ideas + images

curated by sierra gonzalez 

I don’t believe in the myth of design geniuses, working on their own without a community to support and feed them. It’s lazy, and gives the wrong impression about designing. We need more in-depth analysis of certain periods, regions or movements, with different voices, influences, background information. Otherwise it reduces a piece of graphic design to an image, and it’s not that, it’s a process, embedded in a society.

Sara de Bondt, graphic designer [Who cares about graphic design history? | Eye]

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Now’s not the time to be asking donors, who have so many other worries, to tell me exactly what they’re going to do in January.

Katherine French, director of the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA, in a Boston Globe article profiling small arts organizations worried about the recent economic downturn. This article follows earlier reports of big-name financial failures and their big-time philanthropic histories. (thx again to unbeige’s follow-up)

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The renovated California Academy of Sciences opens this weekend in Golden Gate Park.  Some quick links on the Renzo Piano-designed building:

A Building That Blooms and Grows, Balancing Nature and Civilization

Nicolai Ouroussoff’s review in the New York Times

The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, [Piano] seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.

Green Architecture’s Grand Experiment

A three-part story by Metropolis

“The old model of the natural history museum is the search for eternal truths,” [former Academy scientist Patrick] Kociolek says, referring to traditional exhibits such as dioramas, which can remain unchanged for generations. “To me, that’s the antithesis of science. Science is not this collection of facts that you put on a wall. It’s a very dynamic process. It’s about new hypotheses, new data.”

Sausalito landscape architect SWA Group builds living roof at California Academy of Sciences in S.F.

Profile of the landscape architects who designed the building’s green roof in the Marin Independent Journal

“Science is more influential and relevant to our daily lives than ever before, and natural history museums must deal head-on with issues of the 21st century,” said Gregory Farrington, the academy’s executive director. “Our goal was to create a new facility that would not only hold powerful exhibits but serve as one itself, inspiring visitors to conserve natural resources and help sustain the diversity of life on Earth.”

Above photo: Tim Griffith

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The Culture of Wall Street

What does the collapse of Lehman Brothers (and the buyout of Merrill Lynch) mean to the cultural institutions they support?

  • Lehman Brothers is taking bids for Neuberger Berman, “one of the harbingers of the finance industry’s recent infatuation with emerging art,” according to Artnet.  In 2004, Neuberger Berman organized a travelling show of some of its assets, including works by Andreas Gursky, Takashi Murakami, and Neo Rausch.  Artnet speculates, “Whether the new owner keeps the art collection or would consider auctioning it off into the hot contemporary art market remains to be seen.”
  • Lehman’s generous donations to museums worldwide* means that these cultural institutions will lose a significant source of support.  According to the New York Sun, “Kathleen Fuld, the wife of the Lehman Brothers chairman and CEO, Richard Fuld, is a vice chairman [of its board]. Lehman Brothers has been a corporate member of the museum, and the Fulds have made significant donations of both money and art.”  It is unclear whether these personal relationships to the MoMA will continue, or if any outstanding pledges are on the books.
  • The performing arts are also losing benefactors: both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch pledged $3 million each to New York’s Lincoln Center redevelopment project.  The New York Sun spoke with a spokesman for Lincoln Center, who said that both institutions had been on time with their payments but did not disclose how much of their pledged gifts are still outstanding. “The president of Lincoln Center, Reynold Levy, said he didn’t know whether any outstanding portion of Lehman Brothers’ commitment would materialize.”  Lehman has also supported the Apollo Theater Foundation and the School of American Ballet.

The recent economic turmoil affects many organizations and individuals, but its reach extends into communities less often linked with Wall Street; Philip Borhoff’s Bloomberg story has more examples of Lehman’s potential effect on the non-profit sector (Borhoff reports that Lehman spent $39 million in charitable giving budget last year).  It’s unclear exactly how deeply the recent bankruptcy-buyout-bailout news will impact cultural institutions, but America’s community of privately supported arts and education organizations will be likely feeling the crunch.  [thx to UnBeige for the heads-up]

*Here’s a sampling.  In New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Asia Society, International Center of Photography, Museum of Arts and Design.  Elsewhere in the U.S.: Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Miami Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco MoMA.  In Europe: Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Art, Musée du Louvre.

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40 Years of New York Design

http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/blog/40-years-of-new-york-design-event/

This event stars two of the three main players in my master’s thesis: MoMA (represented by Paola Antonelli) and Moss (of course represented by Murray Moss himself).  If I still lived in New York, I would be first in line at the doors.  From Objectified:

New York Magazine’s design editor Wendy Goodman and a panel featuring MoMA curator (and Objectified cast member) Paola Antonelli, hotelier Andre Balazs, architect Richard Meier, and designer Murray Moss discuss the city’s influence on their work.

Tuesday, September 23, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
65 Fifth Ave.
Swayduck Auditorium
New York City
Free, doors at 6pm.

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Tim Brown's IDEO blog

http://designthinking.ideo.com/

Via Bruce Nussbaum (BusinessWeek), Tim Brown’s blog on design thinking and design for social impact.

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Celebrating the Negative: Photographs by John Loengard, recently published by Etherton Gallery, showcases the negatives of 18 iconic 19th- and 20th-century photographs. The hands holding the negative of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare St. Lazare belong to George Fèvre, who works often with Cartier-Bresson’s images.

For safekeeping, the negative was cut from a strip of 35mm film at the start of World War II. Sprocket holes are missing on one side. Possibly the film was manufactured without them—or possibly someone has cut them off. Asked about this, Cartier-Bresson replies, “I swallowed them.”

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I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them. Everyone asks me, ‘Are you bringing technology to RISD?’ I tell them, no, I’m bringing RISD to technology.

John Maeda, 16th president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in an article about some of his goals and plans for the arts and design school. [WSJ]

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Three finalists for “The Color of Palo Alto.” The public art project by Samuel Yates used digital photographs of every parcel of Palo Alto, CA to determine an “average mean color.” The project’s website will allow visitors to vote on their preferred shade of “Palo Alto,” which will then be converted into paint colors for popular use. Allison Arieff contrasts the project with homeowners associations that regulate architecture, landscaping or decorative elements in their neighborhoods: “Regulating exterior paint colors is another popular move, one that flies in the face of what helps make neighborhoods diverse and interesting—variety!”

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As a designer, I feel a responsibility to make positive social impact… Designers are a community of activists, not aestheticians.

Valerie Casey, designer, activist and author of the Designers Accord manifesto [GOOD]

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