Architecture for Humanity
Designed by Nicholas Gilliland and Gaston Tolila
Mother and Child Medical Center Ipuli, Tanzania
Established in 1999, the California nonprofit Architecture for Humanity uses design to help communities in need around the world. Two years ago, the group matched Neema Mgana, founder of the African Regional Youth Initiative, with Paris architects Nicholas Gilliland and Gaston Tolila and helped them plan a medical center for the remote village of Ipuli in rural Tanzania. Projects like this one “promote architects thinking about designing for the other 90 percent of the world’s population,” says Bloemink. “It’s part of the [drive for] social responsibility in architecture, which we’re hoping increases.” The center is under construction by local people and will open later this year, a testament to what collaborative design, community involvement, and a little money (the total cost is undisclosed) can achieve.
Abhinand Lath
SensiTile
While writing his master’s thesis on bamboo at the University of Michigan’s architecture school, Abhinand Lath read a medieval Japanese poem about the shifting colors in a bamboo forest. The poem inspired SensiTile, a technology that embeds fiber optics in tiles made of polymer, concrete, and resin, so that the tiles respond to movement and shadows with “ripples” of light on their surface. At the Triennial, a wall installation of SensiTiles allows visitors to try out their light-conducting properties.
Lath, based in Detroit, “is typical [of current designers] in terms of trying to embed new functionality, whether for aesthetic or practical reasons, into sheeting or façade materials,” McQuaid observes.
Ken Smith
Landscape Architect
Wall Flowers Cornerstone Café
Sonoma, Calif.
New York–based Ken Smith takes the idea of a man-made landscape to a new level, using artificial plants and flowers and other synthetic materials to playfully blur the line between nature and artifice. A 2005 installation by Smith at the Cornerstone Café in Sonoma, Calif., has craft-store sun flowers and ferns sprouting at right-angles from the wall, creating the impression of 3-D wallpaper. For his Triennial installation, draped over the front of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smith “plays with the actual physical structure of the mansion,” McQuaid says. “You have these wonderful pop-like flowers that cover the entrance façade, in stark contrast to what’s behind it.”
David Wiseman
Cherry Blossom Canopy
Triemial installation
California-based designer David Wiseman takes his inspiration from organic forms and aims, he says, to “bring nature indoors.” His early designs—some produced while still an undergraduate at RISD—include faceted, artfully imperfect vases of porcelain, glass, and bronze that bring to mind crystals or animal eggs.
For the Triennial, Wiseman decorated an entryway inside the museum with a canopy of not-quite-naturalistic cherry blossoms, all handcrafted from porcelain. “There’s been this current in design recently toward a more baroque interest in ornament,” says Hodge. “It’s a reaction to minimalism.”
Will Wright
The Sims
Seven years ago, Will Wright’s company, Maxis, released The Sims, a game that allowed players to create and control a family of simulated humans (“sims”) endowed with artificial intelligence. Players can watch their sims fight, play chess, or canoodle in a hot tub—all within houses that players design themselves, choosing everything from the floor plan to the microwave.
Maxis’ 2004 update, The Sims 2, introduced digital DNA, allowing players to track sims over generations. “You create a room, you furnish it, you decorate it—then you see what happens,” says Ellen Lupton (whose preteen son is a Sims fan). “Playing a game like that gives one greater respect and understanding of design as [being] not just about surfaces and décor, but actually influencing how people behave.”
Electroland
Lumen
Triennial installation
In their collaboration as design team Electroland, architect Cameron McNall and interactive designer Damon Seeley create environments that respond—often uncannily—to the people moving through them.
At the Cooper-Hewitt, Electroland has designed an installation of fluorescent lights that runs up the staircase from the first floor to the second. As a visitor walks up the stairs, the lights come on, but in a sequence that’s not wholly predictable. “It’s a social idea—that it’s activated by users and responds to users, but also has its own behavior,” explains Lupton.
“Electroland is trying to create a more transparent relationship between the public and technology,” she says. “It’s pointing out that the buildings are always watching.”
Deborah Adler
Target ClearRx
A few years ago, when her grandmother accidentally took the wrong medicine, Deborah Adler—then an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts in New York—started looking at prescription pill bottles. She noticed that information got lost when it was wrapped around a cylinder, so she designed a D-shaped alternative, along with other improvements: a readable, logically ordered label; color coding; and a slot to hold a patient information card.
Adler’s design caught the notice of Target, and the company paired her with Klaus Rosburg, an industrial designer. Adler and Rosburg refined her design into a U-shaped, cap-down bottle, and in 2005, Target pharmacies adopted it nationwide.
