Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY Architecture, talks to Cities x Design about the intricacies of museum design. With the Speed Art Museum of Louisville, Kentucky as the backdrop, he explains how “acupuncture architecture” is going to transform the museum from an historic temple into a vibrant center for the creative community.

Steve Wilson, Founder, 21c Museum Hotel, talks to Cities x Design about philanthropy, collecting art, regenerating a city center and why he chose to open an art hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

Cities x Design set out to clearly identify the role designers play in promoting and shaping their communities. We found a great spokesperson for Columbus in Gabe Shultz. He talked to us about creativity in Columbus, becoming a designer, his work and how he manages to do it all in one go.

Richard Crabtree talks with Cities x Design about the design community and design economy of Columbus, OH, and the visionary work of Salvato Coe + Gabor.

The Columbus College of Art and Design recently published a report entitled Creative Columbus, which is an inventory study of Central Ohio’s creative industries including the arts, design, performance, media and marketing.

The prominent design fields in the area are fashion, industrial, interior and communication design, with a concentration of businesses in downtown Columbus and many self-employed creatives in based in Clintonville.

During our visit we took a closer look at communication designers and their role in local businesses. We want to highlight CSCA (Columbus Society of Communicating Arts) for its unique and independent approach to design promotion, and its Creative Best Awards initiative that rewards local talents.

A special mention goes out to Ologie, a branding agency that helps businesses with social media strategies, and to Gabe Shultz for his insight on the role that graphic designers play in the corporate world and for keeping the experimental alive through his project Bored Sketchbooks.

Photos: © Jeff Seslar of Chromatic Identity – © Gabe Shultz

Paul Davis, Paul Nini and Kristen Harris talk to Cities x Design about what makes Columbus a creative city and why the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts revels in its independence.

For the longest time Columbus has been considered a typical American city and its local population has been viewed as a mirror image of the U.S. population as a whole. For this reason the city is often used as a testing ground for corporate America’s latest products and services.

Large chain retailers and brands such as Abercrombie and Fitch and The Limited (parent company of Victoria’s Secret) are headquartered in Columbus. Similarly, large insurance companies are firmly based there as well.

Despite such facts, Columbus doesn’t lack personality and is not afraid of supporting independent initiatives. And with the largest university campus in the United States, Ohio State University is a strong local asset that grows and graduates inspired young minds and plays a role in spreading fresh ideas into the city’s diverse communities.

During our short stay, we had the opportunity to walk High Street of Short North, an area recently praised in the New York Times. Highlights include Jeni’s Ice Cream offering handmade confections made with locally sourced ingredients, the spacious and luminous Northstar Cafe, and Tigertree, a select store with unique design pieces from the area and beyond. The noteworthy North Market (the only market in Columbus and also small business incubator) was unfortunately closed during our visit.

Andy Warhol’s creative approach challenged the boundaries between art and design and ingeniously introduced multi-disciplinarity into the arts. He merged it all in his career: from advertising to illustration, photography, film, music, and sculpture.

By embracing creativity as a whole and by collaborating with the most inspired talents, Andy Warhol showed that commercial art (which we like to refer to in this project as ‘design’) acts as a mirror to the world we live in and can serve as interesting social study content.

Andy Warhol’s fame began with his illustration work for established brands like Tiffany’s , Columbia Records and Harper’s Bazaar to name a few. His success as a commercial artist eventually pushed him towards visual experiments that captured the American way of life shaped by consumerism, materialism and celebrity culture.

A personal favorite at the Andy Warhol Museum are the “Time Capsules”: cardboard boxes that he filled with everyday objects, photos, letters, and other collectible items, from 1974 onwards. The Museum today holds over 600 Time Capsules in their archives and gallery spaces.

The few capsules on display are fascinating from a creative and anthropological perspective as they intimately reveal the random complexity of Warhol’s existence and the beautiful designs of everyday life. Our visit to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh showed us that life is art, art is design and design is life.

Full Pittsburgh City Report

James and Larkin of Wall to Wall Studios share their insights into the keys to success of rebranding a neighborhood.

In 1791, French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant was commissioned by Georges Washington to imagine and design the layout of the US capital city. The plans developed by L’Enfant transformed Washington D.C. into a modern city with broad avenues and monumental public buildings. Washington is different from other American cities because it was primarily designed to symbolize and encapsulate the ideals of American democracy through its built environment. As the city evolved, it was confronted to common modern urban issues such as population growth, housing, and crime. Today Washington is at the start of a new chapter in which it is trying to reconcile two profiles: one as the national symbol and capital city, the other as a modern 21st century city that hopes to fulfill the needs of its residents.

Washington D.C. is the city of monuments and memorials. Sculptures, buildings, walls, fountains and countless other objects and spaces are scattered around the city as reminders of past events, historic figures or fallen soldiers. The design style and aesthetics of those monuments, that stretch from baroque to post-modernism, left us wondering about the obscure field of monument design.

Washington is the seat of government but also a city with best practice models for sustainability and preservation. One example is the Metrorail, a local landmark and a masterpiece of brutalist architecture that ranks as one of the best public works of the 20th century. It was designed in the late sixties by Chicago architect Harry Weese who studied at MIT under Alvaar Aalto. and was later influenced by his contemporaries Charles and Ray Eames. To innovate its existing transit system, the city recently introduced a new generation of bike stations that can house 130 bicycles in its 1600 sq. ft. of free standing glass and steel design.