 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage, Caroline Bowman. In a sensational night ahead, because the selfie has become the self-portrait of the digital age, we asked our winners to make their own for the films we will see tonight. Many, many thanks to Cooper Hewitt trustee David Lubars of BBDO New York, John Cayman of Radical Media, and their extremely talented teams for these terrific and inventive films. Also, a call out to the talented panel of jurors and our entire National Design Awards family. Would all NDA winners and jurors past and present please stand up. Now on with the show. It's a many splendored thing. Designs about thinking and making all wrapped in one. Designs about making plan and giving order. What does winning the National Design Award mean to you? It is a tremendous honor. It means that the expanded idea of graph design that we have is something that's viable. We are very grateful. Thank you, Cooper Hewitt. Thank you, everyone. Joining us to present the Communication Design Award is political journalist and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, Ben Smith. I prepared a listicle of smoking hot graphic designers for this event, but I'm just here to congratulate two of them. Prem Krishnamurthy and Adam Michaels, who in 12 years of project projects, have really broadened the scope of traditional graphic design to include editorial thinking and strategy and content, and also a gallery and a publishing house. Congratulations and welcome Prem and Adam. Well, it's a tremendous honor for us to receive this award, especially as graphic designers. When I first started studying graphic design, my mother, who's a roboticist, she said, what is that? What is this graphic design? Is it like computer graphics? Now, after about 12 years of having project projects, she actually knows what graphic design is. Thank you, mom. Adam and I started project projects with the conviction that graphic design and typography are critical to every aspect of contemporary life. It's on every screen, every page, in every space and on every film you see. It's the connective tissue between ideas and people. So thanks to this award, we can keep advocating for graphic design's crucial role in its future. We couldn't have gotten here by ourselves. We'd like to extend our deepest gratitude to the Cooper Hewitt and this year's judges, including graphic designer Rick Valicenti, who is an inspiration to us. Yes, Rick. Our studio benefits from an amazing network of clients and collaborators both within and without. We don't have time to list them all, but we would like to include a shout out to Associate Principal Chris Wu. I'd also like to thank my fiance, Shannon Harvey, and my father, Irv Michaels, who's here tonight and who guided the studio through countless business decisions, leading to our present state of something that looks an awful lot like legitimacy. Legitimacy. I don't know what that means, but thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful night, and here's the graphic design. Design for us is just an incredible way of life. We're constantly pushing ourselves to just really think about the world through this incredible lens that we know is design. The National Design Award, it's, of course, amazing because it's awarded by your peers, and we appreciate the community of designers, architects, and artists, et cetera, that we're in conversation with. Here to present the Architecture Design Awards is Critic Curator and Historian of Art, Yves Alambois. I was a student at Harvard. He had one design ID per minute. I used to, I still use the prototype of a code track that he gave me, and it was, you look at how complex it is actually, conceptually simple. But he was so shy then, and bumbling, that I wanted to ever get his brilliant ideas into the world. At last he met Hillary, whose own brilliance matches his, but who keeps her feet far more firmly on the ground, I think. Together they created Moss, proving that one plus one equals far more than two. Thank you, Yves Alambois. You start. Okay, okay, great. Well, we're incredibly honored. It seems like, I don't know. Can we just take these notes right here? We started project projects. Just to say, I mean like completely unoriginal, but thank you mom and dad. And thank you... Mom and dad? Yeah. To the Judy's? Yeah, both moms and dads. But like, and to our teachers and our colleagues and our friends and our peers, which have become a kind of more and more, more bosses, become a more and more complicated group of people, but still a kind of source for us, I think, in a way, for our thinking. You have to say something, I don't know. We are so unprepared, but we have notes that aren't ours. Why do you guys leave these things here? Thank you. And to everyone who's worked with us and all of our current staff, we couldn't do this without them, but we just worked tirelessly in our office every day. Which we probably better... It's true, that's sort of a downer way to end it, but it's true. Okay, that's good. Thank you so much. The design is about bringing together all the things that are important to us, that we care about, our values, and through a process, giving a form. For us at Heath, we use design as an approach to designing a company where everything is interconnected, where everything is holistic. Receiving the award is really meaningful because it