In early January the Walker hosted more than 30 local architects, landscape architects, product and graphic designers, artists, and other cultural thinkers to help us think about the four-acre green space that was created as part of the museum’s 2005 expansion. This convening took place as the first public step in an upcoming summer-long program called Open Field—an experiment in new educational…

Insights, our annual graphic design lecture series, returns on Tuesday nights, starting tomorrow with Eddie Opara and continuing during the next three weeks with Peter Buchanan-Smith, Irma Boom, and Stefan Bucher. See more info here. And while we’re at it, check out past Insights lecturessuch as Experimental Jetset and Project Projects on our recently revamped Walker Channel—where you will find a…

Houminn (pronounced human) is a design collaborative primarily between Marc Swackhamer, who lives in Minneapolis, and Houston-based Blair Satterfield. The two will be speaking at the Walker this Thursday, February 25th, as part of our Drawn Here series. http://www.houminn.com/ 1. What have you been obsessing about? Marc – We are included in an exhibition opening on March 4 at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery…

Tauba Auerbach is a San Francisco and New York-based artist first known for her text-based paintings. She has since broadened her scope, adding photography and instrument making to her repertoire. Auerbach–in addition to Jean Luc Godard, the subject of my last post–is a non-designer who inspires my design practice. T: This is the floor in my studio right now. I’m making a book of these photos—these…

“Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New…

E: Hey, where’s that blog post you were going to finish two weeks ago? A: I, uh, have been working on it. E: Really? It looked to me like you were watching movies. A: I was refreshing my memory. E: Uh huh. What’s this post about then? A: It’s about Jean-Luc Godard. And it’s done. Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most radical of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, is an artist whose imaginative typographic title sequences…

How does one prove the Earth is round? In February of 1966, during an acid trip on a rooftop in San Francisco, Stewart Brand began contemplating the curvature of the Earth. The horizon sloped away from him on either side, buildings refused to stand parallel, and the flat-earth fallacy became viscerally apparent. He was determined to broadcast this feeling, and called for a solution (in the form of a…

“On the first Sunday of 1969 Robert Barry went to Central Park with four capsules of radioactive material in his pocket. He had ordered them from a scientific supply catalog, choosing an isotope of his namesake, barium-133, the only one of twenty-two known isotopes of the element that does not dangerously decay within seconds or minutes. He walked to the Great Lawn behind the Metropolitan Museum of…

This morning design director and curator Andrew Blauvelt spoke about Walker design at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of a public program series featuring 2009 National Design Awards recipients. The Walker was this year’s winner in Corporate and Institutional Achievement. Andrew spoke about technology and design alongside Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, later taking questions from…