For many, design is at best a tool for solving problems and at worst a method for market exploitation. Laurene Boym, and her erstwhile collaborator Constantine Boym, has spent her career turning this condition inside out and in on itself, using the tools of design and the end products as cultural commentary for an age obsessed with itself and the consumption of things.
Her practice ranges from self produced objects through to commissioned design work, and subjects as diverse as kitchen utensils to the poetics of disaster and much of what she has created stands as sign post and inspiration point to a generation of designers.
As well as her work – which runs counter to the mainstream and permissively ranges across medium and discipline – Boym herself is at odds with the world of design an almost exclusive boys club which like most establishments is clueless to its own prejudices.
Laurene opened Boym Partners in NYC with Constantine Boym in 1986 and has worked with companies, including Alessi, Swatch, Swarovski, and Vitra.
Her designs are included in the permanent collections of many design museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2009, Boym Partners were winners of the National Design Award from the White House. A 220-page book Curious Boym: Design Works (2002) is available from Princeton Architectural Press.
LAURENE:
Before my parents divorced, I grew up in Jersey, in a house that was designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. It had a lot of glass and it was a ranch, of course, and very modernist and it had a little Japanese garden. I lived in the cool house.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
I lived in the cool house, and then my parents had Heller Dinnerware, Heller plastic Vignelli-designed dinnerware in the house and things like that, embroidered chairs, so I was surrounded by it. Even though it was kind of puzzling to me why we didn’t have a TV and a cabinet or something like that like my friends did, but I liked it. It was really great.
As a child, I spent summers in Spain, in Barcelona. I was there for three months every year, so I was in Europe a lot as well. I was going between Jersey and Europe, which was kind of interesting, but it’s sort of started … and I would visit Gaudi and things like that in the summers when I was in … with my mom, like the Iglesia and all that, and we would just be like, “Oh, my god, you know, this is amazing.”
The Gothic style really didn’t appeal to me, but it definitely signaled to me that there was something else out there that was beyond living in New Jersey and hanging out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah. Yeah.
LAURENE:
It wasn’t really in my culture per se, but I was also very artistic. I started taking art classes when I was eight years old.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah, so you immediately had that inclination. Obviously, your parents did, too, to a certain extent if they liked those kinds of things.
LAURENE:
As my mother says, “I drove you into the city an hour from Rumson, New Jersey, to the village,” at that time. My mom was always saying, “Oh, I drove you into the city every day.” “Well, it wasn’t quite every day, Mom.”
ARKITEKTURA:
My dedication. My dedication.
LAURENE:
She was supportive.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
She was supportive. I used to go to MoMA, and I kind of fell in love with the vitrines nd the design galleries. I mean, this is for real. I was really into it. We had a neighbor actually in New Jersey who designed, who was the head designer Remington, which was like this electric shaver company. He was a real industrial designer, so I kind of had an inkling. It took me a little bit of a circuitous route before I got into industrial design because I went to School of Visual Arts, undergrad for advertising and fine arts.
Yeah, I didn’t get right into industrial design. It wasn’t going to appeal to me at that point.
ARKITEKTURA:
The advertising, I mean, was that more like thinking to yourself, “Well, um, you know, this very clear career path in advertising,” was that the appeal or why advertising?
LAURENE:
I don’t know. I mean, I think at that time I felt like it sort of had those, you know, veneer of Madmen and it was still kind of glamorous. When I started going to college back in the ’70s, and it was sort of like, “Okay, this is good. It’s a good field to in because I could write or I could design.” I mean, it utilized all of my skills, but I was also really, really involved with the club scene here in New York City and the art world at a very young age and, by the time I was 19, I was working in a gallery in the East Village as an assistant, so that was pretty cool.
ARKITEKTURA:
Very cool and pleasant. I mean, New York in the ’70s was just … and the East Village at that time, my gosh, it was just such a …
LAURENE:
Early ’80s, yeah.