celebrates the broad impact of design at Heath on not just the products we make. Because it ties both our past, present, and future accomplishments all together. They've proven that we are doing the right things for the company right now and they encourage us to do it even better for the future. Presenting the Corporate and Institutional Achievement Awards are Architects and Winners of the 2003 Architecture Design Award Todd Williams and Billy Chen. Heath started this company in the 50s. We knew it around 2000 and then these young kids took it over and frankly they've done absolute wonders. It's fantastic to go there to Sol Solito and then go to San Francisco to see what they're doing. Frankly we try to cover our buildings in these tiles. We hope you all will too. So we think their colors run true, although every tile is different. Heath is the perfect combination of the head and the hand and we're very happy to be able to give this award to Kathy Bailey and Robin Petrovic. What makes this award really special for us is the recognition of design in all aspects of the business. When we first bought the company 12 years ago our mission was to connect design closely to manufacturing and to close that gap in communication design intent that is so often lost in the making of product. Since then we've extended the principles of design by designing the whole company connecting the product to the manufacturing to the environment of our showrooms and our focus on design really is what's enabled us to keep making our product here at home while similar businesses were outsourcing overseas. We're still a small company so it's even more appreciated by us to be recognized in this way by the Cooper Hewitt and to know that our work is appreciated in the scale that we work in. While the two of us are here to accept the award it's important to congratulate and thank our 200 employees back home who make what we do real. While we're a design-driven company many of them don't work in the design discipline but range from working with our customers in the showrooms to making the clay that turns into the dinnerware and tile that Heath is known for. What's really special is that all of them were just as excited for Heath to win this award it really means a lot to us and the Cooper Hewitt supports design. Thank you. Came to see over many years of trying to build our way out of homelessness was that that was a futile effort in the face of a badly designed housing system and so we started applying the tools of design thinking and quality improvement to looking at the system itself what would it take to actually put our resources together in a more sensible way with the user in mind that people could escape homelessness quickly and never become homeless in the first place and so design for us has become the way into lasting solutions to homelessness and to the problems that expose people to homelessness. Joining us to present the Design Mind Award is President and Treasurer of the Lillie Alkencloss Foundation Alexander Rozan. The most about Rozan is her devotion to ending homelessness through good design. She's been doing this for over 30 years starting right here in New York City in 1990 when she founded Common Ground Community and went on to build over 3,000 units of award-winning permanent supportive housing for homeless New Yorkers. From 2004 to 2007 Common Ground Street to Home Initiative succeeded in reducing street homelessness to a time square by 86% by applying the same design principles to public systems that had proven so powerful in the creation of user-friendly supportive housing. In 2010, drawing on the lessons of that initiative Rozan and her team launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign which helped 186 communities redesign their public systems to find permanent housing for over 105,000 homeless Americans in just four years. In an extremely tight budgetary climate communities achieved this result through better design of existing resources. Today Rozan has founded and leads a powerful new organization, Community Solutions which seeks to bring the principles of quality data-driven design to the systems affecting not only homelessness but also health care, unemployment and other complex social problems. I'm really delighted to present this year's National Design Award for Design Mind to Rozan Hagerty. Thank you Alexandra and the Cooper Ewitt and all of you for this wonderful award and my Community Solutions colleagues and I are especially delighted to be recognized as designers because the source of our optimism that homelessness, intergenerational poverty and these related problems are actually solvable comes from our faith in the power of good design and the acknowledgement that we see in communities where we're working that better design systems that start with a user in mind and the person trying to find a home trying to find a job trying to create a safer and healthier neighborhood trying to get needed medical care that if we designed our systems around those users and the problems they're trying to solve bit by bit we can chip away at solutions. If there's a concern that we share is that not enough people who work on issues of poverty understand the powerful tool that design thinking is and I am eager to enlist this great tribe of improvers in the room to be thinking about the way that the skills that you've learned