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12/5/12 11:32 AMNational Design Awards Gala Honors Richard Saul Wurman and Others - NYTimes.com
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At the National Design AwardsGala
In Design Awards, Age Is a Plus
Robert Wright for The New York Times
The gala designer David Stark wanted the room to look as if you’d wandered into a piece by Sol LeWitt. More Photos »
By PENELOPE GREENPublished: October 19, 2012
THE Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum held its design awardsgala at Pier 60 in Manhattan on Oct. 17 among the giant playgrounds— the driving ranges, bowling alleys and ice rinks — of Chelsea Piers.David Stark, the event designer and producer, had festooned theplace with geometric shapes in neon pink and orange, a collision ofSol LeWitt and Al Held, he said.
Gack, what to wear? A triangle, hesuggested.
Most of the attendees wore theircustomary uniforms, which is to saysignificant eyewear and black linenfrom Japanese designers. RichardSaul Wurman, the TED inventor,cartographer, people connector and kingmaker, wore hisusual irascibility, along with a festive scarf. Mr. Wurman,the recipient of the lifetime achievement award, “seeks
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12/5/12 11:32 AMNational Design Awards Gala Honors Richard Saul Wurman and Others - NYTimes.com
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ways to make the complex clear,” according to the Cooper-Hewitt’s program notes. But he was unable to make abartender there understand that he wanted only an inch ofbeer — just a taste, not a full glass.
Shaking off the moment, he said he was flying to Dublin inthe next few days to accept yet another award, the goldmedal for outstanding contribution to public discourse,
from Trinity College.
“They’ve been giving this award yearly since 1780,” said Mr. Wurman, adding that he wasstunned by the company he would be keeping as an award recipient. “I looked at the listand there was Churchill, Keats, that woman stuck in her home in Burma. ...”
Suddenly, hors d’oeuvres, the usual confounding assortment: tiny green meatballs (sorry,those were fava bean falafel), deconstructed spanakopita, test tubes of pumpkin soup.
Mr. Wurman continued: “What’s interesting about me getting this award is that most of usgo through life with the idea that it’s like a silo, meaning you start as a private and end as ageneral. For some reason, my silo fell over. I don’t excel at anything, but I have a silo ofconnections because I fell down sideways.”
His favorite design? His own life, of course, which he described as “purposeful-accidental.”
There was Rick Boyko, once creative-in-chief at Ogilvy & Mather and a former director ofthe VCU Brandcenter in Richmond, Va., a graduate program for advertising. Mr. Boyko,who is possessed of a certain kind of tweedy good looks, confused a reporter. “Kurt?” shesaid tentatively.
“Sometimes my wife calls me curt,” he batted back.
Mr. Boyko was there to present the award for interior design to Clive Wilkinson, the SouthAfrican architect of vast and groovy open-plan corporate campuses, from Google in SiliconValley to TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles, with its “streets,” “central park,” “nests” and“neighborhoods,” which was a game changer in workplace design when it was built in1998.
At dinner, the two men swapped iPhones to show off their babies. Mr. Boyko’s grandson is5 months old; Mr. Wilkinson’s daughter, just 3 months. She was born the day Mr.Wilkinson was scheduled to fly from his home in Los Angeles to Washington to meetMichelle Obama, along with the other honorees.
Since their inception in 2000 as a byproduct of the White House Millennium Council, aClinton-era initiative to celebrate innovative third-millennial thinking, there has been aWashington component to the National Design Awards. (The Cooper-Hewitt also“belongs” to a Washington institution, the Smithsonian.) The first lady is the host of alunch for the honorees and serves as the honorary patron of the gala. In 2006, however,five graphic designers boycotted the lunch with a letter that accused President Bush ofusing “mass communications” in ways “that have seriously harmed political discourse inAmerica.”
Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, noted in an essay at the time that the kerfuffle wascontained among communications designers. (“Regrets Only,” as Mr. Bierut titled hispiece, is included in “Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design,” out this year in paperbackfrom Princeton Architectural Press.) The other honorees — the Design Awards are givenfor architecture, interiors, fashion, landscape architecture and product design, among
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12/5/12 11:32 AMNational Design Awards Gala Honors Richard Saul Wurman and Others - NYTimes.com
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A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, on page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: InDesign Awards, Age Is a Plus.
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other categories (there are 11 this year) — attended the event and were silent on thematter.
“This may be our collective professional guilt,” Mr. Bierut wrote. “After all, George W.Bush owes his election, at least in part, to one inept amateur graphic designer in PalmBeach County, Fla.”
There was no such disharmony at Pier 60. When Ross Lovegrove, the Welsh industrialdesigner, took to the podium to present the Design Mind award to Janine Benyus, thebiologist who invented biomimicry (design that looks to biology for inspiration), he madea great play of unfolding his notes, finally brandishing a large blue poster. “Vote forObama,” it read.
“Please?” Mr. Lovegrove added, to hearty applause.
Ms. Benyus proclaimed it “a hallelujah moment for biomimicry.” At least, she added, “forthose of us who choose to look to the furred, the winged, the exoskeletoned.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Wilkinson was describing his house to Mr. Boyko, likening it to a war zonebecause his son, Hayden, is now more than 20 months old and “full of testosterone.” Heand Hayden’s mother, Cheryl Scott, met three years ago at a Mindshare Los Angeles event.(Mindshare is one of a multitude of tiny TED knockoffs; it bills itself as “intellectualdebauchery.”)
In any case, Mr. Wilkinson said, he and Ms. Scott were both acting as wingmen to friendsthey had brought. Pointing out that Ms. Scott is 35, Mr. Wilkinson, 58, declared himselfrelieved that her mother was a year older than he was. “Americans are ashamed of gettingold,” he added.
Not here, not this crowd. Designers may celebrate fresh thinking, but they aren’t usuallyundone by the merely fresh-faced. Frank Gehry, 83, for whom Mr. Wilkinson said heworked for a year before being fired (“I wasn’t a good employee,” he said. “I didn’t like tobe told what to do.”), took the stage to give the lifetime achievement award to his bestfriend, Mr. Wurman, 77.
Then Mr. Wurman went into full curmudgeon mode, fiddling with the two mikes on thepodium and questioning the format of the night.
“We should have talked to each other longer,” he said. “This is the least interesting part.”
When he was done, Gloria Nagy, his wife, recalled how he had critiqued Mrs. Obama’sspeech during the awards luncheon in July. (The Huffington Post reported Mrs. Obama assaying Mr. Wurman was “quite dashing and sassy.”) Ms. Nagy said Mrs. Obama hadteased her by offering condolences and asking how she put up with her husband. Inanswer, Ms. Nagy said, she flashed what she called her “hazardous duty prize,” ablindingly huge diamond ring.
Some designs work subtly. Others are successful through sheer force.
12/5/12 11:32 AMNational Design Awards Gala Honors Richard Saul Wurman and Others - NYTimes.com
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Design Wurman, Richard Saul
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