designers

"Aah~(gazes longingly) Those were the days. Taking a look back--back when I was putting out Yu-Gi-Oh! as a weekly serial, on the reader approval surveys, my female reader approval rating was only 5% (among the 5 worst in the magazine), and my editor at the time would tell me to "Just give up on the female fans!"..."

"Guinevere van Seenus, who I have photographed for more than 20 years, was one of the most important muses. Delicate but decisive, masculine but feminine, a hymn to creativity, imagination and dreams. (Paolo Roversi)"

"I think art is personal to each artist, and so to me it is what my art always has been about. But that’s my choice as an artist. I don’t believe art necessarily has to be any one thing. In fact, if we all felt inclined to have to do that, I think it would be a disaster for art."

"In art, I get to walk into my head and do whatever I want to do, to free up completely. That goes back to my roots in Athens, Ohio, my roots in nature and my feelings of connections to the environment, that everything is coalesced around being inspired by the natural world and reflecting that beauty out to others."

"If you ever tried to analyze its shape, it's one of the most complex forms. Think about it, it's every compound curve. There's nothing symmetrical about it. It's about looking at something again and then appreciating it. I mean, nature, is so complex."

"I have fought very, very hard to get past being known as the Monument Maker."

"She’s just amazing, when you think about what she has done, the work she quietly does in her way. She doesn’t seek attention, but at the same time, people come to her because they know that she will take that opportunity and the gifts, the talent she has and from what I’ve seen, and we all see, that it’ll be remarkable."

"I value writing. I respect it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I'm done I am unbelievably just at peace. If you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, writing is totally pure."

"By second or third grade, I was doing my own thing. I still resent being told what to do in any way, shape, or form. I’m sure it’s clinical."

"I would hope that artists can offer a different viewpoint, a different way of seeing the exact same data points, but maybe, because we can think a little bit outside of the norm, we can offer a new way of looking at it."

"I try to understand the "why" of a project before it's a "what." And this might be more pertinent to some of my memorial projects. Memorials are a hybrid between art and architecture because they have a function."

"I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth. I imagine taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up and the initial violence and pain that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the initial cut would remain a pure, flat surface in the earth with a polished mirrored surfaced, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge. The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial. There was no need to embellish the design further. The people and their names would allow everyone to respond and remember. It would be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond."

"I had been blessed that racism had never really entered into my realm. I get to Denmark and ironically I think they thought I was a Greenlander at times. An eskimo. Because if I get a suntan, I change through different races. Some people think I'm American Indian. When I'm in Mexico, I blend."

"The Vietnam War was much more in the main news. I think the rioting was. But I think a lot of the facts hadn't been written into the textbooks because it was current news. From a child's point of view, you're not focusing on the daily news the same way. Anyway, I was stunned at how there was this part of American history. I know now it's absolutely covered in textbooks. But could I offer something out as an information table that would give people a brief glimpse of that era the way I had been, after having looked at this material, been given a glimpse? And of course, the idea is, you look at this. You'll want to study it more. Because the one thing about sculptures, the one thing about memorials is: I can draw you in. I can make you think for 15 minutes, whatever, then it's really about where you go after that."

"I’ve always been pretty fixated on water. Maybe it’s because it exists in multiple states, and you can never understand it in nature as a fixed moment in time."

"Every bowl we ate off was something he made by hand: stonewares connected to nature and natural colors and materials. And so I think our everyday lives was imbued with this very clean, modern, but very warm aesthetic, and that very much influenced me."

"The response is where Lin starts her work as a designer. She creates, essentially, backward. There is no image in her head, only an imagined feeling. Often, she writes an essay explaining what the piece is supposed to do to the people who encounter it. She says that the form just comes to her, sometimes months later, fully developed, an egg that shows up on the doorstep one day. She rarely tinkers with it. She is, in other words, an artist of a rather pure and intuitive type."