could be improving your communities and solving these problems that are certainly within our reach. Thank you and again it's an honor to be here. Design is not only a visual experience it starts in the heart. Design is a lifestyle. It's my life first of all. It's my love. You go into unknown territory when you discover yourself through working with your hands and your mind and your heart. Winning this award is a deep honor. It's a celebration of ten years of Frias 4. I'm extremely honored to be receiving the award as part of Frias 4. When I moved to this country, I always wanted to do something that makes a difference and this award shows me that finally I am. Here to present the award for fashion design please welcome Academy Award-winning actress Marissa Tomey. I'm very happy to be here tonight. I have known these creative minds for almost 20 years. I made it my mini mission to meet them because I had seen them biking around the city together and even though I'm a born and bred New Yorker I knew that the pinnacle of what I was after would be to know these interesting souls. For me they really signified a really full bohemian creative way of life and it was like a dreamy vision of Soho in the 70s and I wanted to be in on that. A lot of this was about their singular design aesthetic but I came to find out much more. I'm a great admirer of their love of music, their deeply rooted spirituality and the way they seek to bridge cultures together in peace. From the New York street cache of their circle bag which is a classic and to the global high culture of their museum exhibitions three is for always above all brings people together. Early on in my own career these innovative designers were extraordinarily supportive of me and I have the fondest memories of going over to their silver loft and playing dress up just like we did today. Little did I realize that one day I'd be doing so in preparation for this historic celebration of their contributions to American design. And so it is with great pride and a genuine sense of poignancy that I present the 2015 National Design Award for fashion design not just to the American fashion designers of the year but to three of the most creative and fun and loving New Yorkers there are. Please join me in congratulating three as four. Let's do one thing. Hello. We are international. We are. What can I say? My name is Anj. We all came to New York in the mid 90s and from very different places from very different cultures and we were blessed to meet each other and to become a family. It's a mitzvah in that sense and I think it's destiny and very much it was destiny to end up in the city where we all long to be because this is the city where we all wanted to make our hopes come true, our dreams come true, the one of the American dream to create our very own puzzle creation of the American dream and we've been working very hard on it for all these years with lots of love from each other from everybody else around us everybody who has supported us dedication to our work vision, hard work and perseverance. You can't give up. You fall down on your nose as my daddy said what doesn't kill you makes you stronger you get up and keep going. So we've been doing that for all those years and you know with a whole big family around us of all different disciplines in New York City of the arts everybody sticks in for each other stuck in together for all the years after 9-11 and that was a very much time where everybody literally glued to each other and it was a very positive time because you know we're doing that to each other every day it's like you know love each other, redesigning humanity thank you. In the same spirit we always like to see our work as an instrument to promote unity and by using design we feel like this is our way to promote unity between all cultures all over the world since we are from different places so this is one thing that is super important for us and not just that this is our 10 years anniversary so this is definitely something we feel so grateful about to receive this honor so thank you. Yeah you have to clap three times I guess I noticed that there's so many collaborators here tonight winning awards which makes us really happy because that's what we feel I think the future of the world is about collaboration so thank you Cooper Hewitt for recognizing so many collaborative designer teams anyways I think just to be fast this will not be possible you guys as all the amazing group of people that we are paired with we're honored to be with without the support of all the fantastic people that believe in us from individual people to museums to galleries to institutions and so forth I just want to say thank you so much and thank you again for the Cooper Hewitt and another institution to be here without you guys and one last thing one very last thing is our moms are here with us tonight and we want to thank them more than anybody else because without them we wouldn't be here and one is from Palestine and the other one is from Israel and more than anything this means so much to us that they are sitting together in one table and this is like the best thing that can ever happen peace, salam, shalom thank you in salam, in shalom you became a career a profession a calling to be a designer all things please welcome back to the stage to present the director's award Caroline Bowman a special honor