This year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair is less than two weeks away. If you’re traveling to Chicago for the event, be sure to pick up a copy of our annual Taste of the Town guide at the Merchandise Mart. Although, really, why wait until you arrive to make dining plans? You can read all our restaurant recommendations—conveniently classified by lunch, dinner, and drinks—in the online version of the guide, now available on our Live@NeoCon site.

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As promised, here’s a video clip from last week’s event celebrating the ten-year anniversary of four of Metropolis’s key staff members. We boiled it down to three minutes’ worth of footage, including comments from George Lois and Steven Heller (and excluding some of the more raucous moments—sorry, had to be there!) Read more…

From left: Paul Makovsky, Martin Pedersen, Kristi Cameron, and Criswell Lappin

The architecture and design community has undergone dramatic changes in the last ten years—but here at Metropolis, the core editorial team covering those changes has remained remarkably steady. Since 2000, four people—senior editor Kristi Cameron, creative director Criswell Lappin, editorial director Paul Makovsky, and executive editor Martin Pedersen—have been at the center of the magazine’s mission to critically cover all aspects of design. And last night we threw them a party! Scroll on for photos from the event; and stay tuned for video clips of the festivities, coming soon. Read more…

Last September, Steelcase hosted a symposium on the 100-year anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Meyer May House, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the event, Metropolis’s Susan Szenasy asked leaders in the architecture and design community—including Jeffrey Bernett, Shashi Caan, Toshiko Mori, and Michael Van Valkenburgh—to consider both what makes Wright’s architecture uniquely successful and what his designs can teach us today.

If you missed the event, you’re in luck: Steelcase has just posted video clips of pretty much the entire conversation on its Meyer May anniversary site (including the above sample, in which several of the speakers talk about principles in design). Moreover, a live version of the symposium may be coming soon to a city near you; Steelcase is currently firming up plans to host similar events in major U.S. cities throughout this year. The first one will take place in New York on April 6, with Szenasy reprising her role as moderator. We’ll keep you posted as the list of speakers in finalized, and you can always find the latest information on the Meyer May events page.

Previously: “Wright at 100”; (or read all our Frank Lloyd Wright–related blog posts)

Click the play button to view the beginning of last week’s “Show Snapshots” event. (Watch parts two and three of the video on our Multimedia page.)

Last Wednesday, news was made at the Davis & Warshow bath products showroom. Hilary Beber, a policy analyst in Mayor Bloomberg’s office of long-term planning and sustainability and a panelist that evening, came to the event directly from a City Council meeting where legislators unanimously passed New York City’s new Energy Conservation Code. It was an exciting and hopeful moment for the 200 or so NYC interior designers and architects in attendance, especially since, earlier that week, reports that the new code had been emasculated circulated in our local media.

Hilary Beber and Rick Cook at last week’s event

And, so, the designers present got much more than they expected when they signed up to be part the showroom’s annual “Show Snapshots from Greenbuild,” organized by Metropolis. Beber kicked off her presentation of the finer points from our new energy code (effective July 1, 2010), which pushes the city’s building owners to reach new levels of efficiency in the coming years. The ruling will also help create nearly 18,000 new jobs—a modest number, to be sure, since the city has reported a loss of around 200,000 jobs in 2009, with the architecture, interior design,  and construction segments having been hit especially hard. Rick Cook, a panelist, gave a personal scale to these local hardships when he remarked that last year his firm, Cook + Fox, sent 22 people to Greenbuild; this year only the two principals attended. Read more…