2011 Milestones
Interior Design Editor 1 -- Interior Design, 12/22/2011 5:43:16 PM
From The Oregonian: Architect and urban designer Greg Baldwin wasn't known for a landmark building, project or even a particular aesthetic style. But if you drive or walk around Portland, you can't help running into something Baldwin designed or help plan, including the MAX system, transit mall, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Eliot Tower and Simon and Helen Director Park.
Athletic and Ivy League-educated, the native Portlander wasn't the Hollywood stereotype of an egomaniacal architect, but a warm, supportive builder of partnerships who helped cement Portland's reputation as a process-loving city that encourages public participation.
Baldwin, 70, died June 25 from a brain tumor, leaving behind his wife, Joan, and many relatives, friends, colleagues and admirers. He also leaves a legacy that has affected all Portlanders, though many may not realize it.
From PRWeb.com: "Interface and the world have lost a great man today," said Dan Hendrix, President and Chief Executive Officer of Interface, announcing that Ray C. Anderson lost a 20-month battle with cancer today. Surrounded by his family, Ray died at his home in Atlanta.
Dan went on to say, "Ray was and continues to be our company's heart and soul. His iconic spirit and pioneering vision are not only his legacy, but our future. We will honor Ray by keeping his vision alive and the Company on course."
Ray's story is now legend: the 1994 "spear in the chest" epiphany he experienced when he first read Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, seeking inspiration for a speech to an Interface task force on the company's environmental vision. Seventeen years and a sea change later, Ray estimated that Interface is more than half-way towards the vision of "Mission Zero," the journey no one would have imagined for the company, or for the petroleum-intensive industry of carpet manufacturing, which has been forever changed by his vision.
From The New York Times: Keith Irvine, an interior designer who brought a sense of wit and unpredictability to the English country-house style that won the allegiance of clients like Jacqueline Onassis, Rex and Lady Harrison, and Pat and William F. Buckley Jr., died on May 31 in Carmel, N.Y. He was 82.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said his wife, Chippy.
Mr. Irvine learned his trade at the hands of John Fowler of Colefax & Fowler, the firm that popularized the English country-house style after World War.
From the New York Times: Eva Zeisel, a ceramic artist whose elegant, eccentric designs for dinnerware in the 1940s and '50s helped to revolutionize the way Americans set their tables, died on Friday in New City, N.Y. She was 105.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Jean Richards.
Ms. Zeisel (pronounced ZY-sel), along with designers like Mary and Russel Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, brought the clean, casual shapes of modernist design into middle-class American homes with furnishings that encouraged a postwar desire for fresh, less formal styles of living.
Ms. Zeisel's work, which ultimately spanned nine decades, was at the heart of what the museum promoted as "good design": domestic objects that were beautiful as well as useful and whose beauty lent pleasure to daily life.
"She brought form to the organicism and elegance and fluidity that we expect of ceramics today, reaching as many people as possible," said Paola Antonelli, a curator of architecture and design at the museum. "It's easy to do something stunning that stays in a collector's cabinet. But her designs reached people at the table, where they gather."
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