It’s National Design Week, and tonight the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will celebrate the winners of the 2013 National Design Awards with a ceremony and dinner at Pier Sixty in New York. Special guests including Tom Wolfe, Al Gore, and Kurt Andersen will be on hand to present the winners with their coveted glass asterisks, while the delightful Todd Oldham will announce the winner of this year’s People’s Design Award. We sent writer Nancy Lazarus to the National Design Awards Winners’ Panel, held at Parsons The New School for Design.
Richard Saul Wurman (center) moderates a discussion among NDA winners. Pictured from left, Tiya Gordon, Paula Scher, Gadi Amit, and Mike Femia. (Photos: Angela Jimenez)
Four of this year’s National Design Award winners appeared at a Tuesday evening panel moderated by Richard Saul Wurman, TED founder and 2012 lifetime achievement award winner. Topics encompassed winners’ early career experiences, current projects, and the award’s impact. Below are selected comments from each winning designer or firm.
Paula Scher, principal at Pentagram (communications design): • “It’s a big deal that the U.S. government honors design, and it’s important to society. If the accolade is a seal of approval, that’s fantastic, but the next day, business is still business.” • “At Pentagram we’re independent minded designers, there are no strategists. We establish direct client relationships using analogies and entertainment.” • “With my hobby, large-scale paintings of maps, I use information to create the spirit of a place. It’s the antidote to my design life where I create corporate communications identities.” • “During my earlier experience creating graphic design for music covers/albums, I learned about the relationship with the public. My work at Pentagram is still largely connected to entertainment, and much of the identity work is focused on making design accessible.” continued…
Strong and Silent Types. The new crew at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum stands in front of a vintage photo of their predecessors.
Wisconsin’s Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum–the only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type–recently moved into a new home in Two Rivers, and the race is on to reopening day. Helping to inaugurate the new space will be the museum’s annual Wayzgoose type conference, which gets underway November 8. Among the special guest speakers this year is the fontastic Erik Spiekermann, for whom a typographic tribute is in the works: Hamilton will be cutting the Spiekermann-designed font, “HARD” (pictured above), at the conference. “I’m excited to see Hamilton cut this font using traditional methods,” says Spiekermann. “With Hamilton’s vintage pantographs and former type-cutting employees, this will be a chance to see history in the remaking.” continued…
World Architecture Festival 2013: the Future Project of the Year award at the World Architecture Festival has been given to a museum for China‘s maritime heritage, proposed in Tianjin.Brisbane studio Cox Rayner Architects’ waterside scheme consists of five halls that radiate out to the harbour, which will each contain different exhibitions.
The National Maritime Museum of China will sit in front of a large plaza for outdoor events, marked by an observation tower also acting as the museum’s energy plant. Completion is due in 2015.
“The project demonstrates a strong conceptual clarity,” the WAF judges said. “In its response to the sea, the design evokes a strong sense of the maritime experience. It brings together vast collections of elements of China’s rich maritime history and offers the visitor references to global maritime cultures. The jury looks forward to a realisation that maintains the integrity of the original idea.”
Ready your bright yellow Pentax K-01, because Marc Newson is bound for our shores. The Sydney-born, London-based industrial designer will be in Philadelphia next month to collect his 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 Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Zaha Hadid, Marcel Wanders, and Frank Gehry.
After picking up his snazzy statue, Newson will give a lecture about his work and inaugurate the museum’s exhibition, “Marc Newson: At Home.” Opening to the public on November 23, the show is a feast of Newsonian domestic delights—from his rapid-prototyped Dish Doctor dish rack to the 021C (read: Pantone orange) concept car he designed for Ford—arrayed inside an abstracted 2,000-square-foot house and garage. continued…
Short of material innovation and aesthetic refinement, the bicycle as we know it has changed very little since its early days of development in the late 19th century. However slight, the evolution of the world’s most widely used mode of transportation is not…
The academic arts journal-meets-design magazine, helmed by editor-in-chief Sarah Ganz Blythe with S. Hollis Mickey, will be published each fall and spring, using the museum’s collections, exhibitions, and collaborations as an impetus for essays and interviews, artist interventions, and archive highlights.
The inaugural “Hand in Hand”-themed issue (pictured) draws upon the expression first recorded in the 16th century, and includes cartoonist James McShane on the intaglio printing process, curator Elizabeth Williams‘ peek into the museum’s archive to reveal the production designs of Gorham Manufacturing Company, and curator Kate Irvin‘s exploration of Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl‘s proposal for a double-weave textile.
This volcano museum in western Hungary features walls of dark concrete and Corten steel designed by Budapest studio Foldes Architects to reference the colours of volcanic rock and lava (+ slideshow).
Located on a flat plain between the city of Celldomolk and a former volcano, the Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Centre tells the history of the surrounding region, which five million years ago was home to many volcanoes.
Foldes Architects won a competition to design the museum, using materials and forms that subtly reference the shapes and colours of volcanoes.
“Instead of the straight translation of the brief, such as creating a volcano-shaped museum building, we wanted to capture the true substance of the location,” said architect Laszlo Foldes.