ARKITEKTURA:
… yeah, an incredible moment. I mean, it’s the moment that we all think about. It’s like Madonna was there and there … It was not what it is now …
LAURENE:
Right.
ARKITEKTURA:
… and Studio 54, and it was an incredible time of creativity I think. I wasn’t living here, but I look at that time as this sort of wondrous place to come and find cheap space and create.
LAURENE:
No, but I remember like being 14 years old and looking at Art in America or whatever art magazine my mother was getting at the house and seeing a real estate show and Colab, this group of collective artists that broke into a building on Delancey Street, and I was like, “Okay, that’s where I need to be.” It was this beacon for me. I needed to be in this city, so, as a teenager, I was like in the clubs.
Actually, there were a lot of artists who were a part of the club scene, and a lot of them went … many of them went on to really amazing careers. You’d be shocked if I told you the names of people that used to just busboy and stuff like that. Madonna was from the clubs, too, but she was … she had her own special agenda.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah. No, I mean, it feels like the club scene and the art scene overlapped so much at that time.
LAURENE:
That’s the thing, and that’s actually how I got into design, because that was your original question, because there was all this cross-pollination that I was exposed to. People were making films. People were dancing. People were designing clothes. People were making music. People were just making outlaw art shows, and all of that stuff really fed into this DIY ethos that became a major current.
Look, like one of the conceptual underpinnings of the work Constantin and I do at Boym Partners, because everything was like you don’t really … There was a saying in Music Press at that time in the early ’80s. It was like pick up a guitar. Learn three chords. Now, go out and play on stage. That was the attitude. You could just pick up anything creative and just express just pure joy and pure expression. That’s something that you don’t want to lose in your work especially when your work has conceptual content like ours does.
Through the gallery scene, I started working on furniture pieces and painting on furniture and putting my stuff in the backroom in the gallery where I worked, so that was actually what led me to go to design school.
ARKITEKTURA:
SVA?
LAURENE:
Yeah. Oh, no, no. I went to Pratt.
ARKITEKTURA:
Pratt?
LAURENE:
Yeah.
ARKITEKTURA:
At that time when you were at the gallery, you were already at SVA …
LAURENE:
Yeah.
ARKITEKTURA:
… and, as you were making these furniture pieces …
LAURENE:
Right, I went to-
ARKITEKTURA:
… which were [acting as 00:07:02] art …
LAURENE:
Right. Exactly.
ARKITEKTURA:
… you went to Pratt and you thought, “Okay, I’m going to, you know, explore this thing, this drive that I have.”
LAURENE:
Another big influence at that time was Memphis sort of, the street, and Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi, Global Tools, Mendini, all of these major figures in new Italian design where paramount to … They were like the spark for me. It was like a baby just looking at something and wanting the candy because Memphis was just so outrageous and it was so beautifully presented and it was conceptually rigorous, and those were things that we valued, that I valued in my own work and that Constantin and I eventually adopted as some of the hallmarks of our work.
ARKITEKTURA:
When you were at Pratt, did you feel unique as being a woman there?
LAURENE:
Not per se, I mean, but what did happen was I got very involved politically at Pratt when I was a graduate student and, myself and a group of other women, we formed The Association of Women Industrial Designers.
ARKITEKTURA:
I saw that. I saw that formed it.
LAURENE:
AWID.
ARKITEKTURA:
AWID.
LAURENE:
AWID.
ARKITEKTURA:
I was kind of thinking …
LAURENE:
I know it sounds horrible. I did all the branding and everything. It looked great. It was fun. I just liked this 1950’s stationary.
ARKITEKTURA:
It’s great.
LAURENE:
It was really, really cool. I was making sure everything looked old. Everybody was objecting because it didn’t look like manufactured enough, but I was already getting cultural references and stuff like that and then wanting to play on the history of the school being so old-fashioned at that time.
ARKITEKTURA:
You wanted to bring women together, too?
