Share this on

How NeoCon Came to Be

Cindy Coleman -- Interior Design, 6/11/2003 12:00:00 AM

This year NeoCon celebrates its 35th birthday. Think of the Mart in 1968: emblazoned with paisley ties, big sideburns and Mary Quant everywhere. I wasn't there, but my husband Neil Frankel, a member of the first year's steering committee, was and has some interesting recollections on the subject...

NeoCon: n.1. National Exhibition of Contract Furnishings. 2. Neo-pref. new; recent. + Contract.

"It's Chicago, 1968, and James Bidwell is chief of the Merchandise Mart which, until this point, has mainly a regional influence," says Neil Frankel, AIA, FIIDA. "The contract design industry was in its infancy then; ISD, based in Chicago, was just emerging as the first stand-alone interior architecture firm to focus on contract design, and Art Gensler had just formed his epochal firm, Gensler, Inc., in San Francisco, to offer space-planning services to business clients, while other architecture firms like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Perkins & Will and Holabird & Root were beginning to build and expand their contract interior design practices."

This was also the year that Chicago is called Czechago, thanks partly to the then-Mayor Daley's handling of the political riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Social issues were top of mind, and change was in the air, which, as Interior Design's beloved senior editor, Monica Geran recalls, was a rather bitter cold air that year.

Bidwell, a forward thinking businessman, had an idea to assemble a leading-edge steering committee of architects, designers, editors and publishers, to design a program to attract a broad national and international audience to the Merchandise Mart.

This was a significant departure from the regional role of the Mart. Bidwell, some of you will recall, was an early adopter of technology. He owned a computer, which he used successfully to convince steering committee hopefuls of his futuristic business plan.

The committee embraced a three-part strategy to encourage designers, manufactures, and dealers to attend. Education, new products introductions, and international design talent became the three focal points around which the design community would come together, they decided.

35 years later NeoCon still keeps the contract industry infused with excitement. Over the years, it has also helped the design industry evolve into a new definition of itself as a professional group, a truly global community of designers, with an enormous array of internationally designed products to select from.