Design 50 profiles: Theaster Gates, Jeanne Gang, Obi Nwazota, Kara Mann et al.

“But distance affords a clearer view of the contours of an ecosystem that Gates’ Rebuild Foundation has cultivated—an ecosystem in which one project accrues to another’s value and in which the ordinary indignities of lost things, decrepit buildings or forgotten places return to grace through the sustained lift of a creative, if occasionally doctrinaire, optimism of Gates’ advocacy.”

For Newcity’s annual Design 50 list, I’ve contributed more profiles that I care to admit. All images by Joe Mazza.

Over the years, I have written a leaning tower of profiles of notable people in design and related fields for Newcity magazine’s annual who’s-who issue. In 2014 and ‘15, when I toiled as editor at the magazine, I also complied and edited these “Design 50” lists which required of me a yogic balance between humility and hubris.

My profiles are brief, irreverent, and wonderfully incomplete. Writing about Jeanne Gang, I imply that she transacts business with the devil. Of Theaster Gates, I quip that his grandest project is Gates himself. Gushing about friend and inspiration Obi Nwazota, I suggest that his preferred mode of conveyance is a time-space-continuum-bending spaceship. All of these profiles, however dated or skewed, were written from a place of love — a tribute from one sinner to another. Below are some of my favorites.

Jeanne Gang
Architect
Even architects who bargain with the Prince of Darkness ask in return for their souls a career only half as illustrious as Jeanne Gang’s. Gang’s list of accomplishments is long and its highlights well-documented: a delicate pavilion at the Lincoln Park Zoo, a variegated glass cube at Columbia College, a sinuous tower downtown. And, lest we be accused of understatement, she is a certified, bonafide MacArthur genius. We can’t help feeling that Gang is just getting started, though. In the past few months, her firm, Studio Gang, won an international competition for a new dorm on the University of Chicago campus and received another commission for a high-rise at Lakeshore East. All hype aside, Gang is doing something important, both in the design of her buildings and in the way her entire body of work reflects on Chicago’s status as an architecture destination.

Jimenez Lai
Architect
Jimenez Lai’s interview in Architect magazine raised eyebrows not because Lai was photographed with his cat, Helvetica, in the foreground. Nor was it because Lai dismissed the vogue notion that architects’ primary mode should be social consciousness. It was because Lai told architecture’s official licensing body that he wasn’t especially interested in licensure. He’d rather engage in formal experimentation, he said. And experiment he does. The youthful UIC instructor is already on the international circuit; he has won important competitions, exhibited at home and abroad (one of his strange pieces of “super-furniture” was collected by the Museum of Modern Art), and had his first monograph, a graphic novel, published by Princeton Architectural Press. This summer, Lai will be representing Taiwan at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Why all the celebrity? It may be because Lai’s work has an uncanny, dreamlike quality—a kind of a Freudian subconscious of architecture. Lai’s design exists beyond the terrestrial boundaries of building. One chapter in his graphic novel, for instance, debates whether plans or elevations are better suited to defying gravity. Another imagines a dystopian world in which the government prohibits people from having sex with buildings—but, thankfully, only certain types of buildings. Even Lai recoils from a world where people may not love at least some architecture.

Stanley Tigerman
Architect
It’s hard to know where to begin with Stanley Tigerman, or where to end. He is an icon and an iconoclast. He is the Old Man of Chicago architecture and he is its enfant terrible. His most famous work isn’t a building he created but one he sunk in Lake Michigan—albeit symbolically. His ethics are absolute. His language is foul. HIs archives are at Yale. His work is, for the most part, in Chicago. He is preoccupied with mortality and has designed his own headstone. He is obsessed with youth and is a prolific mentor, teacher and champion to generations of younger designers. His architecture is peripheral to his life’s work and his architecture is what undergirds everything else—the writing, the teaching, the raging. He is a raconteur, a trickster, a moralist, a myth. Tigerman is, consistently and unapologetically, Tigerman. And that in itself is a great feat.

Ernie Wong
Landscape architect
Ernie Wong is lucky. His firm, Site Design Group, has shaped great swaths of land in Chicago. Wong’s Ping Tom Park, recently expanded into the no-man’s land north of 18th Street along the Chicago River, has set the template for unfussy, vernacular community spaces. A park in Lakeshore East, another in the West Loop, and Bridgeport’s beautifully remediated Stearns Quarry followed. Walking along elevated paths through Stearns Quarry, with a marsh to one side and a gentle hill to the other, you might hear the whoosh of a fishing line cast by an old man into a glassy pond. The effect is like that of entering a wardrobe and emerging into a fable. Each of Wong’s spaces is different, but they all share that sense of timelessness and awe—and a cast of frolicking high-schoolers, sleepy dogs, children on swings, runners stopping for a drink of water. Wong’s luck is likely to hold: the street address of his office, 888, according to Chinese tradition, guarantees good fortune.

