Walker Art Center Recipient of National Design Award

The Walker Art Center was recently recognized for its expertise in the area of Design with a prestigious honor. Underscoring the institution’s continued leadership and innovation, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum announced that the Walker is the recipient of its 2009 National Design Award in the category of Corporate and Institutional Achievement. The Walker is the first nonprofit institution to be recognized in this category. It joins previous honorees such as Apple, Google, and Nike, and along with Target and Aveda is the third Twin Cities-based organization to win the award.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

National Design Awards

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s nationwide awards program celebrates excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in American design and salutes those key individuals and firms who have played an essential role in shaping the way we experience our world. This year’s nominations were solicited from a committee of more than 2,500 designers, educators, journalists, cultural figures, and corporate leaders from every state in the nation. This year’s award recipients will be honored at a special ceremony in fall 2009 at which time Cooper-Hewitt will present the exhibition Design USA: Contemporary Innovation to showcase the work of the honorees from the first 10 years of the awards program.

For more than 70 years, design has played a vital role in the life of the Walker Art Center. Through hundreds of groundbreaking exhibitions, publications, and presentations by designers worldwide, the Walker presents the value of design to the general public. During the 1940s the Walker pioneered many new design initiatives that were firsts in the United States. In 1946 the Everyday Art Gallery opened as one of the first spaces for the dedicated study of modern design, and Everyday Art Quarterly was the first journal published by a museum dedicated to design. Innovative exhibitions and projects such as the Idea Houses of 1941 and 1947 showcased the latest developments in modern architecture and interior design for the general public, and were the first such exhibition houses constructed by a museum in the United States. In its earliest days, the Walker used design as a bridge for the public between the world of modern everyday objects and the unfamiliar world of modern art. In the postwar period the Walker presented design not simply as objects of modern form and function, but design as a process and methodology for solving complex problems. Design Quarterly showcased topics as diverse as Julia Child’s utilitarian kitchen design to Archigram’s visionary architecture and tackled issues such as urban renewal, product obsolescence, and mass transit. Design has been a holistic presence in the organization’s life not only as something exhibited but also as something practiced and taught.

Design and architecture have been the subject of literally hundreds of presentations and programs—from Le Corbusier in 1944 and Frank Gehry in 1986 to Diller + Scofidio in 1991, LOT-EK in 2003, and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes in 2008. The Walker presents design’s past, present, and future: from the first major museum exhibitions about the history of graphic design in America and contemporary prefabricated houses to the ancient and contemporary culture of Tokyo and the future of America’s classrooms. Hundreds of designers have spoken at the Walker—from Charles and Ray Eames to Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Massimo Vignelli to Ed Fella, Maya Lin to John Maeda.

The Walker’s in-house design studio—widely regarded as a leader in contemporary cultural branding—is the recipient of more than 100 awards and operates one of the longest running design fellowship programs in the U.S. It actively commissions cutting-edge designs to create new buildings, landscapes, fonts, and interactive technologies from leading and emerging designers. Its commitment to design is reflected in the importance it has been accorded within the institution since its inception in 1940: a central voice in strategic planning, an essential component of its multidisciplinary programming, and a vital force in shaping its identity. Under the leadership of Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt since 1998, design at the Walker is a reflection of the institution’s mission to be a “creative catalyst” in the field of contemporary culture.