to select the recipient of the director's award which recognizes an individual's outstanding accomplishments and support of the design community this year I am truly delighted to present the award to Jack Leonard Larson Jack has been a dear friend of Cooper Hewitt since we first opened our doors an internationally renowned textile designer author and collector he is one of the foremost advocates of traditional and contemporary craft Jack founded his eponymous firm in 1952 and it grew to become the resource for exquisite signature fabrics his textiles represent 20th century design at its very finest and are in museum collections around the world including of course the Cooper Hewitt collection which boasts 83 stunning examples of Jack's work Jack is also justly lauded for a long house reserve whose gardens, collections and rich diversity of programs embrace living with art and design in all its forms Jack graciously hosted Cooper Hewitt members and friends there last month and we all had an unforgettable day we are thrilled to honor Jack Leonard Larson with the director's award Hello friends and I hope we all are friends and friends of this wonderful museum we're in the best banqueting hall in America and it's never looked so well as tonight I won't say a word about the sound I'm delighted that we are recognizing designers who are helping to differentiate American design we need that industry and our government would like us to be as sheep-like as possible and predictable and they could count our votes in advance for everything we buy both Cooper Hewitt and Longhouse Reserve are fighting back and supporting individuality and recognizing people should be as different as possible and as much their own man as they can possibly be some said they worked very hard I did not I played hard 100 hours a week because it was what I wanted to do more than anything else in my life and I'm still sort of doing it now in a different place but I recommend that you find your vocation encourage your children to do that and have them stop looking just for a job to me design is really everything creating your own perspective of your imagination solving problems Cooper Hewitt's design in the classroom program has reached and inspired over 80,000 kids in grades K through 12 since its inception three and a half years ago with design challenge kits children are tasked to use common materials like pipe cleaners, velcro, tin foil and popsicle sticks to build a prototype that solves a design problem through this design challenge we teach students that design is a key part of their everyday lives and is used to solve everyday problems in 2015 we expanded the program from the NYC area to five additional pilot cities as part of our mission to advance the understanding of design engage everyone in the power of design and continue to instill creative confidence our goal is to extend this program nationwide starting with Los Angeles we want to give every student in America the chance to be a designer our first step train teachers to do this not only in their own classrooms but in their schools and throughout their communities with every 100 educators we train we could reach 7500 students per year if each of those educators went on to train 10 of their peers we could reach 75,000 students per year it's fun it's creative it's beautiful sometimes we got to make things up maybe someday we can make for real and it could be useful for some people we welcome your continued support in helping Cooper Hewitt the nation's design museum bring the unique experience of design in the classroom to children across the country with your help we will inspire the designers of tomorrow future national design award winners before we continue with our ceremony we would like to take a moment to share some tremendously exciting news about Cooper Hewitt's design in the classroom a program that brings design learning directly to children in their schools in 2011 we started design in the classroom so that we could continue to reach students while the museum was closed for our renovation in just three years design in the classroom has reached more than 80,000 students in five boroughs of New York City and in six pilot cities across the US as America's design museum it is our mission to ensure that every child is introduced to the power of design students who learn to think like designers become creative, confident problem solvers they are empowered to fulfill society's needs not only for designers but also for civic leaders social activists business creators scientists and so much more which is why I was over the moon when a certain design entrepreneur and talk show host agreed to help us achieve nation domination and bring design in the classroom to children across America in fact she has a message for us tonight I'm Ellen and I want to show you what I have here this is a Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Challenge Kit as you may know, I love design and I love both Cooper and Hewitt and I'm always up for a challenge so let me see what's in here this is alright so I can do a lot of stuff with that I really believe that design has the power to change the world and the power to teach children to become critical thinkers, designers, engineers artists, leaders, talk show hosts anything they want to be the Cooper Hewitt team has created this toolkit to teach kids how to solve