Jason Pickleman
Graphic designer
Jason Pickleman graduated with a degree in English and his preoccupation with language—the irreducible tension of form and meaning—is at the heart of his design approach. His work is always literate and sometimes literary. At its best, it approaches poetry, which, as Pickleman knows, shares a root with “poiesis,” a term which means making, both in the sense of creative production and, well, Creative Production: willing something out of nothing. Pickleman’s output is prodigious; we’ve never heard him say no to anything. We can imagine some day that tourists on double-decker buses will take a themed tour of Picklemania. We can hear the guide pointing out the logo for Millennium Park, swinging by the West Loop to gawk at Avec and Blackbird, continuing north to the marquee at the Metro, and ending up with a shot of “Pickleman’s Poison” at Eleven City Diner. Along the way, ticket-holders will likely witness the Pickleman himself, striding in signature haste to sneak into a movie premiere or exhibition opening.

Cheryl Durst
Executive vice president and CEO, International Interior Design Association
Though her office is in Chicago, Cheryl Durst herself is everywhere. She is the winged archangel of interior design, soaring through celestial heights en route to Milan and Paris, Dubai and Doha, New York and New Mexico. Durst’s travel schedule isn’t incidental: as the head of a global professional association, Durst is a visible presence at countless events, meetings and awards conducted by IIDA’s thirty-one chapters. Durst understands that the interior design industry carries a critical mass, that, collectively, its members weigh heavily on workplace culture, on taste, on the environment. That’s the important message which, in her frequent speeches, Durst carries from Chicago to the world.

Obi Nwazota
Owner, OrangeSkin
When Obi Nwazota first opened the furniture boutique OrangeSkin in the seedier stretches of Wicker Park, it was as if a spaceship from a more fabulous future had landed. It was an act of defiance, a reaction, Nwazota says, against a Midwestern conservatism. But his store also defied neighborhood boundaries and, more importantly, a blind obedience to Miesian furniture. In the decades that followed, Nwazota has moved his location closer to the bustle of the Merchandise Mart, but he certainly has not lost the bad-boy personality of the store. OrangeSkin’s inventory, which Nwazota personally oversees, remains a bright spot of color, shape and—can we say it?—alienness in River North.

Theaster Gates
Founder and Executive Director, Rebuild Foundation
It may be said of Theaster Gates, as it has been said of certain figures throughout history: he is his own greatest creation. Consider a production typical of Gates’ mode: it might involve a set of physical structures, financed by a consortium, built by a loose coalition of craftspeople, supported by national philanthropy, filled with an archive of vinyl records or books, animated by symposia and casual hangs, and christened by, say, a choral performance. Gates’ genre, other than a relentless generic ambivalence, is what has been termed ethical redevelopment, which supposes that citymaking is a function neither of building form nor of real estate transactions but primarily of goodwill, applied creatively and generously. At close range, Gates’ projects can seem erratic—or, viewed more charitably, oracular—for who can trace a straight line through commercial bookstores, gallery installations, social events, real estate, and racial justice that mark his winding path? But distance affords a clearer view of the contours of an ecosystem that Gates’ Rebuild Foundation has cultivated—an ecosystem in which one project accrues to another’s value and in which the ordinary indignities of lost things, decrepit buildings or forgotten places return to grace through the sustained lift of a creative, if occasionally doctrinaire, optimism of Gates’ advocacy. If he is indeed a designer, he has designed, in his likeness, a way of designing. The only thing more striking than Gates’ ambition is that it succeeds.

Kara Mann
Founder and Creative Director, Kara Mann
Once the brooding doyenne of goth-inspired dungeon chic, Mann has long since emerged into the light of interior-design celebrity. But her darker edge shows in collections that are undergirded by industrial steel, heavy stone and the kind of leather that seduces as effectively in a castle’s grand salon as in the dangerous reaches of its dungeon. Mann’s eponymous studio has, to its credit, captured a hospitality zeitgeist, with hotel interiors across the United States that manage to feel both titillatingly intimate and yet comfortable enough not to spook besuited business guests. In Chicago, Mann’s most confident work can be glimpsed through the hedges of exclusive suburban estates. A solarium in a Lake Forest mansion—part of a charity benefit showcase—demonstrates the uncanny contradictions that form Mann’s vocabulary: a first look reveals a sun-drenched room, clad in light fabrics, anchored by potted plants, and enlivened with a pastoral painting. But a second will uncover a counterpunctual theme: a ceiling fixture of sharp metal spikes suspended on a heavy chain over a tableaux of bunny statuettes—coated in black—unaware of the looming danger above. It’s a perfect visual gag: a room made for light is lighter still with a moment of darkness concealed at its heart.

Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth
Object Designers and Partners, Parsons & Charlesworth
That Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth connected their lives and their practices with an ampersand is a reflection of a dry variety of social commentary that, in their native England, used to be called droll. The designers, who were featured in a solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center that opened at the end of 2016, teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where that kind of post-irony—literate, a little arch—informs broader curricular concerns of cultural relevance, the environment, decay. It isn’t gallows humor but it comes close in oddly gleeful objects designed to greet an imaginary apocalypse. Or consider the heaviness—physical and metaphorical—of an object that was an audience favorite at the CHGO DSGN exhibition: an archetypal patio grill sealed up with a marble top, a symbol of suburban banality upcycled into existential absurdity.