LAURENE:
Oh, yeah, but I still do that. That’s something I continuously have been really active as a feminist and a woman, very active in the design field because I think it’s not like there’s less women. I think there’s less opportunity.
ARKITEKTURA:
In general or for women?
LAURENE:
For women, but, again, it’s all about interpretation and seeing, as my [inaudible 00:09:34] also quoted Tibor Kalman, who’s also one of my heroes, the graphic designer, finding the cracks in the walls. That’s what Tibor used to say. You have to find the cracks in the walls.
ARKITEKTURA:
Leonard Cohen also talked about the cracks.
LAURENE:
That’s how light gets in.
ARKITEKTURA:
That’s how light gets in, yeah, which I think is beautiful.
LAURENE:
Yeah, I know. When I read that, I was like, “Tibor stole that from Leonard Cohen.”
ARKITEKTURA:
No, I don’t think so.
LAURENE:
That’s what I was thinking the other day.
ARKITEKTURA:
Leonard Cohen, yeah.
LAURENE:
Oh, Leonard Cohen, and then listened to Leonard Cohen. It was like …
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah. Yeah.
LAURENE:
Yeah.
ARKITEKTURA:
No, I mean, when I was interviewing Paola Antonelli, she was just talking about the importance of really highlighting all the extraordinary women in design and that it’s a male-dominated field. In your case, it’s interesting because you … I’d love to hear the background of how you met Constantin and how you guys came together. Now, you’re creating something together as partners, so, for one, it’s interesting to be both a woman creating things independently and also be creating something with your partner who’s a man.
How did you meet?
LAURENE:
It’s fun.
ARKITEKTURA:
Of course, it’s so fun.
LAURENE:
Yeah. How did we meet? Okay, yeah, it’s a good story actually. I was actually taking a few years’ working in an architectural office between my schools. I was doing furniture and not incredibly well, but very passionately.
ARKITEKTURA:
Actually making furniture?
LAURENE:
Making, fabricating furniture, and totally enamored with Memphis, which was just at the time like the best FU to anybody that you could have because everything … I don’t know how well you know Memphis, but it’s all these richly patterned geometric shapes and very, very cartoony-looking. It was mostly furniture like desks and tables and stuff like that, bookshelves in the shape of a running man and things like that. I was just like I want to be with these people. I swear I have this smell of like … I’m very much one of those people who gets into something way before everybody else gets into it. I saw it was really going on in Italy and I wanted to really go to Italy, and I couldn’t.
I was working in this architectural firm. I was looking for adult education courses to take, and I read in the person’s catalogue, the person’s continuing ed catalogue, “Meet a teacher who studied with the main figures of the new Italian design,” so I was, like, “Ooh,” and, also, he has a really cool name, Constantin Boym, so I have to take his class.
ARKITEKTURA:
This is so lovely. How many years ago was this?
LAURENE:
Oh, 26 or something.
ARKITEKTURA:
Amazing, and you look so young. I mean, you, just with your style, you look like you’ve kind of … I can understand why you’re attracted to something from the ’50s because there’s a little bit of ’50s-ness about your look, which is great. It’s hard to imagine that you’ve been with someone for 26 years, but so be it.
LAURENE:
Yeah, I’m all about quotation. I mean, I also think that energy fields are like the way you are as a person. It’s sort of the way you project, and that’s also a part of design, too. Age is irrelevant in some ways.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yes, I completely agree.
LAURENE:
Yeah, so I took this class and, near the end of the class, he asked me to come to an opening a show he had at a place called Gallery 91, which used to be down on Grand Street where the Margiela store is now.
ARKITEKTURA:
Oh, yeah.
LAURENE:
I went down there, and we went out and then we went out. We went out with a bunch of people, which was fun. Then we went out separately and then, on our third date, we went to see a Jeff Koons’ show together, and that was like it. That was how it worked, but we didn’t work together for a long time.
