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 to ignite conversations about the importance of research, collaboration, and innovation. LPA Architects in Irvine, CA documented the Metropolis Tour program they hosted in June:

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By co-opting a time zone as its title, the multi-venued, collective event called Pacific Standard Time demonstrates its dynamic breadth and depth. Beginning with the post-war year 1945, it encompasses exhibits that span 35 years to 1980. The shows, exhibits, and events explore not simply art, but politics and social movements as expressed by activists, artists, community leaders, filmmakers, and musicians from different social, economic, and racial groups. The events are sited all over Southern California, from the  Watts Tower Arts Center in Downtown Los Angeles to San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, East to San Gabriel Valley’ Pomona College’s Museum of Art and North to San Fernando Valley’s Cal State Northridge Art Galleries. The venues range from museums, art and film galleries to street festivals and music theatres.

The Lifted X (1965) image via pacificstandardtime.org

Yet viewing this merely as a series of aesthetic exhibitions trivializes its import and impact. Between 1945-1980, Los Angeles was the site for some of the most powerful, controversial, and historically significant social and political movements in the country, movements that reverberated far beyond its borders. Pacific Standard Time maps those dynamic political, social, and artistic expressions. From Black Power rallies and crackdowns by the police, to protests on Free Speech, nuclear power, and the rights of locally-born colored men and women, Los Angeles has been a location of profound change. Many of these exhibits document the movements that wrought those changes.

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When picturing Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, what comes to mind is the skeletal and translucent structure sitting among 47-acres of lush Connecticut landscape. The subtle color of the modernist building is so seamlessly integrated into nature that it recedes to the background and often goes unnoticed. This design decision was the work of master architectural colorists, Donald Kaufman and Taffy Dahl, who rendered the site-specific color palettes for Johnson’s architecture when it was built in 1949.

Hailing from a background in creating ceramics and paintings, Kaufman and Dahl work as a team, providing logical coloring as “frosting on the cake” to architectural masterpieces. In this film released by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the two colorists are invited to share their experience of the Glass House, on-site with the public:

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