"Everything you make is being made by every single experience you've ever had in your whole life, and on top of that, things you were born with. I think your personality comes out. There's no way of really saying: "If A, then B, or A plus B equals C in creativity." The true strength of the creative arts is that you allow yourself to think about something. Then how it finds its way in your mind to the surface through your hands to-- whether it's paint or sculpture-- is intuited. I think there's reason to it. But could you extrapolate? Could you actually formulate a mathematical theorem? Absolutely not."

"Another adage in art is: you're a child and then you become an adult. You're always trying to regain that pure, almost empathetic response that you have when you're a child. It doesn't come with a lot of baggage. You're not worried about, "Oh, what are you thinking here, here, here?" You just respond in certain ways. I think sometimes: Can you think like a child? We're always trying to regain that. I almost make things imagining a child will experience them."

"It’s a bit unusual, as you said, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials—they’re problem solving, but it’s very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They’re all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they’re coming out the same thing, whatever it is."

"Now, your great fear in art is that it's never guaranteed you're going to get that next idea. And there's always the fear that the idea you just made that you really, really love, you'll never be able to do it again."

"I think I’ve always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me—and this is where some people just don’t get it, or they’d prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder—I have this personality where I just want to put something out that’s a fact and then let you interpret it. It’s almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention."

"There are a couple of things out there that I really want to do. I’ll tell you one. I want to work in a landfill. I love things that involve adaptive reuse of really degraded places. The sad thing about our current landfills are, you can’t dig a hole into them, because heaven forbid, there’s all this toxic stuff in there. It’s not just that I want to work in a landfill. I would like to help rethink what a landfill could be. What if we didn’t put anything toxic in? What if we composted all our organic matter? So then it wouldn’t be dangerous to plant a tree in it, you wouldn’t have to cap it because you think there’s so much poison in there. What if we could recycle all our rare-earth metals and minerals? It’s a big ask. That’s something I want to do in my lifetime."

"It took a lot to understand and to thread a path that would allow me to develop in architecture, and develop my voice there, develop my voice in art. I wasn’t abandoning what I would call my interest in history and memory."

"I tend to make models of a lot of my pieces. I end up making models, and the models get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I call it the Christmas tree syndrome. You buy a Christmas tree outdoors, you think it’s too small, then you bring it inside and you have to lop two feet off because it’s way too big. If you’re working out of doors, you have to test actual scale, with a paper cutout, with a maquette at full scale, because you need it to feel intimate like a dining table. You have to scale it up just enough so that it will still feel intimate — so it won’t jump to monumental in scale. It has to be bigger than it would be inside because then it would get dwarfed. You can only do that by actually mocking it up."

"I think art is different. I think you have to be who you are. My art happens to be very integrally linked with my environmental concerns. But to be an artist, you have to be true to who you are."

"I leave it up to the viewers. If it’s in a museum, if it’s in a gallery, usually I am going to point out something about a river right below your feet or right outside your window. I’m not going to scream it out. If you get a little curious, you can find a little bit more. At times my works are maybe to a fault subtle. For public works, maybe you won’t even notice I was here. I’m not trying to defeat or conquer nature."

"You can draw a curve on the paper and know immediately that it is the right one, but you can not do the same to the computer; the curve is not realized with a function or using a digital guide, it is a form that is drawn freehand."

"In the late 1970s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly interested in the world of things that surrounded him – "an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises." As a designer, Rams was aware that he played an important role in the world he was helping create, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?"

"Design isn't marketing, but more and more companies are treating it like that. There should be an absolute commitment to design and technology, and they have to go together."

"When I started at Braun there were difficulties between the designers and engineers, as there are in many companies, but I noticed that the engineers liked to have a brandy, so I'd buy a bottle of good cognac to share with them. To be a good designer, you have to be half-psychologist."

"The first Braun period was marked by the Ulm school, through Hans Gugelot, in the sphere of product design and Otl Aicher in that o graphic design. My own work and that of my group would have been unthinkable without the way paved by them."

"If you do it right, it will last forever. It’s as simple as that."

"If you can't find it, design it."

"I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella."

