In the late 1920s, three grand and progressive New York ladies, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., decided the world needed a museum devoted to modern art. They hired Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., as director, and in 1929 — an inauspicious year — the Museum of Modern Art opened to the public.
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“The starting point of Teneo,” say designers Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck, “was challenging the storage archetype and saying, ‘Well, why can’t we do this any other way?’” They answered their question by looking at storage from an entirely new perspective. This year, Teneo storage furniture earned the coveted Gold award from the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) in the Office and Productivity category.
The next time you brush your teeth and leave the water running, think about some of these facts that point to a worldwide water shortage.
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Not everyone gets to step out from their workplace and pinch off some fresh dill to top their leftover salmon at lunchtime. Or bring tomatoes home from work for dinner. Unless you work at our Design Yard facility in Holland, Michigan, where a group of employees have nurtured a garden full of veggies, herbs, and perennials for all employees to enjoy.
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Bill Stumpf, designer of the Equa (with Don Chadwick), Aeron (with Don Chadwick) and Embody (with Jeff Weber) chairs, Ethospace (with Jack Kelley), and corporate friend to Herman Miller for over 30 years, would be happy with the sculpture recently installed in his honor at Herman Miller’s Design Yard facility.
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Photo credit: Kellar Autumn
Kellar Autumn, Professor of Biology at Lewis & Clark College, is best known for his discovery of the mechanism of adhesion of geckos. He is the leader of the Gecko Team, a collaboration between L&C, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSB. His research focuses on the mechanisms and evolution of animal locomotion, and on developing biologically inspired materials and machines.
In 2005, Kellar’s lab discovered that gecko setae are the first self-cleaning adhesive known to science. Why might anyone care? Because the gecko adhesive system is perhaps the first truly smart adhesive, which means gecko-inspired smart adhesives may revolutionize adhesives and assembly techniques. In the design world, this matters.
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“Art is only art when it is synonymous with living.” — Alexander Girard
Alexander Girard’s playful patterns and bright colors were a breath of fresh air into the otherwise stodgy and often colorless domestic world of post-war America.
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Photo credit: NASA
When Hurricane Ike hit Beaumont, Texas, in 2008, it made rubble out of what had been a chemical plant for a major oil company. The wind had hardly died down before the question came, “How fast can you help us get up and running again?”
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There are many definitions of a classic. The Eames Aluminum Group, the 1958 creation of Charles and Ray Eames, meets all of them, including the ability to take a bit of tinkering in stride. In this case, it’s the addition of a pneumatic height adjustment.
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When I think about resilience, I think of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, who held her family together through death, homelessness, unemployment, and hunger. I think of Ishmael Beah, who lost his humanity as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war but later regained it, wrote a memoir, and now serves as an advocate for the rehabilitation of child soldiers. And I think of my friends Ann and Jim. Within a span of 18 months, they separated and reconciled, she learned she had cancer and underwent treatment, and he lost his job.
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