Those of us who watch the architecture and interior design professions from the sidelines can’t help but feel that we’re witnessing a squabble between a brother and a sister. Perhaps their contentious history can be attributed to growing pains, or it may be a result of poor definitions. After all, the skills necessary to design and erect a memorable building, are very different in scale and intent from making it delightfully habitable and functional. The current president of IFI, the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers, Shashi Caan, thinks it’s a matter of definition.

So, this woman of action who, by the way, is trained as an architect and industrial designer and has a stellar career in interior architecture and design, has decided to make the global organization she heads up, the arbiter of definitions.  She is in a powerful position. IFI, distinguished from its other alphabet soup trade organizations, is known to bring together global forums on issues that local practitioners from 50 countries need to know about. There’s a lot of cross-cultural learning going on at these meetings. Research is a key topic. So is the future of the design and architecture professions.

Under Caan’s leadership, the organization is in the process of “exploring the value, relevance, responsibility and identity of Interior Architecture/Design.” Through the global policy initiative, Design Frontiers: The Interiors Entity (DFIE), madam president hopes to reach the consensus that, as she says, “has become critical” in view of the enormous challenges presented, globally, to everyone responsible for designing our cities, buildings, and interiors.

It will take 8 minutes of your time to provide your honest, real, and relevant answers here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/IFI_DesignFrontiers.
You have until January 27th to complete the survey. Then the answers will be tallied and be ready to be discussed at the DFIE Global Symposium in New York, on February 17-18, 2011.

Cohen House, Siesta Key, Florida, Architect: Paul Rudolph. Photo: Ezra Stoller/Esto.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft—they all had their buildings “Stollerized.” To have one’s building photographed by Ezra Stoller was to practically ensure its place in the architectural canon, such was the power of the black and white images he created. Stoller worked in a way few architectural photographers before him had, waiting for days, watching the light move across the surface of a building, studying it deeply before he clicked the first photograph. The crisp and clear pictures that resulted made him the ideal photographer of the Modernist movement in the 50s and 60s. Read more…

In 2008, HUGO perfumes came up with a new way to celebrate their HUGO Man bottle – they began an online contest to create iconic images of the squat glass bottle with the unusual cap. Now in its third year, the HUGO Create contest has announced a U. S.-only challenge. Artists and designers from America are invited to create an image that features not only the bottle, but also an American city that inspires them.

The idea of using the identity of a city to promote a product is not particularly new (remember the Absolut vodka city-themed ads from the 90’s?), but it’s always a fun exercise.  So if you’re an image-maker, and your heart beats faster for your city, here is a very good opportunity to showcase your work. If you aren’t an artist or a designer, you can be part of the fun by helping the jury pick a winner — all the entries are added to a gallery on the website, where visitors can vote for their favorites. All the winners receive a $500 cash award, and the work of one overall winner will be displayed in a prominent area of the city that inspired them.

Tadao Ando, Farnsworth House, 2009.

When I went for a tour of the Glass House, someone in the tour group shared with us yet another colorful, but completely unverifiable anecdote about Mies van der Rohe. Legend has it that on his first visit to the newly completed house, the master, having closely examined the structure, turned to Philip Johnson and said, “You never could do corners.”

Whether the story is true or not, it is one of many conversations, real and imagined, between Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which was designed earlier, but completed two years later, in 1951. Linked closely in time, and by the relationship between the architects, the two buildings together form a landmark in modern architecture. Not only do they speak to each other over 800 miles, agreeing in spirit, disagreeing on the details, they also continue to speak to artists, architects and designers today. Read more…

Last month, Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy noted the extraordinary attention that Auburn University’s legendary Rural Studio has received, including the PBS documentary, Citizen Architect. Now, Mix ‘n’ Match, a photography exhibition that opens this week in downtown New York, shows that inventive architecture was not all that came out of that intensely creative place.

At the same time that the PBS documentary was being made, photographer Cynthia Connolly was at the Rural Studio, processing her photographs in a dark room that she built for herself in a barn. 40 of those photographs will now be displayed at The Quality Mending Co., where they will be re-arranged by a new guest curator every two weeks, along with the other objects in the store. The images are of the natural landscape and built environment of the Alabama Black Belt – the context within which the Rural Studio was conceived.  Its founder Samuel Mockbee encouraged his students to “Proceed and Be Bold,” to go forth into the communities around the Studio, and build for them.  Connolly’s photographs of signs, buildings, barns and trees, are an intimate examination of precisely those communities, presented in an innovative and bold format that Mockbee might well have enjoyed, and showing us another side of that utopian architectural experiment.

More details of the exhibition on our online events listings.

From left: Andy Warhol, David Whitney, Philip Johnson, Dr. John Dalton, and Robert A. M. Stern in the Glass House in 1964. Photo: David McCabe

Writing 24 years ago in Architectural Digest, Vincent Scully called Philip Johnson’s Glass House “the most sustained cultural salon that the US had ever seen.” Within the glass walls of that modernist marvel, people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert A. M. Stern battled wits over the endless martinis supplied by Johnson and his partner, David Whitney. Now, thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the School of Visual Arts (SVA), that vibrant discussion continues at glasshouseconversations.org.