"In reality, the Castiglioni brothers were one person. Symbiosis of thought, creative ability, inspiration and execution were an integral part of their being. Talking to one of them or all three of them was the same, they were completely interchangeable, same voice, same accent, same grin, same laughter, same gestures. They were the Castiglioni, like their work, indivisible fruit of the same research, of the same passion, of a great ability to transform the world around us into a new memorable gesture. (Translated from the original Italian)"

"In New Haven, in the 60s, I designed some housing using trailers. I had the acquiescence of Mayor Lee, a remarkable mayor indeed. The whole notion of making a project for about 150 people using trailers was difficult to persuade anybody to do. I suppose it was a mistake; it was eventually demolished. People hated it. First of all it leaked, which is a very good reason to hate something, but I think it was much more complicated than that. Psychologically, the good folk who inhabited these dwellings thought that they were beneath them. In other words, the deviation of the dwelling was not something to their liking. I thought, and I suppose the mayor thought, that trailers were perfectly good enough for them. But I should say, in defense of what we built, that it was a pocket court plan and that it provided a separate outside space for each family. There were two stories, with a core at the center. I am very tenacious about certain things, and in the long run it seems to me that with the correcting of mistakes one can make something much more successful."

"Rigid dogma about what is and is not ’authentic’ has hamstrung architects. We need to break out of these shackles and recognise that all architecture is drawing from the past."

"Gualtiero Galmanini"

"Angelo Mangiarotti is an absolutely original author of international architecture, one of the few Italian masters (such as Ponti, Nervi and Piano) able to export his own idea and project philosophy. architecture, engineering, design and art, thanks to its ability to dialogue with these normally distant disciplines - The profound sense of ethical values, civic commitment and moral rigor with which to feel every gesture of the profession make us Angelo Mangiarotti a rare example; unique designer in his being an architect, designer and sculptor at the same time. (Beppe Finessi)"

"Pierto Portaluppi"

"Let's start together, you with the computer I at Hand [...] he hadn't started yet while I had already finished, and it was a very simple thing [...] the younger and more skilled they are, the less they have interest in drawing in Hand. I believe that today with information technology, you have great means at your disposal, of course there are databases left, it is not from there that a project comes out; culture is something else ... the risk is the loss of the gesture"

"In my projects, I have always tried to make people's needs participate in the definition of the work. I would say that the fundamental starting point for designing a design object lies in the usefulness it has for people. An object that is not born of a necessity cannot even be considered as belonging to this category, design."

"My works have always been born from the interest, the curiosity, that I have for the material and the possible ways of working it; and then find solutions often even at the limit, I would say. It is always necessary to pay close attention to the choice of materials with which an object will be made, since a relationship with the form is always very delicate. Technological innovation represents one of the fundamental aspects for the designer's work, but it must not lead to the exasperation of the technique at the expense of other aspects."

"Angelo Mangiarotti"

"I believe that design is a [...] method usually means only the industrial one, so I wonder how to consider the Etruscan statues? there are millions in the world, there are museums full [...] but how did they manage to produce them? And they are all original Etruscan! So why shouldn't we consider them design?"

"He is an architect, designer and sculptor. How would you define yourself? In the meantime, I am a convinced materialist [...] look that it is not thought that uses matter to express itself, it is matter that uses thought. If you do not know the matter you cannot speak of spirit."

"The Virtual Reality is yes the continuation of reality, but sometimes you can no longer understand what you are talking about in a pink, yellow or green thing, it is so devitalized."

"The Eclissi lamp. He called it concept design, a design so clear and simple it could even be explained in words, over the phone. Vico said he had learned from Latin to recognize the superfluous from the necessary, the indispensable and the useless. And when you design an object, he repeated, you have to know how to recognize what is indispensable. (Ernesto Gismondi)"

"Design is a conceptual process that can be communicated over the telephone. About Chimera Lamp. A very simple geometric shape with three cylinders in semi-transparent plastic material. I remember having described it over the telephone without any drawing. Geometry and an extremely simple communication system. After about ten days, I was brought the lamp to my studio."