ARKITEKTURA:
I noticed that, and I mean it makes sense because working together is a whole … it brings in a whole other dynamic. What made you decide to work together?
LAURENE:
It was interesting because I did this thesis project at Pratt which became pretty well-known because it was part of Mechanical Brides, Women and Machines from Home to Office at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1994. It was a feminist show about how design was conceived, marketed, manufactured, pitched to women, and that’s something I’m really … something that’s been of real interest to me all throughout my career because I think that’s a voice that needs to be heard in corporate America.
I was working on that show, Mechanical Brides, and working … I worked at a small, at that time, design studio called Smart Design. I was designing things for mass market, kitchens and things like that.
ARKITEKTURA:
There is a Smart Design in San Francisco. I wonder if it’s the same.
LAURENE:
It’s the same one.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
It’s huge.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
It’s huge now. It’s huge. It was only five people back then.
ARKITEKTURA:
Wow. It’s huge now. Yeah.
LAURENE:
It’s huge now. I was doing that for a little bit and, I don’t know, I got really involved at Cooper-Hewitt. I became a designer resident at Cooper-Hewitt for the Mechanical Brides show, and I started getting into the educational aspects of being a designer, and I got … I, at that point, was sort of just freelancing a lot and Constantin was working on some stuff, and he had me collaborate with him and it was successful.
ARKITEKTURA:
In that first collaboration?
LAURENE:
The first collaboration won first prize in some national competition.
ARKITEKTURA:
What was it?
LAURENE:
It was an edible pencil …
ARKITEKTURA:
Interesting.
LAURENE:
… for the IDSA. It was like a new writing instrument competition. I started getting on-
ARKITEKTURA:
An edible pencil? You can eat it?
LAURENE:
An edible pencil, right, so, all of a sudden, I’m like waking up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning and doing morning shows with DJs from all around America.
ARKITEKTURA:
They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, so you can write and eat it at the same time.”
LAURENE:
Yeah, totally, and I was explaining the project. It was made out of carbon and dough. It’s totally possible to manufacture something like that now probably through extrusion, but, at that time, it was like people were, like, “Aah, that’s so weird, you know. This is cool, you know,” and, “Oh, she likes to talk, so let put her, let’s, let’s put, let’s put her on the radio. Let’s put her on TV,” and that was actually really crazy. We did that, and we thought it was an anomaly. We would never work together again.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
I continued my way doing my design education stuff and my … working for clients like Alessi and stuff like that and getting prototype, and it was pretty exciting because I was still in my early 20’s and it was like, “Whoa, you know, this is really great, you know.”
ARKITEKTURA:
Absolutely. Totally.
LAURENE:
I was already like in the shit.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
It was really wonderful.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah.
LAURENE:
Yeah, so we were just like working side-by-side, and then he started working for a company called Authentics.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah, I saw that you had a lot of products for them.
LAURENE:
Right. Right, and they were like the people that really pioneered translucent plastic. They were at least three years ahead of the first iMac.
ARKITEKTURA:
Interesting.
LAURENE:
Yeah. They did it. The thing about it was the prices. Everything was manufactured in China, which was kind of a new-ish thing at that time. It was all housewares. The price of the housewares was very, very reasonable. I mean you could go into some … In Europe, in Italy, you could go into some hardware store and next to the key chains at the counter would be like my containers selling for $2 each, which was very … That was of my dream to do this democratic stuff that would be in all these weird places all over the world, just … not weird, but random, random places like Home Depot or like the supermarket where my mom shops.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah, the places that aren’t necessarily for designs, so to speak, that you’re not … It’s not the Alessi store. It’s actually in a place where it’s for the everyday person.
LAURENE:
That’s what I liked about it because we did [inaudible 00:18:38] at Target. We did Bed Bath & Beyond with that. It was like real mass market manufacturing. There was so much enthusiasm for that collaboration that then we just kept doing it.
ARKITEKTURA:
Like we’ve got something here.
