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Dialogues with Design Legends Ralph Rucci and Ike Ude - September 18th 8:15 PM Recipient of the National Design Award for 2008, Ralph Rucci is the chief and only representative of American design in the Parisian Haute Couture. For the past fifteen years, through his womenswear label Chado Ralph Rucci, the Philadelphia-born designer has made his name as a modernist of intricate yet restrained aesthetic, where high craftsmanship, refined, often complex cuts, exquisite materials, and sophisticated, minimalist color palette merge into a super feminine agenda. His work has been showcased and recognized in such groundbreaking exhibitions as The Little Black Dress of the 21st Century at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1985), Goddess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003), and Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2005), the show that examined the common principles of fashion and architecture. The two monograph shows, Chado Ralph Rucci at the Costume Institute at Kent State University (2006) and Ralph Rucci: the Art of Weightlessness at the Fashion Institute of Technology (2007) explored the wide spectrum of Rucci’s vision and integrity. A true art connoisseur, Rucci, in his splendor and sensual garments has proved that in our age and time when mass-production, signatureless, and casualty are the chief rules, his fashion of purity and perfection is a true manifestation of art. His discourse of clean and timeless fashion represents the very essence of an artistic approach to clothing in the most orthodox way. His signature style is rooted in the perfection of Belanciaga, the femininity of Madame Grès, and the abstraction of Halston, all those who have been instrumental in the development of his own identity. This event acknowledges and celebrated Rucci as an American icon. The Nigerian-born Iké Udé is one of the most extraordinary visionaries working in New York City today. Artist, editor, writer, and a publisher of the cultural and fashion magazine aRUDE, Udé has made his name with creative work and philosophy that merges art and mass media. Ambitious and stimulating interviews with high profile personalities such Comme des Garcon’s Rei Kawakubo, Jil Sander, and Isabella Rossellini, just to name a few, have become a touchstone of his work. Udé started his artistic career in the late 1980s as a painter, but soon moved to photography, establishing a signature art that challenges issues of sexuality, identity, and race through the use of the medium of photography. His work is rooted in mass communication, magazines, video, film, and fashion, all arenas which provide thematic discussion. Udé’s artistic work can be found in private and museum collections, including the Guggenheim and Smithsonian National Museum. A monograph show that honored his work and explored issues twentieth-first style, mass-media, gender, race, and communication of the body, all at the core of Udé’s projects, was entitled Beyond Decorum: the Photography of Iké Udé (2000). It had traveled to such art institutions as Harvard University’s Sert Gallery, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Art, Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts, OBORO Contemporary Art in Montreal, and University of California’s Museum of Photography, and resulted in a catalogue, published by MIT Press. Udé’s forthcoming book, Style File: the World’s Most Elegantly Dressed, to be published in October by Harper Collins, is a collection of interviews with fifty-eight figures whom the author considers to be today’s top thinkers and creators in the filed of style. With interviews by Udé, Harold Koda, Valerie Steele, George Pitts, and Nicholas Boston, this publication explores and redefines the intriguing, yet complex notion of the “stylish,” and its role in our society. Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, Kurt Forster - October 23rd 8:15 PM It is hard to think of any architect in our time that has addressed the essence of architecture with a greater intellectual approach than Peter Eisenman. Whereas architecture is often about forms, his is about ideas, about challenging fundamental questions such as the role of architecture in our society and the very meaning of the built form. His is also about dialogue between oppositions, as the title of the journal of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, which he had founded: confrontation versus integration, past and future, site and non-site. He is here tonight not only because he has produced some of the most exciting projects and buildings of our generation, but also because he initiated a dual work as an intellectual and designer that has shaped much of the present innovations in the design would. His Memorial for the Murdered Jews in the center of Berlin, surrounded by the Reischtag and other iconic buildings is one of the most moving commissions of recent years. The abstraction, the silence, echoed by the rectangular concrete blocks of varying heights arranged in a grid, is the pure story of the Jewish nation. The younger designer converses with Peter tonight, Greg Lynn, is one of the most innovative of today’s architects, named by Time Magazine one of the world’s 100 most innovative people of the 21st century. He can be credited for pioneering and defining the use of cutting-edge technology as a medium of crafting design, blending computers in his signature aesthetics that derive from technology and from science fiction. Working at his Los-Angeles-based firm, Form, Greg has produced buildings, projects, publications, teachings and writings all of which have been instrumental in the acceptance and use of advanced technology for design and fabrication. Kurt Forster, the moderator, is a world renowned architectural historian, theorist, critic, educator, and a recipient of an honorary doctorate from the New School for Social Research. He has made his name for mediating between European and American interests in architecture and architectural education. Professor Forster is an authority and widely published author on Renaissance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, architecture, and urban history with monographs on such icons as Palladio, Schinkel, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Rossi, Gehry, Libeskind, and Herzog & de Meuron. A founding director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, now the Getty Research Institute, Kurt established one of the world’s most comprehensive libraries and archives, an international program for research in the history and practice of art and architecture, and a series of publications and exhibitions. He has been also the Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where he curated the fascinating shows John Soane, and Herzog & de Meuron. Mr. Forster serves regularly on scholarly boards and committees and frequently participates as juror in major architectural competitions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Milton Glaser, Stephen Doyle, Paul Stirton - November 3rd 8:15 PM Milton Glaser, the creator of our beloved logo “I love NY” hardly needs introduction. Globally, his work has been regarded as American as Coca Cola, not only for its enormously beneficial impact on various industries, but for it originality and optimism Milton has crystallized through the medium of graphics. He empowers both his students and the public with a mandate to think critically about all forms of propaganda, and by directing political anger and frustration into transfiguring initiatives. His images would remind us all that “what happens in Darfur happens to us,” that “a worldwide effort will stop” the AIDS crisis, reassuring us that after the tragedy we all “love NY more than ever.” The young talent who will be conversing with Milton here tonight, Stephen Doyle, is, in a real sense, a magician. But instead of merely pulling rabbits from hats, Stephen pulls character out of words, transforming their resonance through his mastery of the graphic form. Known for creating identity, packaging, environment, and editorial design with his witty signature style, the recipient of the national design award for Communication for 2008 made his name with an exceptional talent for extracting visual personality from words. As the Creative Director of the NYC-based Doyle Partners, Stephen, with his strong passion for innovation, sophistication, and excellence, has created graphics for such major publications as the New York Times and Vanity Fair.Our remarkable moderator, Paul Stirton, is a senior lecturer of Art History at the Glasgow University and a fellow of the Centre for Whistler Studies in Glasgow. Currently residing in NY, Paul serves as a Visiting Professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Material Culture, where he teaches the history and theory of printmaking and graphic design. He has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century British and Central
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