Virginia DuBrucq likes to think big. She files her biggest thoughts on a disk labeled "goals."
"My goal writing is a form of creative visualization," she says. "The process of writing helps me see." With only six or seven entries, her file is not to be confused with a wish list. "I'm careful what I put in it. It's realistic."
Her reality, however, has a certain loftiness to it. For example, one goal: "Through design, to achieve a regional expression of this area."
This "area," roughly defined, is the Rocky Mountain West-particularly its urban centers, so influenced by both the West and East Coasts, she thinks, they've lost their own identity.
"We need to celebrate our history of individualism, our culture of self reliance. And design-of everything-is the key." In typical understatement, she calls this goal "a challenge."
Virginia DuBrucq also likes to think small. She likes the details, of, say, balancing the colors and textures of a dinner she's prepared for friends.
In contrast to the expanse of her talents, Virginia works-and prepares dinners-in her 975-square-foot Denver home. There she tends to the details she so enjoys, the details of a profession that defies singular definition.
She's a licensed architect and an artist; a designer of chairs and neon lamps and children's modular furniture; a teacher and lecturer; a champion of "reusing, recycling, and reducing." She's as practiced working in a metal or woodworking shop as she is designing the interior architecture of a downtown restaurant, a public library, or a high-rise office building.
"Designing a city and designing a safety pinit's all the same kind of creative process," she says.
Virginia DuBrucq is comfortable with such leaps in logic. Nothing seems out of reach, whether she's dealing with details or grand, long-range plans.
That confidence, that comfort in setting high expectations for herself is evident in a goal she wrote in 1982: "To design a product for Herman Miller." |
Herman Miller Designs
Awards/Recognition
1982 Progressive Architecture citation in International Furniture Design Competition
1984 Women in Design International award in Industrial Design
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