LAURENE:
Yeah, and then Vitra came, and we started working for them and a lot of … I mean, we worked for a lot of high-design companies where people are very sophisticated and really know the market, but, at the same time, we also enjoy equally and maybe even more sometimes working for companies that are less about design culture and more about mass marketing.
ARKITEKTURA:
How is it for you in a marriage to be working together?
LAURENE:
It’s interesting because it’s like being in a band.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah?
LAURENE:
That’s what I tell everybody. It’s like being in a band. I like to have the best job in the world. Right?
ARKITEKTURA:
Totally, and doing what you’re passionate about.
LAURENE:
I do what I’m passionate about. I get to do it at the level of competence and perfectionism that I like to do it at almost like an auteur because, Constantin and I, we’re very selective about the projects we choose and because we realize our output is going to be there after we’re gone. I think the idea is not that things will be recyclable. I think that they should just be objects which should be forever.
ARKITEKTURA:
The legacy issues are really interesting, and I didn’t think about them, about that being part of the reasoning behind why you execute something in such a beautiful way because you know it’s going to outlast you.
LAURENE:
Right, but you also make it part of somebody’s life. When you think of a song being part of somebody’s life, and I guess certain memories are associated with that song. It’s the same thing with an object. You really can evoke certain emotional and intellectual responses from the consumer, which I find totally fascinating because, I mean, I want objects to be meaningful to people. I want them to feel like they belong in this world. I don’t want to create something that’s not about the culture we live in.
ARKITEKTURA:
When you think about the objects that are most meaningful to you, the ones that come to mind are? For instance, for me, the most meaningful objects, my daughter asked me the other day if our house was burning, what would I run in and get?
LAURENE:
Oh, interesting, and what did you say?
ARKITEKTURA:
There are just these certain things that completely discardable, but one of them would be the photographs, that’s just … and the hard drives, let’s say, this piece of driftwood that my grandma brought me from Kauai, which I thought was such a thoughtful gift, or a ceramic piece that my sister-in-law made …
LAURENE:
Oh, nice.
ARKITEKTURA:
… that was for our wedding or marriage …
LAURENE:
Nice.
ARKITEKTURA:
… certainly, a piece of jewelry that has had significance for me. It could not be necessarily physically … It might not be that expensive. Certainly, the driftwood isn’t, but it carries a tremendous amount of meaning for me.
What are some things that carry a meaning for you?
LAURENE:
Constantin and I have collected for years miniature buildings, and that’s like one of our big obsessions going and traveling somewhere. They have to be a certain scale, of course, and it has to be displayed in a certain way, but those types of passions like miniature buildings lead to certain franchises that we’ve worked on in the studio editions like Buildings of Disaster.
ARKITEKTURA:
Which is what I really wanted to talk about that serious.
LAURENE:
Oh, I’m sure you do. Yeah, so I mean that’s why I brought it up.
ARKITEKTURA:
It’s great.
LAURENE:
Yeah, but I think the buildings are definitely important. I’m also really into like cults and religious objects.
ARKITEKTURA:
Interesting.
LAURENE:
Yeah, I just spent time in Machu Picchu and …
ARKITEKTURA:
Yes, I saw that from the blog, yeah.
LAURENE:
… Peru. Yeah. I got this shaman stick with this energy crystal on it.
ARKITEKTURA:
Totally. I love that stuff.
LAURENE:
It looks like a big cross, and I like to hang it above my bed.
ARKITEKTURA:
Really?
LAURENE:
Yeah, and it looks like a large [inaudible 00:23:18] in my bedroom right now. It’s really strange.
ARKITEKTURA:
It’s great.
LAURENE:
Yeah. No, I really … but I like that. I like all those types of, kinds of juxtapositions where you take something from another culture, and it’s sort of benign, but then you turn it into something that has a lot of alternative meaning like pot brownies. Like they look innocuous, but then you’re inserting with content and when those people sort of peel the layers back from those objects, they start to understand there’s … It’s more than just this little, tiny object.