real problems and think like designers they've already reached over 80,000 kids from New York to New Orleans but here's the problem this takes money and we need your support because we want to get design in the classroom to every kid in America to match up to $100,000 that you donate that's right $100,000 Cooper Hewitt and I thank you for giving and may you be inspired by what I made that's what I made thank you thank you Ellen Cooper and Hewitt love you too this is such hi David hi Caroline I'm here to spontaneously fantastic interrupt away well it's great to see you tonight I'm sorry to interrupt but I've got my phone I've got my pledge card from the program book on the table so it's go time tell me what I need to do to meet Ellen's challenge David first of all you're the best thank you we have not one but two easy ways to give and I want to interject this is the first time in the history of the National Design Awards we've interrupted the program to fundraise for Cooper Hewitt so we appreciate your patience and this is the chance of a lifetime with Ellen behind us so thank you all you need to do is text the word design to 56512 there you go and follow the instructions to pledge or there's a handy pledge card in your program books that's what that sticker on my place card was trying to tell me done thank you David Ellen would be here tonight but she's taping the show so she offered a few special gifts as encouragement and here's where I get to be Bob Barker on the Price is Right the first four donors of $25,000 or above will receive two tickets to the Ellen show which happens to be sold out for the next three years the first 10 donors to give $10,000 will receive a custom designed Cooper Hewitt limited edition plate created by John Darian and Ellen the Cooper Hewitt staff is moving around the room ready to take your pledges and answer any questions as I am and I just want to say thank you thank you very much, thank you attention everybody thank you I have a preliminary report that we are moving to matching Ellen's challenge I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't clarify that matching the challenge will expand design in the classroom to four cities nationwide however $500,000 will achieve nation domination for Cooper Hewitt's design in the classroom so thank you very very much for your gifts and on with the show I'll return at the end of the ceremony with a full status report Ellen is an intuitive intentional creative problem solving process that looks to elevate a standard or a status quo and in our studio we also seek to address social and cultural issues with our work it's epic it's thrilling it means everything to my team and me it's exciting because it comes from our peers and from this institution recognizing our contributions in landscape architecture and urbanism as innovative as important presenting the Landscape Architecture Award is architect and winner of the 2007 architecture design award Monica Ponce de Leon the work of Cohen and partners is extraordinary because of his attitude towards nature they neither let it be nor tame nature into submission instead Cohen and partners create a framework for a relationship with nature to be reimagined and constructed anew it is my distinct pleasure to present the 2015 National Design Award in Landscape Architecture to my friend Shane Cohen thank you Monica I'm so inspired by the process of design from the inception of an idea to its evolution through the never ending possibilities of the collaborative process standing here today represents the culmination of many ideas and many beautiful and talented people that have developed and strengthened these into a series of beautiful built environments we hope that we've touched and inspired the lives of the people who have inhabited them the power of collaboration is seen in the Cooper Hewitt creation process with our insanely talented jury and the Cooper Hewitt all the people at Cooper Hewitt who share all of our work with the public what an honor it is to be part of this incredible institution and tradition thank you to those who've taught me to see my incredible creative and beautiful wife Kathleen de Cohen my mom and dad my incredible team of landscape architects urban designers and planners Brian Kramer Robin Ganser Jonathan Blasek Wanjing Jai who are celebrating this evening an honor with us tonight I think that design is the collision of deliberate human thought with tasks of toolmaking of communication, of construction but it's not just the work of doing those things what's slightly exuberant is that it's meta-work it's an inflection of effort as you undertake those tasks and at the end of the day I think that great design feels like life only more so at the Coopercute National Design Awards and what's so overwhelming and lovely as a recipient is to realize that the recognition is not for an individual work, not for a single project but for a continuum, a trajectory that includes many works and an evolution of thought and ideas and efforts Joining us to present the award for interaction design is Academy Award-winning film director and producer, Aang Lee I know John for about 15, 14 years ago I planned to do a movie, The Hulk and thinking back I made a mistake by treating it like a psychodrama instead of superhero movie to make a long story short I need a scientist a genius to help me develop a theory