Design Diversity: Cooper Hewitt 2020 Awards – Part 1

The 21st annual National Design Awards from the Cooper Hewitt Museum were announced recently with a virtual gala that celebrated “the power of design to change the world.” This year’s honors differ from last year’s not only in their necessarily online announcement, but in some revision of its categories. The 2020 honors are going to nine individuals or teams, vs. twelve last year. Missing this time are the awards for Lifetime Achievement, Corporate & Institutional Achievement, Interaction Design (which may not be widely understood), and Interior Design (which we hope will return next year).

These awards continue to demonstrate the diversity of what constitutes “design,” as well as the increasing diversity among those who do it. The work of some winners may not be products at all, but rather processes such as the funding of design efforts or the mitigation of pollution. And, as always, some of these awards go the designers in specific areas (communications, landscape architecture, et al), while others recognize a stage in the designers’ evolution (this year’s Emerging Designer and Design Visionary, both recently added to the program).

As in past years, nominations for the awards were solicited from a wide network of “design experts and enthusiasts” who are not identified publicly. The final selections were made by a jury that this year included: Sigi Ahl, creative director, Eileen Fisher Waste No More; Angela Brooks, principal, Brooks + Scarpa Architects; Shane Coen, founder, Coen + Partners; Arem Duplessis, group creative director, Apple Inc.; Ben Ebel, experience design, Michelin North America; Toni L. Griffin, principal and founder, Urban American City; and Jae Park, vice president, G Suite UX Design, Google.

The 2020 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award recipients will be presented in Officeinsight in two installments – five of them this week and the other four – equally honored – winners in next week’s issue. Here, in no particular order, are the first five.

Landscape: OJB

OJB Landscape Architecture. Photo: Courtesy of OJB Landscape Architecture

Founded by James Burnett in Houston in 1989, OJB Landscape Architecture is especially notable for the urban parks it has created or revitalized – in Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Omaha, Chicago, and elsewhere. The firm’s website states, “Transforming public spaces is central to our mission.” Among their most notable works are the Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, on a 5.2-acre deck over a freeway, and the restoration and enhancement of the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City, a rare instance of such an amenity in a city core.

OJB’s skills are demonstrated as well in a wide variety of cultural, commercial, residential, and mixed-use developments – most of them accessible to the public — all over the US and in Mexico. These range in scale from expansive corporate campuses to rooftops and other found spaces at urban workplaces. Besides its Houston headquarters, the firm has offices in Dallas, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Boston.

OJB Landscape Architecture, Overview of Klyde Warren Park, a 5.2-acre deck park that replaces a major section of freeway and connects the cultural districts of downtown (Dallas, Texas, 2012). Photo: © Payne Wingate
OJB Landscape Architecture, Street level view of Klyde Warren Park (Dallas, Texas, 2012). Photo: © Liane Swanson
Hall Wines (St. Helena, California, 2014). Originally an industrial winemaking vineyard with metal buildings and remnants of historic structures, Hall Wines has been reimagined as a destination that celebrates the vineyard landscape and welcomes visitors in an immersive garden experience. Photo: Courtesy of Hall Wines
Sunnylands Center and Gardens, Rancho Mirage CA, 2011. Nine-acre desert garden on Annenberg estate. Includes circular event lawn. Photo: © Sybille Alllgaier.

Fashion Design: TELFAR

Telfar Clemens. Photo: © Ari Markopoulos.

The fashion brand TELFAR was named for its founder Telfar Clemens, a 35-year-old New York-born Liberian-American. He founded TELFAR at the age of 18, while still living with his parents in Queens and studying at Pace University. His company is now headquartered in the fashion-appropriate Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Identifying as “openly queer,” he has committed to designing only unisex apparel and accessories.

It took about a decade of low-income persistence before the larger design world began to recognize TELFAR. In 2017, Clemens introduced uniforms for 400 White Castle franchises, and in the same year received a $400,000 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize. The company has often introduced new lines in unconventional settings, such as a mosh pit with live performers on stage. And it attracted attention with “outfits” designed for musician Solange Knowles and accompanying dancers performing in the atrium of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. TELFAR’s best-known design to date may be its shopping bag made of vegan leather embossed with the company’s T logo.

