questions:

To Bruce Mau:
What is it that you do? How does it fall under the cloud of design? Would it be appropriate to ask if you are really a designer, or is your practice as yet unnamed, maybe "pre-apocalyptic-engineering" would be more apt... Would you feel more comfortable at another school? Your definition of design seems to be more based on a process or a series of material selections and manufacturing decisions. What implications do you think your design process is supposed to have on the practice of invention in design?
To Zoe Ryan :
You've been attacked several times; but you seem to be refusing to defend yourself without aligning with a member of the panel. If you were to assume that none of these characters are on your side or willing to back you up, what would you say?
To Mr. Kipnis:
If design exists in order to affect the way that people understand the world, what are successful examples of this affective dasign?
To Aaron Betsky:
Your comments about design seem to threaten the practice in an almost opposite method from Mr. Mau; but with the same effect, mainly, that architecture, design, as a medium driven by realization and commodity could cease to exist if it becomes only an ephemeral grouping, in miniature, of what could be, or with the passing of time, what could have been. If your intention to demote architecture to an artistic medium in order to free up the thinking of the practice was regularized, how would you sleep at night?

Ben got the chair from the cool kid Konstantin Grcic...of whose work you see very few "limeted edition" collector style pieces. Grcic is one af a small sect of designers that sees themselves as industrial designers first--not artists. Interesting choice for the conversation.

Zoe Ryan picked Ross Lovegrove's 'go' chair. I watched Ross Lovegrove do a Ted talk and he really believes that his designs will save the world too, mau should've nabbed Zoe's chair-it wouldn't have been the rudest thing to happen to her that evening


Kipnis picked the chair by the most playful designer except maybe Starck


Bruce Mau-obviously not the "ego chair", Pietro Arosio is a much better designer than Mau, um..unless you use Mau's definition of design--you know, the one that made everybody cringe during the symposium...Anyway, Arosio's catalogue is full of Italian minimal design which is reight angle heavy and very very lean--he even has a contemporary update to Mies's daybed with no tufting-awesome!
Aaron Betsky ero (s) by phillipe Srtarck-Mr. Starck is actually a very intelligent designer I've read a very good description of his own work in phaidon book I think. I'll find it and qoute it soon

calendar of architectural events:

Borrowed from Lynn Becker...

new Blog

Blogs. Blogs are lame. Usually they're just the repitition of the same images on the internet that everyone else is talking about. I look at 8 architecture and design blogs daily and I usually see at least one repeated story or borrowed image. I'm not really disappointed with this cyclical sharing of informations; but the gossip-y nature of the communication does detract slightly from the medium. Anyway, in the spirit of blogs, I'm not going to pretend that I've authored anything I haven't. All images will be simply screenshots of whatever I see on my computer screen,and all text not written byme will be italicized. I do hope that some sort of discourse will come out of this blog; but let's find out and see.