a plausible theory scientifically and that's plausible and play out visually in the movie how come a person through nanotechnology can turn into 15 feet tall when he's misunderstood and John was introduced to me by the film company and producers this is this genius I was told who designed this futuristic communication tools I don't even know what I call in a minority report where Tom Cruise do this and that and a lot of things happened it's quite genius we hit it off, we made the movie again make the long story short not only in production but in post production John saw me put on the motion capture suit and play The Hulk myself I think it's these two things together the communication and motion capture suit something I suspect years later I met our producer who's made it our science guy John the Coffler he has these companies, he made it so we visited his company and I went through this most magnificent experience of communication all sorts of information visually orally verbally everything with people anywhere in the world I was in the room I was directing them freely I'm not a designer by any means my understanding of a good designer it's someone who confronting difficult problems complicated problems who can come up with a solution that is so easy and the execution that is so intuitive and matter of fact I think that's our we's friend John I'm so happy to have an inspiring friend like him congratulations John for this prestigious award thank you, thank you you know one of the one of the many humbling privileges of working with Aung is that you're not simply bearing witness to a great artist but you're bearing witness to a sort of world class synthesis someone for whom the entire universe of ideas and fields and images and sounds and everything else is all fair game in putting together a piece of art and so the most unthinkable trauma might come down to the image of the texture of lichen growing at one millimeter every hundred years on a tiny rock or the macro and the micro might collide in the way that the form of a single cell echoes the form of an entire galaxy and at Oblong Industries I helped to run we aspire to that same kind of omnivorous synthesis because the very last thing that an interface designer an interaction designer should study to produce new and better interaction designs is computer science instead we have to draw from cinema we have to draw from dance architecture, music and always always biology the forms of flora and fauna as they are designed through time because that's what design is it's the motion of ideas through time and we need all of those fields because we need all of the help that we can possibly get because the task before us at Oblong and in the rest of the world everyone who's working on interface design is nothing less than the proper evolution of a language and it's not a human language it's a human machine language do we need that language? well as it turns out we do it's important because whether we chose it or not and we chose it by not choosing it we've surrounded our lives with these we've surrounded our lives with machines so if we're going to get along with them and if we're going to keep them at heal as it were then we need a language and a new one the one we have right now is about 35 years old so that's a very interesting task and if all that sounds a little bit political well it is and that's okay and if in sounding political it also sounds dour it's not actually because nothing could be more joyous than this work properly a new UI, a new interface that's working well should feel capable it should feel human it should feel beautiful and it should feel most of all exhilarating and that's great stuff to work on I'd like to thank the Cooper Hewitt for recognizing the validity of this work as design that's fantastic I'd like to thank my 100 odd incredible colleagues at Oblong my astonishing family sitting over at table 15 Jennifer, Karen and Parker but not in that order and to the rest of you please remember that design isn't just something that you buy or have conferred upon you it's your right and indeed your obligation to insist on the very best stuff you can possibly find thanks here to present the award for product design is furniture designer Jeffrey Burnett Steven Burks and his studio Steven Burks Man Made radically unite artist groups and global brands in collaboration with nonprofits to bridge the gap between craft traditions industrial manufacturing and contemporary design and I think that's a great idea and I think that's a great idea and I think that's a great idea and I think that's a great idea and contemporary design many of Steven's collaboration shown at the Moan Furniture Fair which Steven and I are lucky enough to go to every year have been among the most memorable exhibitions of the season including Misoni, Mogu, Van Van Capolini, Love Moroso, Manfreak Caligarga Variations Steven Burks Man Made Dwell Steven has received numerous accolades along the way including the first solo show of contemporary design ever held at the studio museum in Harlem and at MAD curatorial project for the museum of arts and design as a long time friend good good friend and fellow design globetrotter tonight it is my pleasure to welcome Steven up to the stage as this year is Cooper here at National Design Award winner for product design Mr. Steven Burks Hi everybody I'm Steven Burks