Cooper-Hewitt 2009 National Design Awards, Buildings, Projects, News, Design

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards 2009

American Architecture Prize, USA

Jun 25, 2009

National Design Awards White House Ceremony

First Lady Michelle Obama Celebrates the National Design Awards with Public Programs and White House Ceremony

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum today announced First Lady Michelle Obama will celebrate the 10th annual National Design Awards Friday, July 24, with education programs in Washington, D.C., followed by a White House ceremony for the winners and finalists of the 2009 awards. Mrs. Obama will serve as honorary patron for the awards program.

Launched at the White House in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the annual National Design Awards celebrate design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world. The awards are accompanied each year by a variety of public education programs, including special events, panel discussions and workshops.

Several of the National Design Award winners will be part of a series of free concurrent public programs starting at 9:30 a.m. July 24. Envisioned as a series of dialogues about the current state of design, winners will be paired for hour-long conversations. Members of the public can learn more about attending the programs by visiting the Web site www.nationaldesignawards.org.

“Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is honored to receive the patronage of First Lady Michelle Obama for its National Design Awards program,” said Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. “The National Design Awards recognize and promote design excellence, innovation and public impact, and the support of Mrs. Obama will immeasurably increase national awareness of design’s important role.”

The awards recognize extraordinary contributions to design in 10 categories: Lifetime Achievement, Design Mind, Corporate and Institutional Achievement, Architecture Design, Communication Design, Fashion Design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, Landscape Design and Product Design. The award recipients also will be honored at a gala dinner Oct. 22 at Cipriani in New York.

30 Apr 2009

Cooper-Hewitt 2009 National Design Awards – Winners

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Announces Winners and Finalists of the 10th Annual National Design Awards

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will celebrate outstanding achievement in design this fall with its 10th annual National Design Awards program. Today, Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Warwick Thompson announced the winners and finalists of the 2009 National Design Awards, which recognize excellence across a variety of disciplines. The Award recipients will be honored at a gala dinner Oct. 22 at Cipriani in New York.

“This year’s winners reflect the design climate of the times,” said Thompson. “We are in an era that demands public commitment and work that strives for change and the responsible use of resources. The public impact of the daily work of the nominees demonstrates the far-reaching effect of design innovation in every sector.”

The 2009 National Design Awards nominations were solicited from a committee of more than 2,500 designers, educators, journalists, cultural figures and corporate leaders from every state in the nation. Nominees must have at least seven years of experience in order to be nominated, and winners are selected based on the level of excellence, innovation and public impact of their body of work.

This year’s jury—a diverse group of former National Design Award winners convened by Cooper-Hewitt—reviewed the nominations and chose Lifetime Achievement and Design Mind recipients, and selected winners and finalists in the Corporate and Institutional Achievement, Architecture Design, Communication Design, Fashion Design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, Landscape Design and Product Design categories. This year the new Interaction Design category was added to the Awards, celebrating exceptional work using digital technology.

First launched at the White House in 2000 as a project of the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards were established to promote excellence and innovation in design. The Awards are accompanied each year by a variety of public education programs, including special events, panel discussions and workshops. A Winners’ Panel will take place Oct. 20 during National Design Week.

Cooper-Hewitt’s fourth annual National Design Week will be held Oct. 18-24. A series of public programs celebrating design will be held at the museum and online with the People’s Design Award, which gives the public an opportunity to nominate and vote for a design of their choice by logging onto www.cooperhewitt.org. The 2009 National Design Week and the National Design Awards are sponsored by Target.

National Design Award 2009 Winners

Recipients with architectural relationship

Corporate and Institutional Achievement : Walker Art Center

photo: Paul Warchol
Walker Art Center – building by Herzog & de Meuron

The Corporate and Institutional Achievement Award recognizes a corporation or institution that uses design as a strategic tool of its mission and helps to advance the relationship between design and quality of life. The 2009 Award is presented, for the first time, to a not-for-profit cultural institution, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Through hundreds of groundbreaking exhibitions, publications and presentations by designers worldwide, the Walker presents the value of design to the general public. Its in-house design studio—widely regarded as a leader in contemporary cultural branding—is the recipient of more than 100 awards and operates one of the longest-running fellowship programs in the United States.

The Walker actively commissions cutting-edge designs to create new buildings, landscapes, fonts and interactive technologies from leading and emerging designers. The Walker’s commitment to design has been evident since the museum’s inception as a multidisciplinary art center in 1940: design is a central voice in strategic planning, an essential component of its multidisciplinary programming and a vital force in shaping the museum’s identity.

Finalists in the Corporate and Institutional Achievement category are Dwell Magazine, the San Francisco-based publication that has become a proponent of “small living,” and Heath Ceramics, which has hand-produced quality stoneware with a focus on sustainability since 1948.

Architecture Design : SHoP Architects

Dunescape, P.S. 1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY, 2000.

photo: SHoP Architects

The Architecture Design Award, which recognizes work in commercial, public or residential architecture, is given to SHoP Architects. The 60-person practice, founded by its five principals in 1996, has been a leader in the transformation of intricate theoretical design into easily understood construction models by rethinking architectural practice.

