Szenasy, Design Advocate: Writings and Talks by Metropolis Magazine Editor Susan S Szenasy

Szenasy, Design Advocate:  Writings and Talks by Metropolis Magazine Editor Susan S Szenasy

Metropolis Books

ISBN 978-1-93892

(page 22)  …Charles and Ray Eames, whose mission involved delivering, in their words, “the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least.”

(53)  As successful adaptations of buildings tend to point out, a design is most meaningful and lasting when it accommodates possibilities far beyond its original talent.

(70)  … lighting designer Barna.  “Light tends to penetrate into a space about twice the height of the window.”

(74)  Though the living-room setting expresses the social side of doing business, it doesn’t really reflect the real needs of the office’s occupant.  A famous case in point is the story of Hollywood director Billy Wilder who didn’t want the stigma of having a “casting couch” in his office but needed a place to stretch out in private and, at times, take a quick nap between scenes.  Wilder’s friend Charles Eames came up with a solution in 1960 when he designed an ascetic-looking long chair (some like to call it by its more familiar French name, chaise longue).  With its wafer like leather cushions on a slim steel frame, the chair was made to lift the head, stretch the back, raise the knees, and keep the feet level with the heart.  (Since the late nineteenth century that postion has been advocated by various physicians and furniture manufacturers as a healthy way to relax the tense body.)

(92)  One of these workers [in a paper manufacturing plant mentioned in Shoshana Zuboff’s book In the Age of the Smart Machine] was prompted to ask himself, “What is work now anyway?”  Then he defined it:  “It seems to me that our work has really changed and our work is now a lot of sitting, and watching, and thinking.  You try to anticipate problems and concentrate on the process, even if you’re having a conversation.  Your mind never leaves the information."

(102)  presbyopic - a condition associated with aging of the eye that results in progressively worsening ability to focus clearly on close objects

(104-105)  Remember it was George Bush Senior’s VP, Dan Quayle, who championed the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], which forced designers to think about complex human needs, at all stages and ages of life.  While a lot of agriculture and design firms saw it as another nuisance regulation, I saw it as a flawed but great piece of civil-rights legislation.  What is more American, after all, than access to the good life for everyone, regardless of ability or disability?

(141)  Local is no longer provincial.  Local is real, it’s rich, it’s useful - and it’s beautiful.  Discover it anew, and make the rest of the world want to come into a place that cannot be found anywhere else.  Remember what your countrywoman Frida Kahlo said:  the intensely local is universal.

(150)  Roland [Gebhardt] and Brent [Oppenheimer], for instance, used the kind of anthropological and anthropometric studies they learned as industrial designers and office planners to create a whole new system of maps.  They called it experience mapping, which is a way to understand what works and what doesn’t work in neighborhoods by interviewing residents and visitors about how they use the neighborhoods.  Experience maps are great graphic presentations of people’s everyday lives.  They’re much more revealing than cold statistics.

(157)  Edward Mazria:  US greenhouse-gas emissions in the building sector are down 11 percent [in 2013] from 2005 levels, which is a huge drop.  

(174)  Socially and environmentally concerned citizens are dismissed as BMWs - bitchers, moaners, and whiners.

(175)  There is something very beautiful and elegant about the thought that we all share one giant breath with each other and every other creature on earth.

(206)  He [her father] was the best pilot around and felt that he was totally independent.  So when he married my mother at the age of 29, his commander said to him, “Remember, marriage is like flying in formation.  What you do is watch the others’ wings.  You are in a group of equally skilled people who are trying to create something beautiful together.”  This story taught me about precision - being precise about how you talk, what you do, what you say, how you explore an idea.  It taught me about caring for something and someone other than myself.  It taught me about the consideration of some other person’s abilities.  Collaboration is looking at how you work together, how you make that perfect line of planes, and how you keep them in line.

(208)  In my opinion, the source of our current gender stereotypes is a set of economic trends that began after World War II.  It became an economic imperative to put American women in suburbia, so they could become consumers of the massive industrial output that emerged during the war.  Women adjusted their lives to an economic construct.

(222)  What was different about this group [2005 students]?  My class roster began to reveal the new pattern:  a large portion of these 25 students came from the Design and Technology department at Parsons, in New York, and their idea of history seems to be something you Google, not something you study slowly and deliberately.  Yet they were superbright kids, navigating easily and creatively through complex software programs, making sophisticated presentations of information and ideas, but unable to connect with the historic information they were assigned to gather and analyze.

(230)  All I saw [among the 100 new buildings in Miami the Miami Herald did an article about] was a lot of modern glass boxes and duded-up postmodern behemoths that could be designed for any city anywhere in the world by architects who still believe that the International Style gives them a license to ignore local climate, resources, and cultures.  But this can no longer be the way of architecture.

(240)  Kate Lydon:  Our Lunar Resonant Streetlights have sensors on top that anlayze light levels so that when the moon is full, the streetlights dim, and when the moon is in varying stages of waxing or waning, the street lights generate the correct amount of illumination needed to see.

(242)  Bill Stumpf, industrial designer, author of The Ice Palace That Melted Away:  Restoring Civility and Other Lost Virtues to Everyday Life

(260)  Working behind sealed glass windows, in steady settings of 70 degrees and 50 foot-candles of light, may not be as universlaly desired as we’ve been led to believe.

(289)  We build greatness then we neglect, abuse, and misuse it, and eventually, we lament its demise.

(310)  Ray Anderson Mid-Course Collection:  Toward a Sustainable Eneterprise, The Interface Story (1988) and Confessions of a Radical Industrialist:  Profits, People, Purpose - Doing Business by Respecting the Earth (2009)

(322)  I’m on a conference call with Tony Doublas, who works in mobility services at BMW in Munich.  He’s describing the company’s BMWi program, which is about to change how we think of urban transportation.  These electric cars (with carbon-fiber chassis) will be deployed on the West Coast by late summer and on the East Coast by the end of the year.  The services they offer are a direct outgrowth of our familiar smartphone technology.  Through these small, handheld devices you’ll be able to reserve a car and find a parking space and a charging station.  But the connectivity goes beyond the automotive;  in fact, even people like me who don’t drive will be able to take advantage of this multimodal system.  We’ll connect to all available transportation options - in New York, that means finding out about the next bus, train, and plane schedules, and bike-sharing locations.

(326)  Dwelling on the visual has turned design into an image-driven, superficial practice that provides sleek buildings, rooms, and objects of consumption.  But we’re not as one-dimensional as that.  Our species also collects information through touch, smell, taste, and hearing.  It behooves us to create a constructive design discourse about the needs of the whole human being.

(334)  Starchitecture has nothing to do with effective place-making.

(336)  Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film Powers of Ten gave me an idea.  I came up with the Cycle of Responsibility - my own Powers of Five.  Responsibility starts with yourself, then extends to your profession, your client, your community, your planet.  Like Fuller’s systems thinking, these five layers form a system, too.