I am so excited to be touching crystal right now you have no idea what can I say thank you to Jeffrey Burnett Jeffrey is really like a big brother to me in this business when he and I first started this man this gentleman was the first designer to work with many of the major brands that I held very very dear to my heart Cappellini and Buffy and B&B Italia Jeffrey helped teach me how to navigate being an American designer working in the European world to one day come up on stage and accept the National Design Award so thank you very much Jeffrey I'm also accepting this award as a traveler and a designer for all of the artisans the hundreds of artisans I've worked with for the past 10 years all over the world from Senegal to Rwanda to Kenya Haiti with the Clinton Global Initiative India, Mexico, Peru, Columbia so on and so forth and I'm very grateful for their contribution to the work the 21st century is about the designer being more than a stylist more than a form maker the designer today has to be a collaborator of course but a kind of conduit through which ideas flow we're much more capable of changing the world than just making the shape of things and so I am really excited because the Cooper Hewitt has me up here accepting this product design award and I feel like acknowledging my alternative way of working a way of working that drew the work that I did in South Africa back in 2005 when it was like design boot camp and you know tens of artisans were approaching me asking me how to do this, how to do that and where's the money coming from and so that's kind of evolved into our studio process our strategy our philosophy and I'm just really grateful to see that acknowledged so thank you Cooper Hewitt and am I dragging on so I guess I'd like to say that I really believe that we have an opportunity not just to change the world through design, not just to also change the world of the other 90% but to also really work together I think this National Design Award has to in one way acknowledge the kind of brain trust that's in this room and I think we all have an opportunity to collaborate together to solve much much bigger problems I'd like to start the fellowship of the award if we could alright, alright John yes so let's all talk about that and let's think about how design moves forward in the 21st century sorry thank yous table nine represented over there Dr. Helen Smith who's been a great great friend of mine and supporter of my work Mirmade Sare De Ganji another great friend and supporter of my work my son Anwar who's 10 years old and literally would be you know saying hey shut up I mean he's not blah blah blah great supporter of my work and my friends and my family um etc ok thank you very much thank yous the definition of design is asking questions I think a lot of people talk about design as problem solving which it is but in order to solve a problem I think the foundation is to ask a lot of questions design is an invitation into somebody's dream for the world it provokes how I feel think and navigate every day it's what excites me and gets me up in the morning winning the national design award is a wonderful opportunity to share the work we've done and hopefully get more people interested in what we'll do next receiving the national design award means that we're in very good company to me it just reinforces the belief that good design or celebrated design is a collaborative process joining us to present the interior design award is academy award winning actress Julianne Moore we're not Julianne Moore we're commune and Julianne is actually in the ER she has appendicitis and we wouldn't be telling you this except she told us to tell you because that's how cool she is and how rock and roll so she wrote something about us and we thought we'd read it to you because why you know put it to waste we haven't really read this so we're all kind of okay so when Margaret Russell asked me to help design the green room at the 2015 Oscars my first thought was are you kidding I'm not a designer I'm just like a furniture no way I can't do that but when she told me that I would be co-designing with commune and I said watch out actor coming to sit in commune's office because Margaret just happened to pair me up with the absolutely favorite Los Angeles design firm Resist it meant that I could indulge my fantasy of being a member of commune by sitting in their office and seeing all their stuff going shopping with them at JF Chan's pouring over sketches that had made and telling them I didn't like peach and having them take me to lunch in effect really behaving like an entitled intern for which I was so grateful in return all I could offer them was my copious praise of their work, their aesthetic, their ability to make environment seem at once personal and exceptional lived in and yet glamorous and truly truly aspirational I should know because I aspire to be just like them thank you Julie well we'd like to accept this award on behalf of our team back in Los Angeles 40 plus very very talented people whose dedication and hard work were always in awe of also a big thank you to our extended family of artisans craftsmen builders many of them have been with us from the very beginning and they are truly the soul of our work we've been so lucky we have always gotten to do exactly what we wanted exactly with whom we wanted to do it with and exactly