This think tank has pushed the designer’s realm past form-making and into software design, branding, real estate development, construction and the co-development of new sustainable technologies. As both practitioners and educators, their commitment to challenging the entire process of building has proven to a generation of architects that beauty and technological proficiency are not mutually exclusive.

Their current work includes a two-mile waterfront park along New York’s East River, projects for the Fashion Institute of Technology and Goldman Sachs, both in Manhattan, and Google in Mountain View, Calif. Recently completed projects include Garden Street Lofts in Hoboken, N.J., Hangil Book House in Seoul, South Korea, The Porter House in New York and SanLiTun in Beijing.

Finalists in the Architecture Design category are Architecture Research Office, a New York firm led by principals Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky, FAIA, recognized for its innovative use of materials and careful attention to context and detail, and Michael Maltzan, principal of Los Angeles-based firm Michael Maltzan Architecture with a large roster of institutional, commercial and museum clients.

Interior Design : Tsao & McKown Architects

The Interior Design Award is awarded to Tsao & McKown Architects. Partners Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown have demonstrated that the design of environments can best be served when building design and interior design are conceived as a whole, as evidenced by the unique sense of seamlessness between outside and inside exhibited in their many celebrated projects.

Their work includes: architecture and interiors for Andre Balazs’ 47-story William Beaver House in New York, Riverlofts condominiums in New York, and Suntec City, a 6-million-square-foot public/private development in Singapore; architecture and urban master plans for large-scale projects in Budapest, Hungary, Berlin, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and cities in China; interiors for cultural and fashion leaders Ian Schrager, Josie Natori, Joyce Ma, Peter Morton and Geoffrey Beene; exhibition design for Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, McGill University’s McCord Museum and New York’s Jewish Museum; and product and furniture design for Nan Swid Designs, Donghia, The Robin Hood Foundation, World Studio and Japanese cosmetics master Shu Uemura.

Finalists in the Interior Design category are Ali Tayar, principal of Parallel Design in New York, and Work AC, a New York firm specializing in modern buildings, retail installations and urban planning projects.

Landscape Design : Hood Design

The recipient of the Landscape Design Award, which is presented for work in urban planning or park and garden design, is Hood Design. Hood Design was established by Walter Hood in 1992, in Oakland, Calif. The firm is committed to issues that address the re-construction of urban landscapes within towns and cities. Hood Design’s approach is multidimensional, exploring the role of specific landscape typologies and topologies that together reinforce and re-make landscapes that are specific to place and people.

Hood is a professor and former chair of the Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning program at the University of California, Berkeley. His area of teaching and research, American urban landscape history and SI-174-2009 6 design, is intertwined with office practice creating a didactic approach to projects. Hood’s projects include the landscape for the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Poplar Street, a green boulevard in the heart of downtown Macon, Ga.

Finalists in the Landscape Design category are Andrea Cochran, principal of Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture in San Francisco; and Rios Clementi Hale Studios, also California-based, dedicated to an interdisciplinary design approach.

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards 2009 Jury

Composed of previous winners of the National Design Awards, including:
John Maeda, chair, president, Rhode Island School of Design
Stephen Frykholm, vice president and creative director, Herman Miller
Michael Maharam, principal, Maharam
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, Google Inc.
Sigi Moeslinger, partner, Antenna Design
Monica Ponce de Leon, dean, University of Michigan (TCAUP) & principal, Office dA
Ralph Rucci, principal, Chado Ralph Rucci
Margaret Stewart, user experience manager, YouTube, a subsidiary of Google Inc.
Marc Tsurumaki, principal and co-founder, Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis
Michael Van Valkenburgh, principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates

National Design Week

The museum will offer free admission to all visitors and provide a range of online resources celebrating design throughout National Design Week, which will take place Oct. 18-24. National Design Week aims to promote a better understanding of the role that design plays in all aspects of daily life.

In addition to hosting a Teen Design Fair and Winners’ Panel, the program will reach school teachers and their students nationally, in the classroom and online at Cooper-Hewitt’s Educator Resource Center (www.educatorresourcecenter.org). The site features more than 250 lesson plans aligned to national and state standards that demonstrate how the design process can enhance the teaching of all subjects and features discussion boards that provide a forum for educators to exchange ideas.

The People’s Design Award invites the public to express their views on what constitutes good design, whether an everyday object, a design classic or an architectural landmark, from Sept. 22 through Oct. 20 at www.cooperhewitt.org. The winning design will be announced Oct. 22 at the National Design Awards Gala. In addition, the museum’s Web site now features the year-round “Design Across America” clickable map listing design-oriented events throughout the country. The chair of the Oct. 22 gala is Richard Meier, and the vice chairs are Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie, Amita Chatterjee, Madeleine Rudin Johnson and W. Bruce Johnson, Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer, Lauren Zalaznick and Judy Francis Zankel.

About Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Founded in 1897 by Amy, Eleanor, and Sarah Hewitt—granddaughters of industrialist Peter Cooper—as part of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the museum has been a branch of the Smithsonian since 1967. The museum presents compelling perspectives on the impact of design on daily life through active educational programs, exhibitions and publications.

Location: Washington D.C., USA