“The raw materials, the homogeneous grey of the concrete, the lava-inspired colour of the Corten steel and the flue-like arrangement of the space deliver the spirit and essence of a volcano,” he added.
Corten steel boxes puncture the rectilinear volume of the five-storey building, forming self-contained screening rooms and exhibition spaces that project out towards the landscape.
The entrance leads into a full-height atrium. A small skylight five storeys above lets in a beam of light and is intended to recreate the feeling of being inside a volcano.
Concrete walls are left exposed inside the building, while steel staircases ascend to exhibition spaces on all four upper floors.
Here’s some more information from Foldes Architects:
Volcano Visitor Centre opened in Hungary, designed by Foldes Architects
Though Hungary, located in Central Eastern Europe, is not rich in active volcanos, a large expanse of the country used to be volcanic some 5 million years ago. However, this does help ensure good quality soil for high level wine production, one of Hungary’s largest export products.
The iconic Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Centre lays 200 km west of the capital Budapest, and has been realised following a national architectural contest announced in 2009 by the Celldomolk City Council, when Foldes Architects celebrated their winning entry from the competing 44 projects. The chosen plot for the centre highlighted a flat area between the city of Celldomolk and the 5 million year old Sag Hill, a former volcano.
“Instead of the straight translation of the brief, such as creating a volcano-shaped museum building, we wanted to capture the true substance of the location. According to our concept, the raw materials, the homogeneous grey of the concrete, the lava-inspired colour of the Corten steel, and the flue-like arrangement of the space, deliver the spirit and essence of a volcano.” – Laszlo Foldes, chief designer of Foldes Architects.
Upon entering the vast interior of the building, the visitor meets two engaging attractions. At first sight the vertically open space captures the eye. Five floors above, a small window lets in a beam of light offering the ‘eruption’ point on the flat roof. On the opposite side, the industrial materials of the facade appear consistent with the interior: naked concrete walls, dark grey resin flooring, steel staircase and corridor, and the Corten steel cubes also visible from the outside. The varied height and location of bridges link the different sizes and positions of the Corten boxes. These offer a range of functions, from screening rooms to interactive installations area, and present the fascinating history and typology of volcanos. To create a more refined interior, the exhibition texts are situated directly on the wall without any supporting board.
If you ever wanted to imagine walking through a cubist painting, this building is a great example of how it might feel to wander into Picasso’s Guernica. While passing below the red cubes, grey walls and bridges of the building, you have a real opportunity to comprehend the transience and vulnerability of human existence bracketed by such a formidable force of nature.
Project name: Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Center Location: Celldomolk, Vas County, Hungary Program: Specific museum building to represent the volcanic history of the territory Type: competition commission
Area/Size: 965 sqm Cost: 1.238.000.EUR Client: Celldomolk City Council Project by: Foldes Architects
This maritime museum in the Netherlands by Dutch studio Mecanoo features reclaimed wooden cladding and a zig-zagging roof that reference the gabled houses of the surrounding hamlet (+ slideshow).
Photograph by Mecanoo
Mecanoo completed the Kaap Skil, Maritime and Beachcombers Museum in Oudeschild, on the island of Texel. The angular roof profile was designed to match the rhythms of a group of harbour-side buildings, while the louvred wooden facade relates to the driftwood used by locals to build their homes.
Sheets of recycled hardwood were sawn into strips to create the louvres, which allow daylight to filter through to a ground-floor cafe and a first-floor gallery.
“The wooden slats used in the facades come from tropical hardwood piling from the North Holland Canal,” said the architects. “The un-sawed edges have been deliberately placed on the visible side of the facade. After forty years of residence under water the white, grey, rust-red, purple and brown colours are beautifully weathered.”
The large upper gallery is dedicated to underwater archaeology. There’s also a second exhibition space in the basement to present the history of Reede van Texel – a historic offshore anchorage used by the fleet of the Dutch East India Company.
“The entrance and the museum cafe form a natural frontier between the world of the Reede van Texel in the basement and that of the underwater archaeology on the first floor,” explained the architects.
Photography is by Christian Richters, apart from where otherwise stated.
Here’s some more information from Mecanoo:
Kaap Skil, Maritime and Beachcombers Museum, Texel, the Netherlands
Tourist Attraction
The island of Texel is situated in the Waddenzee and is the largest of the Dutch Wadden Islands. Every year a million or so tourists visit the island, which is only accessible by plane, boat or ferry. Few however will be familiar with the glorious history of Texel and its links with the Dutch East India Company. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Company’s fleet used the anchorage of Texel as its departure point for expeditions to the Far East. The ships waited there for a favourable wind before weighing anchor and sailing off to the ‘Orient’. While they waited, maintenance work and small repairs were carried out, victuals and water were brought on board and family could see their loved ones one last time.
Many painters visited the ‘Reede van Texel’ (the offshore anchorage of Texel) to depict on canvas the fleet of the Dutch Republic. In the new entrance building of the maritime and beachcombers museum, Kaap Skil, in the hamlet of Oudeschild, the public is taken back in time to the Dutch Golden Age. The showpiece of the museum is an eighteen-metre long, four-metre deep model of the Reede van Texel, displaying in great detail the impressive spectacle of the dozens of ships anchored off the coast of the Wadden Island.
