Hasta La Ideas

Thomas Heatherwick’s London bus, the expanded Städel Museum, and the Pentax Q10 are among the winners of the Travel + Leisure 2013 Design Awards.

Before planning your next trip, be sure to review the newly crowned winners of the Travel + Leisure Design Awards, which will be featured in the magazine’s March issue. The winners, announced today, range from Schneider & Schumacher’s souped-up Städel (Best Museum) and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park first imagined in the early 1970s by Louis Kahn (Best Public Space) to Weimar-era glam Pauly-Saal in Berlin (Best Restaurant) and Götti Switzerland sunglasses that fold flat (Best Travel Accessory). Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including Thomas Heatherwick‘s diesel-hybrid London bus (Best Transporation) and the Microsoft Surface (Best Tablet). Meanwhile, 2013 T+L Design Champion Rolf Fehlbaum, the literal and figurative chairman of Vitra, joins past honorees such as ubercollector Micky Wolfson, André Balazs, and Amanda Burden. Tasked with choosing “the best new examples of design” in 22 categories was a jury moderated by Chee Pearlman that included interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud, creative director Stephen Doyle, and architect Deborah Berke. Keep reading for the full list of winners.
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In a first for an accessories designer, shoe maestro Nicholas Kirkwood has clinched the 2013 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, the across-the-pond version of Anna Wintour and co.’s wildly successful initiative to boost young design talent. Now in its fourth year, the BFC/Vogue award provides the winner with £200,000 (at current exchange, about equal to the stateside $300,000 purse) and access to industry mentors. Also shortlisted for the award were Roksanda Ilincic, Mary Katrantzou, Peter Pilotto, and Emilia Wickstead.

Kirkwood, who also made the 2012 shortlist, was selected as the winner based on the strength of his collections over the past few seasons, the three-year business plan he created with partner Christoper Suarez, and a presentation to a judging committee chaired by Vogue UK editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman. “I’m thrilled,” says the London-based designer, who has collaborated with the likes of Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, past BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund winner Erdem Moralioğlu, and the Keith Haring Foundation. “Being awarded the fund will enable us to realize our plans to develop the brand globally.” The designer unveiled his first men’s collection, Nicholas Kirkwood Men’s, earlier this month in London.

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MOCA Cleveland, Konstantin Grcic’s Medici chair, and the 2012 Olympic Cauldron are among the Designs of the Year contenders.

Rare is the shortlist that includes the work of Renzo Piano, a zombie-apocalypse-themed smartphone app, and a non-stick ketchup bottle (straight out of MIT), but so it is with the 2013 Designs of the Year nominees, announced today by London’s Design Museum. The more than 90 contenders represent “the best designs from around the world in the last 12 months” across seven categories: architecture, digital, fashion, furniture, graphics, product, and transport. Among the notable nods are Farshid Moussavi‘s smart and shiny Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Wind Map created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, Front’s bubble-blowing Surface Tension Lamp (which kept crowds mesmerized last month at Design Miami), the Dior ready-to-wear debut of Raf Simons, and Irma Boom‘s new identity for the soon-to-reopen Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. An exhibition opening March 20 at the Design Museum will bring together all of the nominated designs in advance of the award announcements in April. In the meantime, pick your favorites from the complete shortlist (below).
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A new prize offers a Pritzker-sized purse for young architects. The Harvard Graduate School of Design‘s Wheelwright Prize is a $100,000 traveling fellowship that will be awarded annually to talented early-career architects worldwide. It’s an expansion of the school’s annual Arthur W. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship (established in memory of Wheelwright, an 1887 GSD grad), intended to encourage the study of architecture outside the United States and formerly available only to GSD alums. Past fellows include Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, I. M. Pei, and Adèle Naudé Santos. Now architects practicing anywhere in the world can apply for the prize, proposing research agendas outside of one’s country of residence. If you’ve graduated from a professionally accredited architecture degree program in the past 15 years, start polishing your portfolio along with a proposal for a research project accompanied by a travel itinerary. Applications will be accepted from January 10 through February 28. The winner, to be selected by an international jury, will be named on May 15, 2013.

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Rucci Redux. Looks from Alexander Wang’s spring 2013 collection.

• Wake the kids and phone the neighbors: Alexander Wang is taking the creative helm at Balenciaga. Look for the PPR-owned house to make it official next week, according to WWD. Wang will replace Nicolas Ghesquière, whose departure was announced earlier this month and becomes effective today. Wang’s brand has soared in recent years, staking out a lucrative turf between contemporary and designer pricing. His spring 2013 collection ripped off borrowed liberally from the design signatures–if not the technical prowess–of Ralph Rucci, a true innovator in the mold of Cristobal Balenciaga himself.

• Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast are the recipients of this year’s Collab Design Excellence Award, bestowed annually by a collaboration of design professionals supporting the modern and contemporary design collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Past winners of the award include Zaha Hadid, Alberto Alessi, and Philippe Starck. Scher and Chwast receive their award tomorrow at the museum, where they’ll inaugurate an exhibition of their work that opens to the public on Sunday.

• Fans of The Last Magazine will be particularly excited to learn that the publication’s co-founder Magnus Berger is headed to WSJ. as the magazine’s new creative director. Look for his fresh look to debut with the February 16 issue.
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