ARKITEKTURA:
What I love about that is also it … if you’re inclined that way and you digest a pot brownie, it completely opens your mind, so, as you peel away the layers of an object, your mind is widely opened.
Let’s talk about Buildings of Disaster.
LAURENE:
Sure, and, hopefully, Babel Blocks, too.
ARKITEKTURA:
Sure, anything that you’d want to talk about. We can talk about both.
LAURENE:
Yeah.
ARKITEKTURA:
What was the germination of that series?
LAURENE:
It comes to this idea of collecting and having passion for objects in your house, which is just what you were talking about, about your driftwood. Constantin and I travel, and we love architecture, of course. He’s actually a former architect. We would just go to souvenir shops and collect little metal buildings, which we became really obsessed with, but they were banal. They were like Washington Monument or it would be like the Pantheon or whatever, and we would just be collecting them all at the same scale, tabletop sized, like paperweight size.
Also, at the same time, we’re big media people. We spend lots of time digesting and absorbing the news and trying to understand the world we live in. Building of Disaster came about because we were noticing that a lot of architecture on TV was getting noticed because terrible or tragic events had happened to it like Waco, Texas, or the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City where there was a terrorist mom. We got intrigued by the idea of cross-pollinating …
ARKITEKTURA:
… and the idea that something so terrible could highlight something potentially beautiful or interesting or engaging or existing, that people were not actually paying attention to architecture, but a disaster would bring you to that.
LAURENE:
I think the issue was nobody paid attention to those buildings otherwise. They weren’t really distinguished by their architecture, but they were distinguished by the content of what happened there. The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing became an involuntary tourist destination, and people were selling souvenirs out on the sidewalk. Souvenirs is actually the genre we spend a lot of time working in. Buildings of Disaster is a subset of that, of all our souvenir projects.
ARKITEKTURA:
One of the things that I … There are a couple of things I love about your site and, therefore, your practice, but the concept of behind your site of showing all your work chronologically which allows for this like how did they evolve over the decades.
LAURENE:
Oh, I didn’t even think about it like that.
ARKITEKTURA:
Really? Interesting.
LAURENE:
Yeah. No, but I mean we were like just, like, “Okay, let’s just put it up there,” but I think it really gives people a story like you’re saying, right?
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah, it’s like what did or how did … where did they start and how did they development over time, what happened, and it’d be great to actually, considering the nature of your work, it would be great to put this side-by-side with a calendar of current events from each of those years and see how those current events affected the projects even if it wasn’t, didn’t seem exactly direct.
LAURENE:
Oh, that’s fascinating. What a great idea. I mean, you could see though that certain issues … Like, okay, I will give you one example. In 1988, there was a series by Constantin before we worked together called Recycle, and he would take just common household objects like plastic bottles and tin cans, and he would build wood frames around them. It’s like this project now you see on everybody’s website. What was interesting about it was he called the series Recycle, and a lot of people said, “Recycling doesn’t exist.” This was 1988. “Recycling doesn’t exist. Recycle is not a word.”
ARKITEKTURA:
Amazing.
LAURENE:
Yeah, so we were like, “Yes, it is. It’s in the dictionary,” but you could see how the project sort of mirrored the times, and I think that’s really like a very important hallmark of our studio. When we started working on Babel Blocks in 2006-2007, we were really trying to address like issues of injustice and multiculturalism and the overwhelming prejudices and xenophobia in our country because we were actually … Constantin and I ended up settling and getting a studio down the Lower East Side, and it was very much an immigrant area, and it was not full of hipsters at that time. There was no hipsters, but there were a lot of different immigrant groups, and our neighbors became our friends and there was kind of a seamlessness and old-school feeling to that neighborhood.