Photograph by Mecanoo
Typical gable roofs
The museum is designed with four playfully linked gabled roofs which are a play on the rhythm of the surrounding rooftops which, seen from the sea, resemble waves rising out above the dyke.
Photograph by Mecanoo
‘The sea takes away and the sea provides’ – this is a saying that the people of Texel know so well. For hundreds of years they have made grateful use of driftwood from stranded ships or wrecks to build their houses and barns. The wooden façade of Kaap Skil is a good example of this time-hallowed tradition of recycling. The vertical wooden boards are made of sawn hardwood sheet-piling from the North Holland Canal and have been given a new life just like the objects in the museum collection.
From within, the glass facade in front of the wooden boards allows an inviting view of the outdoor museum terrain and of the famous North Holland skies to visitors of the museum café. Inside the building the boards cast a linear pattern of daylight and shadow creating an atmosphere infused with light and shelter.
Daylight and artificial light
The entrance and the museum café form a natural frontier between the world of the Reede van Texel in the basement and that of the underwater archaeology on the first floor. The contrast between the two worlds is reinforced by the different experiences of light and space. In the basement visitors are drawn around the exhibition by projections and animations, creating an intimate space that harbours a sense of mystery. On the first floor the North Holland sky floods the objects on display with light. The movable showcases of robust steel frames and glass create a transparent effect so that the objects in the collection seem to float within the space. Under the high gabled roofs the visitor gets a generous sense of being able to survey the sizable collection, the museum grounds and the village of Oudeschild at a glance.
Site plan
Client: Maritiem & Jutters Museum, Oudeschild Architect: Mecanoo architecten, bv Museum design: Kossmann.dejong, Amsterdam Project management: ABC Management Groep, Assen Builders: Pieters Bouwtechniek, Utrecht Installations consultant: Peter Prins, Woerden Contractors: Bouwcombinatie De Geus & Duin Bouwbedrijf, Broek op Langedijk Installations: ITBB, Heerenveen Sawmills for wooden cladding of façades: Pieter Dros, Texel
It’s Marseille’s moment. The port city, France’s largest on the Mediterranean coast, is in the spotlight as this year’s European Capital of Culture, with a host of major projects on view. Writer, author, and intrepid flâneur Marc Kristal paid a visit to the new and improved Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean and filed this formidable report for us.
(All photos courtesy Rudy Ricciotti)
Comprised of two 15,000-square-metre structures—the 17th-century Fort St.-John and a new seven-level building by architect Rudy Ricciotti, linked by a slender 115-metre-long footbridge—Marseille’s Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM), is, says director Bruno Suzzarelli, “an outstretched hand from France to the region.” Wishing to refuse the “bling-bling brightness” of signature-building starchitecture, Ricciotti responded to the fort’s massiveness with a “bony, feminine, fragile” design, executed almost entirely in high-strength concrete, and distinguished by a densely-patterned screen that covers two elevations and folds onto, and projects off of, the roof.
Seven hundred and eleven of the 15,688 cubic metres of MuCEM’s signature building material are comprised of fiber-reinforced ultra high performance concrete (UHPC), which proved especially suitable to the project: UHPC’s “closed-pore” compounding renders it virtually impervious to sea spray and other corrosive agents, and the highly “flowable” substance can adapt to the most elaborate molds—ideal for MuCEM’s latticework panels. Ricciotti also appreciated the material for its narrative qualities. “Cement can inspire dread in certain slums and elsewhere touch the sublime,” he observes. “And cement gives off a formidable sensuality.” continued…
They’re ba-ack! The unlikely art world power couple of Herb and Dorothy Vogel returns to the big screen in Herb and Dorothy 50×50, a follow-up to the heartwarming 2008 documentary that brought them to the attention of millions worldwide. In the new film, which opens today in select cities, director and producer Megumi Sasaki follows the Vogels as they see the results of their national gift project, launched in 2008 with the National Gallery of Art, to give a total of 2,500 artworks to museums in all 50 states. The road movie through the art world goes from Honolulu to Fargo, visiting 11 of the museums that were on the receiving end of “The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States.”
Sasaki decided to embark on a second film about the Vogels after visiting the first exhibition of the 50×50 gift, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and realizing how little she knew about the storied collection that was at the center of Herb & Dorothy. “The artworks were so small in size yet carried such beauty and elegance,” she says in her director’s statement. “I felt as though I had been documenting a famous actor behind-the-scenes for four years without ever having seen him act onstage.” The project gained a new poignance—and took a challenging turn—after Herb’s death last year at the of 89. “My only regret is that Herb didn’t get to see the film,” adds Sasaki. “But I know his spirit has been with us this whole way, and I hope the film’s release will be a wonderful tribute to him.” continued…
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Comprised of two 15,000-square-metre structures—the 17th-century Fort St.-John and a new seven-level building by architect 