After the architect’s death in 2005, the National Trust realized that it would be meaningless to preserve the building without attempting to preserve the culture of inquiry and debate that animated it for so many years. In 2008 and 2009, they held two events under the new Glass House Conversations program, inviting cultural, business, and educational leaders to sit around and have a chat, just like the old days. (Metropolis’s editor-in-chief, Susan Szenasy, co-moderated the conversation in 2008; watch the video here.) This year, the Philip Johnson Glass House teamed up with SVA’s graduate programs in interaction design and design criticism to update that format for the age of Web 2.0 and social networking. Read more…

Last week we posted a roundup of noteworthy design competitions accepting entries in the next few months. We wanted to take a moment now to call extra attention to one contest that is particularly important to us at the magazine: the fifth-annual IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards, which recognize interiors that are more than just pretty pictures. Eligible projects do have to be good-looking, of course, but the jurors are just as concerned with sustainability and accessibility. The idea is that these are spaces that embody the very best in 21st-century interior design, with aesthetics, human health and well-being, and environmental concerns all seamlessly integrated. Perhaps the best way to understand what make a Smart Environment is to study past winners—so here they are:

2009

THE PLANT CAFE ORGANIC
CCS Architecture

TWELVE WEST (above)
Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects

KROON HALL
Hopkins Architects and Centerbrook Architects and Planners

Read more…

We’re back in that cheerful time of the year between July 4th and Labor Day when the sun doesn’t set till 8 p.m. If you’re wondering what to do with all those extra daylight hours, may we suggest entering a competition or two this summer? Here is our list of noteworthy competitions now accepting entries (For a more complete, and frequently updated, roster of design competitions, be sure to check out our online Events section.)
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Building: Problem or Solution? 
Building: Problem or Solution? is managed by Faith in Place, intended to create new ideas in the design of religious buildings, and greater creativity in the re-use and modification of existing structures. Faith in Place hopes to generate ideas that a congregation will find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring, that preserve a sense of the sacred, and a space for contemplation and worship, but that integrate completely into their communities. Winning entries will illustrate creativity within realistic parameters, offering solutions for the 21st century religious congregation.
Submission Deadline: August 15

Green Heart 2010
Incheon Metropolitan City, Korea, announces the Incheon International Design Awards (IIDA) 2010. This year’s theme is “Green Heart,” and designers with a passion for preserving the environment are asked to suggest a future where humans and nature can coexist. Entries can be submitted in three categories – Green Design for Humans, Green Design for the City, and Green Design for Communication. The IIDA 2010 offer cash prizes totaling $43,000.
Submission Deadline:  August 25 Read more…

Each year as summer gives way to chill, the Jewish faithful erect sukkahs, or temporary outdoor structures in which to eat meals. At first glance, the rules dictating the sukkah seem arcane to the point of amusement: for example, the roof cannot be made of utensils or anything conventionally functional; the roof cannot be made of food; during the day, one must have more shade than sunshine; at night one must be able to see the stars through the roof; and the sukkah must be at least ten handbreadths tall. Oh, and a whale may be used to make the sukkah’s walls. Read more…

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Whether you have spring fever or seasonal allergies, or both, try to pull yourself together for a moment and check out this list of noteworthy design competitions now accepting entries. (For a more complete, and frequently updated, roster of design contests, be sure to check out our online Events section.)
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Suburbia Transformed, One Garden at a Time
This juried competition will assemble contemporary projects that explore green technologies within the context of the aesthetics of human landscape experience on small residential sites. The emphasis is on how emerging sustainable strategies and tactics are used to create human landscape experiences that are beautiful, inspiring, perhaps profound, and which might serve as examples for transforming the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time.
Submission deadline: April 16

Electrolux Design Lab 2010
Electrolux Design Lab 2010 invites global undergraduate and graduate industrial design students to create home appliances that consider shrinking domestic spaces. Your ideas will shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050, when 74 percent of the world’s population is predicted to live in an urban environment. Growing populations living in concentrated areas dictate a need for greater space efficiency. This year, special consideration will be given to designers that submit a design within the context of a range or suite of solutions/appliances. Your design ideas should address key consumer requirements: being green, adapting to time and space, and allowing for individualization.
Submission deadline: May 1

New Aging Award 2010
Banal and indifferent architecture can become a barrier as people age, exacerbating physical limitations, and paradoxically increasing both social isolation and dependency. The New Aging Award will recognize designs that enable the aging and elderly to lead a life of dignity. The award is open to any architectural project designed for, or including, a single person or a group of people who are 55 and older. The designs may range from a private house to an assisted living facility, nursing home, or continuing-care retirement facility. The requirements for submission are a minimum of three images, a 150-250 word description, and credit for the entire team. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of architectural and social innovation.
Submission deadline: May 3

Read more…