how we wanted to do it and for that we want to thank our clients for placing their dreams in our hands and that's for us a real big responsibility and lastly we'd like to thank this year's judges and the Cooper Hewitt we really love what we do and we're very thankful that they see that in our work and in our honor thank you all of this is such a joy it's not drudgery it is hard work in the sense that you've got a lot on the line when you're making confines but you still please yourself or ask yourself the right questions so that you can develop a drawing therefore in a way that will communicate and I guess that's where humanism comes in all of my work is for the people that we're working for and you can do so much presenting the award for a lifetime achievement please welcome Emmy award-winning journalist and television host Meredith Vieira thank you so much I'm incredibly honored to be here tonight a little more than a year ago as I was planning my return to daytime television I invited Michael Graves to come to Rockefeller Center to be a guest on my show I wanted to talk to him about possible ideas combining architecture and design with a talk show I had no idea what to expect when I met him what I learned in that meeting moved me beyond words he was no ordinary architect and designer here was a man who after reaching the pinnacle of success in the design world suffered a heartbreaking disability when he became paralyzed overnight due to a rare viral infection giving in to his disability Michael triumphed again he dedicated his remaining years to the noble pursuit of making the world a better place for everyone regardless of physical ability one designed at a time and that hit home with me personally my husband has MS he walks through the cane he's legally blind although he can spot a large breasted woman from a mile away don't ask me what that's about but what Michael has done for people like my husband what he did was allow my husband to navigate his world a little bit better than he had before while giving him his dignity and people who live with disability often lose their dignity so I will forever be grateful to Michael Graves for sure unfortunately a few months ago he passed away but his genius lives on in the buildings the products and the people that he's left behind so it is my great great honor to present the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement to Michael Graves and receiving the award on Michael's behalf our two of his long time design partners Karen Nichols and Donald Strom thank you Meredith you captured perfectly what Michael was like he was really an extraordinary person and he meant a tremendous amount of deal to us to our clients and to all of our colleagues thank you to the Cooper Hewitt for this honor it's one of the lifetimes for Michael and the National Design Awards jury we're very pleased to receive this of course our clients and colleagues are near and dear to our heart a year ago we celebrated the firm's 50th anniversary we used the phrase past as prologue to describe it for us it embodied what we think about when we think about architecture and design but also it reflects our optimistic outlook on the next 50 years of the firm past as prologue also expresses Michael's lifelong interest in educating generations of architecture students and design students he as this is now embodied in the Michael Graves College at Caine University and also the Michael Graves School Michael Graves School of Architecture at Wenzel Caine University in China fortunate to have with us tonight at table 44 some of the first students and faculty of the Michael Graves College Michael was very proud of the diverse practice that he created and he left it to his partners to carry on and bring in the next generation to continue it many of us have worked together for over 30 years certainly Donald and I but also Patrick Burke Linda Kinsey and Tom Rowe and also we have brought up a whole new generation of people embodied here tonight with Ben Yucca and Robert and some others who weren't able to make it so we think that this practice of ours is really just a prologue to Michael's legacy and as we look forward to the future let us all remember the lessons that Michael taught us thank you thank you very much and Michael always wanted to receive this award and predicted that this would finally be his year so we are happy about that and just want to say that Michael got it right he was right it was his year as usual thank you ladies and gentlemen please welcome back Caroline Bowman congratulations again for all of our winners this has been a spectacular evening and it's ending on such a high note we not only met Ellen's challenge we exceeded it together in this room we raised $230,000 on top of Ellen's 100 extraordinary and we are very very grateful for your support one last favor who better to spread the word than the people who love design let hashtag next gen designers and let the world know that you have contributed tomorrow morning our crowd sourced fundraiser goes live on our website so that we can close the gap and reach that $500,000 level please share the news and encourage your friends to help Cooper Hewitt achieve nation domination for design in the classroom I hope all of you will join me in the next room where we'll toast tonight's winners and the NDA winners of the future thank you so much goodnight