Frank Gehry Frank Gehry is known for making astonishing buildings, but his achievement is much greater: he has single-handedly made design a public event. Cities clamor for his buildings, and people make pilgrimages to their doorsteps. In 1962, he formed Frank O. Gehry & Associates in Santa Monica, California, and in 1978 he gained widespread...

AMERICAN ORIGINALS This honor—created especially for the first National Design Awards—is bestowed on individuals who have achieved the feat of becoming cultural icons by taking highly personal, even iconoclastic, paths to hone a unique vision of design. Morris Lapidus, 1902-2001 Morris Lapidus studied acting at New York University and architecture at Columbia University before embarking...

AMERICAN ORIGINALS This honor—created especially for the first National Design Awards—is bestowed on individuals who have achieved the feat of becoming cultural icons by taking highly personal, even iconoclastic, paths to hone a unique vision of design. John Hejduk, 1929-2000 True romantics are dangerously scarce these days. Thus the death of architect John Hejduk this...

Apple When Apple rolled out its new iMac in 1998, commentators couldn’t resist hailing the colorful new computers as the fruits of a design revolution. However, this was no conversion: the iMac was an affirmation of Apple’s core values. Since the mid-1970s, Apple Computers has overturned industry standards of speed and functionality with an approach...

Ralph Appelbaum When Ralph Appelbaum began his career three decades ago, designing an exhibition might have meant little more than specifying wall color and pedestal dimensions. Today, the museum designer creates exhibitions that rival movie sets in technical complexity and books in narrative intensity. Appelbaum’s designs have transformed museums from temples into public forums. For...

Lawrence Halprin Since opening his San Francisco design office in 1949, Lawrence Halprin has been in the business of bringing gardens—and their attending civic graces—to American cities. Remarkably, he romanticizes neither. In fact, the key to Halprin’s success may lie in his acceptance of the reality of his materials—natural forms that grow, change, and simply...

Paul Maccready Design today places a premium on beauty, lightness, speed, and sustainability. Paul MacCready’s energy-efficient vehicles have been a paragon of those virtues for decades before they became so urgently fashionable. MacCready’s early innovations earned him the moniker “father of human-powered flight.” In 1977, MacCready made history with his Gossamer Condor, the first successful...

Robert Wilson Design poet Robert Wilson defies easy categorization. He explores the human experience often in provocatively enigmatic ways. Over his thirty-year career, his brilliant approach to theater, dance, set design, installations, architecture, and furniture has raised the standards of creativity in all those fields—and beyond. His influential body of work ranges from the 1971...

Stanley Marcus Stanley Marcus is chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus. Often dubbed the “Merchant Prince” of Texas, Marcus is best known for building his family’s Dallas store into an international icon of luxury and service. A noted collector, award-winning journalist, and dedicated architecture patron, Marcus honed his discriminating taste as he “shopped” the world—and he...

Tupperware In 1942, Earl Silas Tupper produced the first flexible plastic container, a product that would become the foundation of a billion dollar global enterprise. Few companies have both saturated the marketplace and lined the shelves of major museums worldwide. Tupperware’s ethos is firmly rooted in Tupper’s quest to create products that married traditional American...

Peter Eisenman Peter Eisenman, architecture’s chief intellectual since the 1960s, has applied contemporary philosophy to his own field and transformed his architecture into an art form that probes human experience. Since founding the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1967, Eisenman has sought to infuse architecture with leading ideas from other fields, from literary...

John Maeda Merging art and computer science, John Maeda investigates the physical manifestations of digital data. Whether designing innovative digital calendars and game patterns or creating digital echoes of real world behaviors, Maeda exerts extraordinary control over his design process by creating his own computer code instead of simply manipulating programs off the shelf. More...

Julie Bargmann Of D.I.R.T. studio Julie Bargmann teaches community leaders to see their ravaged industrial sites in new ways—to claim, accept, and even celebrate their history, to boldly tackle their problems, and to have faith in their future. Trained as a sculptor and landscape architect, Bargmann collaborates with scientists, ecologists, architects, artists, engineers, and historians...

David Kelley & IDEO David Kelley may be the prototype for the twenty-first-century Renaissance man. With IDEO, the international design and engineering consultancy he founded in 1991, Kelley has cultivated a multidisciplinary hothouse, just at the moment when design demands new hybrids of expertise. Sought after by Fortune 500 companies around the world, IDEO generates...

Dan Kiley In a professional career spanning more than 60 years, Dan Kiley has been acclaimed as the “dean” of American landscape architecture. He has worked with the great 20th-century architects (including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Frank Gehry) on some of this country’s most important commissions, combining a refinement of eye and hand with...