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:

Read more…

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.

Metropolis Interviews: Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

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.

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.”

But, I said to myself, what of their writing?

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Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

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:

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Just as the film makers at One Time Studio are rallying up supporters and funding for their documentary, Design & Thinking, another group of designers are working on their own film, also eager to investigate the meaning behind the overused buzzword “design thinking.” Initiated by Erik Roscam Abbing, Design the New Business is a collaboration with Erik van Bergen, Esra Gokgoz, Gunjan Singh, Juan David Martin, Marta Ferreira de Sá, Miguel Melgarejo and Robert Zwamborn to find out the design key to business success.

Like Design & Thinking, Design the New Business promises it will feature an array of notable interviewees across the design industry, but the line-up has not yet been announced. They’ve released a teaser so far, and have emphasized that there will be equal parts focus on design and business. Read more…

As we discovered at the Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York last year, good films about design are few and far between. Even among these, it is easier to find films about designers, design disciplines, or objects. But a film about design theory? Now that’s a truly ambitious project.

In March this year, Yuhsiu Yang and Melissa Huang of the Taipei Design Center U.S. teamed up with film makers Mu-Ming Tsai and Iris Lai of Muris Media to make a film about one of the most elusive concepts designers have come up with in the last couple of decades – Design Thinking. Even though the term has been bandied about since the 1970’s, and used as a mantra by some of the biggest creative consultancies,  we’re still debating if it is relevant, indeed if it means anything at all.

This week, the four film makers, who are calling themselves One Time Studio, have officially released the trailer for their film, and it looks impressive enough. They’ve got a lot of big guys—like Smart Design’s Dan Formosa, and AIGA CEO Richard Grefé—to talk about why designers felt the need to qualify what they do with the word “thinking.” (Watch closely for a sneak peek at Metropolis’s offices, and a quick comment by editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy.)

But are they being critical enough? Read more…

In our June 2011 issue, Peter Hall writes about the fascinating relationship that the giant design consultancy, IDEO, has with a very particular type of client – governmental agencies. The firm’s trademark design thinking method is showing mammoth bureaucratic juggernauts like the Social Security Administration a deep insight into who uses their services, and how they can help streamline even the most convoluted process, allowing government officials to effectively reach out to the citizens who need them (while saving costs). In the process, IDEO also had its own significant learning curve on how to use design to fix problems in governance.

There are some interesting parts to that journey that we couldn’t share with you in the magazine, like the videos produced by the firm as part of two projects: monitoring energy use in buildings operated by the General Services Administration (GSA), and helping Clark Realty understand what kind of housing wounded veterans really need.

The GSA came to IDEO to understand how they might meet President Obama’s directive that all government buildings are to reduce energy consumption by 30% below 2003 levels by 2015. So in a sense, the client was already converted. But the administrators weren’t the only stakeholders in the project. Read more…

Last month, attendees at the annual Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) conference, were shown the best films chosen from this year’s Interior Design Education Video Competition. Aiming to change the public perception of the profession, the competition asked students to demonstrate the quality of interior design education and industry standards. This year’s theme:  “How is the public’s health, safety and welfare protection enhanced by the skills of fully prepared health care interior design practitioners.”

The winning video, “Interior Design and Health Care,” was submitted by Louisiana State University students Colette DeJean, Leigh Hardy, Ryan Weilenman, Sarah Tull, and Alyse Lambert, with the guidance of faculty advisor, Danielle Johnson. It builds a strong business case for the process of design and its impact on health care. The description of the seven-stage design process is a logical progression, which would make sense to health care practitioners and administrators, as well as practicing designers. It is an excellent promotion for the value of design, and its impact on the customer, including patients and staff. As I watched the film, I kept wishing that design firms would make similar presentations to their potential clientele across all market segments. As the students have discovered, it’s a great, shorthand tool, to communicate visual messages. Read more…