Hasta La Ideas

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Moritz Waldemeyer.

Name: Karim Rashid

Occupation: I am a designer—industrial design, interiors, architecture, graphics, art . . .

Location: Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. But that’s new for me. I just renovated an office here; we moved in four months ago. I was in Chelsea for 20 years, so it’s a big change.

Current projects: Right now I’m working on the architecture of seven buildings around the world—four in New York, one in St. Petersburg, one in Latvia and one in Toronto. And then in industrial design, I’m doing everything from branding for new drink bottles to lighting, kitchen design, jewelry, perfume bottles, and lots of furniture.

Mission: My number one mission in life has been to make design a public subject. To basically preach to the world how design not only shapes a better life, and shapes our future, but how it has a huge impact on our physical well-being.

Rashid’s recent product designs include the Bruno lamp for Verreum (above) and the Hooka for Gaia & Gino (below), both from 2013.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? My first inkling of that was when I was about five years old in London with my father. He’s an artist, and he used to take me to sketch churches. We were drawing, and I looked up at these Gothic windows, and I started changing the shape of them, making them into ovals. My father looked at my drawing and showed me that I wasn’t drawing the shape I was looking at. But I had this weird little epiphany that, oh, I could decide to change the windows if I want. So that was a really abecedarian moment of feeling like I could have some impact or control in shaping the world I’m looking at.

Education: I studied industrial design as an undergraduate at Carlton University in Canada, and then I did graduate studies in Naples, Italy.

First design job: Between my third and fourth year of university, I got a summer job designing business telephones at Mitel, in Canada.

Who is your design hero? Naming one is impossible. It’s like saying, What’s your favorite song? Let me just name a few people that I think had a great influence on me. Luigi Colani. Ettore Sottass, whom I studied with. Joe Colombo. Philippe Starck. George Nelson. Charles Eames. I remember having a Buckminster Fuller lecture when I was at university—that was a huge inspiration for me. Victor Papanek, he was a professor of mine too. And one more I have to add is Marshall McLuhan, whom I also studied with for one semester. He made me realize that design has to embrace theory—that we’re not just doers, we can be thinkers.

Rashid’s recent interiors include the Amoji Food Capital in Seoul, completed last spring. Photo by Lee Gyeon Bae.

Rashid designed the exhibition Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture, on view at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto until March 30. Photo by Philip Castleton.

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