiting for me to look at and meet the people who live in them. I started researching and hunting but could not find much about Joseph Eichler, his family, or his history. Then I came upon a book by a friend recommended, Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream. It became my constant resource. I learned that there is a small, tight knit group of Eichler enthusiasts, a sort of a “cult” group of people that all know one other. I also learned that I had to do something special to get “in” with people living in their Eichler community for the last 30 some years. I also realized that these Eichler communities were self-sufficient. The neighbors know everything about each other. They meet at block parties almost every week. One owner told me, “We all have spare keys to each other’s homes and take care of each other.” This sounded strange yet wonderful to me. I can’t think of any neighborhood that I have ever lived in that is this way. Fascinating!
I started calling the names listed in any Eichler publication, book, magazine, and blog. I learned that these homes are a form of modern art and convey a sense of mid-century modernist architectural expression. They are the epitome of California living with its culture of inside-outside. I learned many amazing things about Joseph Eichler himself. He was a tough little guy who never backed down and did what he wanted to do to optimize the housing industry in the post World War II years. He was also the first developer to allow African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics purchase his homes.
About halfway into the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, the filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey turn to Charles Eames’s way with words—or lack thereof. The legendary designer, it appears, was capable of being aimlessly verbose, repeating himself, taking off on tangents, and generally obscuring the matter at hand. “He had this ability,” the architect Kevin Roche says in the film, “of surrounding everything in a cloud of words.”
Using archival photographs and candid insights like Roche’s, the film takes on the prolific, multidisciplinary career of Charles and Ray Eames. With only occasional lapses into cheesiness—computer-animated cherry blossom petals flutter across the screen as the couple’s romance is described—it remakes the old argument that Charles (masculine, forceful, craftsman-thinker) and Ray (reticent, artistic, magpie-like hoarder) were some sort of yin and yang that produced the magic of the Eames office. There is a lot of discussion in the film about their incessant image-making: “Perhaps their greatest creation,” the celebrity narrator, James Franco, intones, “was the image of Charles and Ray Eames.”
If we need any further proof that the Danish architect and wunderkind Bjarke Ingels is destined for superstardom (and we don’t), here’s another piece of evidence: a new documentary on Parkour, the so-called “urban sport” where competitors race from one spot in the city to another as quickly as possible. (Fifty years ago this was called “playing on the fire escape.”) The film—directed by the Danish director Kasper Astrup Schröder and entitled My Playground—began as a modest twenty-minute effort. But the irrepressible and relentlessly media savvy Ingels watched a rough cut, saw hipsters at his Mountain complex in Copenhagen leaping from one terrace to another, and suddenly a short film on Parkour became a somewhat longer film on Parkour—and architecture. (More specifically, Ingels’ architecture.) Think of it as a benign form of creative hijacking. The trailer, in fairness, looks like a lot of fun:
Political Hardball: Part 2 Updated
Remembering Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bijou
It’s Show and Tell Time for Building Product Manufacturers
Q&A: Kevin Shanley
Political Hardball: Part 2
SOM and CASE Invent a New Interface
A New Humanism: Part 18
The Green Team Part 13: Game, Sett, Match
On the Road with the Rudy Bruner Award: The Steel Yard - Providence, RI
Designing from Nature
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