2002 National Design Award Winners

Celebrate design

The National Design Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.

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 an uncomplicated understanding of his place in “the natural order of things.” Kiley’s designs have been widely cited for their ability to raise public consciousness and enhance awareness of humankind’s relationship to nature, while maintaining a sense of excitement. Some of his best-known works include New York’s Lincoln Center, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the New York Botanical Gardens, Dallas Art Museum, Fountain Place in Dallas, Rockefeller University in New York, and the Oakland Museum in California.

Geoffrey Beene

Universally recognized for his unparalleled craftsmanship and excellence in clothing design, Geoffrey Beene has maintained his strong, singular vision—unmoved by the whims of trends—throughout his 50 years in American fashion. Having originally studied medicine, he has a unique perspective on the human body and, throughout his career, has returned again and again to developing designs that enhance a woman’s figure. Always thoughtful and inventive, Beene shapes fabric and seam into seemingly simple forms that reveal the beauty of the female body without sacrificing freedom of movement. Among his many accomplishments, Beene has been honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America on several occasions for his design innovations.

André Balazs

André Balazs has created some of the most innovative and widely imitated hotels in the world. Focused on the narrative of the individual experience, Balazs works closely with architects and designers to create a unique look and feel for each hotel. His hotels range widely from luxury boutique hotels like The Mercer, in New York City, and the legendary Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, to the seaside simplicity of Sunset Beach and the affordable sophistication and humor of The Standard in Los Angeles. Acclaimed for their treatment of each site’s unique archaeology, Balazs’ hotels share a relentless attention to detail and atmosphere. Various projects under development include the Hotel Broadway, a luxury hotel/condominium with architects Jean Nouvel and Antonio Citterio, and a luxury resort in St. Barths with designer Christian Liaigre. He is a trustee of the New York Academy of Art and a member of the board of directors of the New York Public Theater.

Whirlpool Corporation

Whirlpool Corporation uses design as a strategic tool to produce high-quality, innovative appliances that meet the needs of a broad range of American households. Whirlpool strives to achieve both business value and consumer solutions through design and consistently reinvents mass-market appliances. The recent development and introduction of a new youth brand, Pla (pronounced “play”), reveals the company’s ongoing commitment to innovation and design-driven solutions that are relevant to its customers’ lives. In the last two years, Whirlpool introduced a record number of new products and futuristic design concepts, including the Whirlpool brand Duet, a horizontal-access clothes washer-dryer pair; Personal Valet, a clothes revitalizing system that smoothes wrinkles and removes odors; and Macrowave, a new look at the microwave oven.

New York City Housing Authority

The New York City Housing Authority, the largest public housing authority in the United States, has become a model for the construction and rehabilitation of quality, innovative housing and other facilities for low-income families. The playgrounds, police stations, and community centers built by the agency serve over half a million people from the full spectrum of New York’s communities. Demonstrating that the highest quality design can indeed be achieved on restricted budgets, the housing authority has designed more than 80 new community centers in the last eight years, working with prominent architects such as George Ranelli, Agrest & Gandelsonas, and Hanrahan-Meyers.

Steven Holl

Since establishing Steven Holl Architects in New York in 1976, Holl has earned a reputation as one of the most brilliant pure designers in America. Holl’s spare yet beautiful architecture originates from the architect’s geometric rigor, attention to detail, and belief in the integrity of craft. Rather than carrying one signature style to different sites, he seeks the unique character of each site and program as the starting point for an architectural idea and venture. His imaginative integration of the formal aspects of material, light, and color with the particulars of site has earned him commissions in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Among his most notable projects are the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, Simmons Hall residence at MIT in Massachusetts, the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington and Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki.

Lucille Tenazas

Lucille Tenazas is the principal and creative force behind Tenazas Design, a San Francisco-based communication, graphics, and design firm founded in 1985. Her work, spanning 20 years, lies between the rigor of design and the freedom of art and achieves an effective symbiosis of rationality and creativity. Tenazas’s interests in language and the relationships between meaning, form, and content have produced elegantly layered and beautifully composed designs. Her clients include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, Golden Gate National Parks Association and the San Francisco National Airport. Tenazas also teaches and chairs the newly established MFA program in Design at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

James Carpenter

James Carpenter has spent his career in the arena of public art and architecture, pushing the boundaries of light and glass technologies in large environmental spaces. The primary focus of his work is the exploration of the natural phenomenon of light and structure as they influence built space. Carpenter’s original approach to glass uses the material’s inherent transparency and reflectivity to capture and direct light in ways that give shape and character to architectural space. Some of his major projects include a light threshold for the 2000 Olympics in Australia, the skylight for Columbus Center in New York, the Great Hall Tower of the San Francisco Civic Center, and projects for NationsBank, San Francisco International Airport, and Seattle Financial Center.

Niels Diffrient

A pioneer of ergonomic design, Niels Diffrient is driven by the need to improve the way existing products work. For Diffrient, product ideas originate from the specific human factors relevant to the product at hand. He delays giving his designs a distinct physical form until all relevant ergonomic factors are considered—an approach that results in furniture of unusual comfort and visual ingenuity. Diffrient’s Humanscale, a compendium of information on the data and dimensions that regulate the movements of the human body, is one of the seminal works of ergonomics and design. Diffrient has designed aircraft interiors for American Airlines and elements of the company’s corporate identity, the Knoll #71 and #72 chair series and the Borletti sewing machine with Marco Zanuso. His latest product is the Freedom chair for the Humanscale Corporation.