Cooper-Hewitt awards go to designers of High Line, birding center and designer shops
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The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Thursday announced the winners of its annual design awards – this year recognizing people and firms that are “committed to shaping how we live through design,” said the museum’s director Bill Moggridge.
Works by the winners and finalists included housing in Pennsylvania for apple pickers,
Manhattan’s new High Line park and structures for the nonprofit Make It Right Foundation in New Orleans. Kieran Timberlake, winner in the architecture category, has been chosen to build the new U.S. Embassy in London. Its Loblolly House in Maryland is pictured above.
“The context in which designers and design thinkers operate is expanding all the time, as evidenced by the work of these award winners. These design pioneers are committed to shaping how we live through design, and their work truly responds to the pressing issues of the day,” Moggridge said.
Read more about the winners after the jump.
Architecture Design:
The architecture winner, Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake, was founded in 1984 by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake and is noted for its integration of research with design and for an environmental ethic. Among its projects are buildings for Cornell, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Loblolly House, in Taylors Island, Md., is a single-family home on the Chesapeake Bay that sits between a grove of loblolly pines and the bay. The foundations are timber piles, and the house is composted of off-site fabricated elements, according to the firm’s website.
The firm designed Cellophane House, a five-story, fabricated dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for a 2008 show. Watch the house being assembled here.
Finalists in the category were Lake|Flato Architects and Design Corps.
Among the projects of LakeFlato, a Texas-based firm led by David Lake and Ted Flato, is the World Birding Center in Texas, at left. Design Corps, a North Carolina nonprofit organization, has as its mission providing architecture services to those traditionally not served by it. It has designed housing for hurricane victims and farm laborers. Below is a rendering for a Gulf Coast raised house in Mississippi.
Landscape Design:
James Corner Field Operations is the winner of the category, presented for work in urban planning or park and garden design. James Corner’s New York-based firm has had projects including the design of the popular High Line in New York City, below.
The High Line was originally built in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off the streets. Section 1 has opened as a city-owned public park. When all sections are done, it will run 1 1/2 miles through Manhattan’s West Side. It combines concrete paths with plants and seating.
Finalists in the category were Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, a
firm that seamlessly integrates landscape, art and architecture, and Stoss Landscape Urbanism, a Boston-based studio that practices at the juncture of landscape architecture, urban design and planning.
Above, Cochran’s Hayes Valley roof garden in San Francisco. Below, Stoss’ rendering for a plan for the Mt. Tabor Reservoir in Portland, Ore.
Interior Design
The winner, William Sofield, is known for his unique take on modernism. His Studio Sofield was founded in 1996 as an interdisciplinary design collective. His projects have included more than 900 retail boutiques around the world for Tom Ford, Bottega Veneta (above), Yves St. Laurent and Gucci and corporate offices for Soho Grand Hotel in New York. The finalists were Clive Wilkinson Architects, a California-based firm, and Aidlin Darling Design, a multidisciplinary firm that bridges the demands of artistic endeavor, functional pragmatics, environmental responsibility and financial considerations.
Wilkinson’s projects include the headquarters in Los Angeles for Pallotta TeamWorks (left), which created multi-day event concepts in which participants walked or biked long distances on behalf of causes such as AIDS or cancer.
Aidlin Darling’s projects include the San Francisco home, below left. Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is the country’s only museum devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Founded in 1897, the museum has been a branch of the Smithsonian since 1967. Its fifth annual National Design Week will be held Oct. 9-17, and the winners will be honored Oct. 14.
-- Mary MacVean