TELFAR, White Castle Uniform (New York, New York, 2017). Photo: © Jayson Keeling
TELFAR, Telfar bag, editorial image from New York Magazine (New York, New York, 2020). Photo: Justin French
TELFAR, No One Is Innocent, t-shirt to raise money for prison reform, and A seat at the Table Chair Photo: © TELFAR

Climate Action: Sponge Park

Susannah Drake. Photo © Ann Billingsley

Introduced this year, the Climate Action award honors the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park in Brooklyn, NY for its contribution to addressing the global crisis. Designed by DLANDStudio, this new form of green infrastructure demonstrates a way to capture and clean the storm water runoff that contaminates urban streams – and ultimately oceans – worldwide. Completed in 2016, Sponge Park helps to ameliorate the pollution of the canal, a notorious Superfund site contaminated for more than a century by petroleum products and sewer overflows.

The pollution treatment process at Sponge Park involves directing excess water into a replicable ecosystem where plants and microorganisms in the soil absorb and break down contaminants. The modular system developed and proven effective here is intended for wider implementation along the waterways of New York and beyond.

DLANDstudio , view of the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park looking East (Brooklyn, New York, 2016). Photo: © DLANDstudio
DLANDstudio, diagram showing how Gowanus Canal Sponge Park works (Brooklyn, New York, 2016). Photo: © DLANDstudio
DLANDstudio, the myriad of agencies with jurisdiction over each element of the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park (Brooklyn, New York, 2016). Photo: © DLANDstudio

Communication Design: Scott Dadich

Scott Dadich. Photo © Mark Mahaney.

Winner of many awards for publication design, Scott Dadich may have had his broadest public impact as creative director, then editor-in-chief, of Wired magazine. His skills have been more widely applied, however, to the design of books and films, iphones and their apps, even sneakers. He is currently co-founder and Co-CEO with Patrick Godfrey of Godfrey Dadich Partners, founded in 2017, a firm “that helps organizations tell better stories” in terms of corporate strategies and brand marketing. The firm has advised such organizations as Nike, Apple, the Obama Foundation, and such publications as National Geographic and The New Yorker.

Dadich has written widely about design. In an essay entitled “Wrong Theory” published in a design-themed issue of Wired, he wrote that “you need to know the rules, really master their nuance and application, before you can break them.”

WIRED magazine, cover of third annual design issue, featuring “Wrong Theory” essay by Dadich, 2014. Photo: Courtesy of Scott Dadich.
Scott Dadich, Cover of a special edition of WIRED magazine, guest-edited by President Barack Obama while Dadich was Editor in Chief (November 2016). Photo: Courtesy of Scott Dadich
Abstract, the Art of Design, subtitled Go Inside the Minds of the World’s Greatest Designers, Netflix original series by Dadich, 2015-to-present. Photo: Courtesy of Scott Dadich.

Emerging Design: Studio OneEightyNine

Rosario Dawson and Abrima Erwiah. Photo: © Joshua Jordan

The award reserved for designers in the early stages of their careers is bestowed on Studio OneEightyNine, a “fashion lifestyle brand and social enterprise” founded in 2013 by Rosario Dawson and Abrima Erwiah. Its mission is to design and produce African and African-inspired clothing, made in artisanal communities with traditional techniques, thus creating jobs and promoting empowerment, skills training, and education in Africa.

Studio OneEightyNine operates a manufacturing facility in Accra, Ghana, and stores in New York and Accra, as well as an ecommerce site. It partners with the United Nations ITC Ethical Fashion Institute and NYU Stern School of Business, and its collaborators include Ferragamo, Fendi, Nike, and Net-a-Porter, among others. In 2018 It received the CFDA + Lexus Initiative for Sustainability.

Studio One Eighty Nine, Spring/Summer Collection 2020 (Ghana, Spring/Summer 2020). Photo: © Dan Lecca
Studio One Eighty Nine, Spring/Summer Collection 2020 (Ghana, Spring/Summer 2020). Photo: © Dan Lecca