When we did Babel, Babel Blocks is a series of toys that we based on the people in our neighborhood, wood toys, to show just what kind of community we lived in. They were souvenirs in a way, souvenirs of the Lower East Side.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah, absolutely, which I think is we need now because that community has virtually gone, so it’s like a great reminder of what’s there.
LAURENE:
That’s what’s so beautiful about this country. You don’t think about it, but we’re all from somewhere else.
ARKITEKTURA:
Absolutely.
LAURENE:
We have to be.
ARKITEKTURA:
Yeah. Yeah.
LAURENE:
Not very few of us came over on the Mayflower …
ARKITEKTURA:
That’s right. That’s right.
LAURENE:
… or Native American. This whole idea of peaceful coexistence was something that was really beautiful. When we worked on Babel Blocks, I showed it to Paola Antonelli, the curator at MoMA, the design curator at4 MoMA, and she was really intrigued by it right away because we wanted to do this multi-pronged expression of this idea. One would be the wood toys, which we would manufacture and sell through our E-commerce website. The second expression of which would be films, short one-minute films that we would put on YouTube, in the Web, basically of like weird, almost Seinfeldian situations that would happen to us like in the line at the Post Office …
ARKITEKTURA:
Great.
LAURENE:
… or in an elevator. There were a lot of elevator films we made, but this idea of these places where people come together where they’re not expected to come together and the interesting ways they come together, and we used the toys as stand-ins for the real-life people we knew. They were all based on … these archetypes were all based on … It was almost like a literally project which they were all composites of the different people we knew, each character.
ARKITEKTURA:
I love it.
LAURENE:
Yeah, so that was good, and then we did a big public art piece down in the Lower East Side, which was 407 feet long next to the Williamsburg Bridge, which was up for over two years, which they called the History Fence because it’s supposed to be about the history of the Lower East Side, but it’s really just a big wall of Babel Blocks out of a white background.
ARKITEKTURA:
Great. The other thing I loved about the site is the index because, when you look at the index, I love the way it’s organized and just this vast sort of … all these different kinds of projects you’ve done.
LAURENE:
Yeah. Totally.
ARKITEKTURA:
I mean, really, it really runs the gamut, from housewares to exhibition design to interiors, and I think that to challenge yourself that way is important and impressive in any medium that you work in. For me, as a journalist, this is the case. You can do things in a similar way and get comfortable in that way. These opportunities can come your way to challenge yourself, and you may or may not take them.
I wondered, out of that, when you look at that index, what do you think when you think about these things that you did? What are some of the ones that sort of remind you of, “Wow, we really pushed ourselves here beyond what we thought we might be able to do, and we did it.” I was thinking that exhibition design might be one of those, but …
LAURENE:
There’s a saying “design is everything from the spoon to the city.” I just thought that was like really brilliant. I mean, it sort of sums everything up. Right? We’ve worked on a lot of non-design projects which were more conceptual and more innovation-based. Like, for example, one day, we were in the studio and this guy calls and he’s like, “Well, I’m the director of innovation at McDonald’s,” and my partner was like ready to hang up on him and … because we’re a very small studio. We’re only like five people. I answer the phone frequently.
I mean, I like it that way. I want it to be a boutique sort of thing. I don’t want it to be corporate. I don’t, because I think the quality would be different. Having a small studio enables us to keep the quality very high. Anyway, so the guy turned out be really from McDonald’s. I worked with the innovation team there on and off for a few years on the Restaurant of the Future. Actually, Super Size Me had just happened, and they were really looking for a way out of this … Their public reputation wasn’t like perfect at that time, and people were really questioning what they were serving and how they serving it, and all these things needed to be reconsidered.
I got through that into experience design and trend forecasting, and that proved to be really like a rich area, difficult work, but delightful work because it’s not so much about making an object, it’s about creating something that people take away from them and it affects all the senses. That’s something that’s really important to me right now, this idea of Design Primario, the design of the senses, everything being sort of activated at the same time by either it be a building, an experience, an object. It’s what we look for. We want people to sort of be tapped into things on different levels
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