26 Things I Remember Fondly About Working at Bruce Mau Design
Jim Shedden
July 22, 2011
From 1998 until 2010 I worked at Bruce Mau Design, which proved to be an extraordinary time of growth for me, both personal and creative. It’s now been 18 months since I last worked there, so I thought I’d put a few thoughts down on my time there for posterity and, I hope, commentary by others who worked there over the years. I’m not sure how much sense it will make to people who haven’t had an association with BMD, but I’m throwing it out there anyhow.
It's all a bit random, so don't feel neglected if I've failed to mention you in any significant way. I limited myself to the 26 letters of the alphabet to give this note some structure, and myself some closure. Also if I didn't tag you, please don't take offense: I think there's a limit on the number of people who can be tagged.
“Amanda”: three wonderful people, all called Amanda: first Sebris, then Ramos and then Happé. It’s helpful for me to remember that, aside from Bruce’s leadership, the simple but lovable physical design of the studio, and our impossible-to-top roster of clients, the support of my colleagues over 11 1/2 years made my experience there great. With each Amanda I learned some crucial life lessons. Sebris and I learned how to manage someone as complex as Bruce (can’t say we ever figured it out), the ups and downs of the New York art, design and culinary worlds, and the art of making exquisite books as we argued about whether it was the end of print. With Ramos, I learned how to remain ruthlessly and tirelessly creative, even when it seemed as though we were never going to get it right, and to have fun traveling, whether we were in Copenhagen, or Holland, Michigan. And with Happé, the one Amanda who remains at the studio, I was reminded how important it was to always remain optimistic, curious, open-minded, and, something we often forget, friendly.
Bruce: Brilliant. Infuriating. Introverted. Extroverted. Gregarious. Shy. Generous. Self-absorbed. Perfectionist. Laid back. Serious. Constantly joking. Obsessive. Open-minded. Straightforward. Complicated. Ambitious. Easygoing. I learned a lot from Bruce: lots of predictable stuff about typography, design, books, architecture, and art, but more importantly many things about managing clients, staff and business, especially when we were failing at those things. For many of the years I was there, Bruce seemed like my best friend, but we reminded each other that we weren’t. He could fire me, and I could quit, and the extremes implied in those plausible actions suggested all the other possibilities that ultimately make it difficult, if not impossible, to be friends in that context. So, while I often saw Bruce 7 days a week, all day and into the night, here in Toronto and around the world, I’ve barely spoken to him over the last couple of years. Around the time I left the studio, Bruce’s own relationship to it changed radically, allowing him to invent some new directions, and the studio to reinvent itself as well.
Change, as in Massive Change. Our biggest project, with so many branches it’s staggering looking back on it. The most fun I ever had at BMD, the most exciting it ever got. This isn’t the place to detail what that project was about, but you can get a good glimpse at the http://www.massivechange.com blog, sadly out-of-date, so it feels like a ghost town, but dig a little and the project is all there: the ideas, the research, the people, the project elements, and so forth. There were some major residual effects of the project. First, the Institute without Boundaries (http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/), which we founded in tandem with Massive Change, as a “machine” for producing the projects. It continues to thrive at George Brown College, and the work they produce has a Massive Change flavor. Second, inspired by the vitality and forward-thinking we found in Chicago, the final location of the Massive Change exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bruce moved there. For a while we had a studio there, which is another story altogether, but the upshot of the move is that Bruce is in Chicago, and Bruce Mau Design is in Toronto, and they are pretty much autonomous. From 2002 until 2004, when the project opened we produced: a manifesto and gobs of research; a best-selling book for Phaidon (still in print - it’s really good too: http://www.phaidon.ca/store/general-non-fiction/massive-change-9780714844015/); a fantastic exhibition for the Vancouver Art Gallery that travelled to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; a marketing and communications campaign; public programs; products; a website, which morphed into the blog I referenced above by the time we opened in Chicago, an educational website for the Virtual Museum Canada project (http://www.massivechangeinaction.virtualmuseum.ca/), and many other vehicles. Jennifer Leonard, one of the students in the first year of the Institute without Boundaries, started an amazing radio program that you can still access (http://www.massivechange.com/mcradio), and from which much of the content for the book was derived. Once the project opened in Vancouver, it seemed as though everything else we were doing was either a spin-off or continuation of Massive Change, or an opportunity to approach more traditional design work using the Massive Change lens. I can’t say for certain, but it seems to be that the spirit of what we started back in the summer of 2002 still informs the studio’s approach. It definitely informs Bruce’s, as he has started a new entity, along with his wife Bisi, called the Massive Change Network (http://mcnonline.massivechangenetwork.com/). I’m not entirely clear on what that is, but the spirit of it is clear. My experience of Massive Change was the highlight of my time at BMD intellectually and creatively.
Downsview Park: In the year 2000, our team, which included Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Petra Blaise and Inisde Out, and David Oleson, won the competition to convert 150 acres of the Downsview military grounds into a public park, with our proposal “Tree City.” It was a major international competition so it was huge pleasure to win. At the same time, we had our reservations about entering the competition in the first place. It proved to be the beginning of the end of the studio’s relationship with Rem and OMA. That was fine: all things must pass. Besides, the proposal was really driven by BMD, and we led the project for the next six years after the competition. Bruce and our team, led by Anita Matusevics and Jason Halter, developed a fantastic concept, where poetry meets pragmatism, and the rural, urban and suburban dance together. Later, the team would evolve. I can’t remember all the individuals involved, but Cathy Jonasson and Henry Cheung led it through to the final design documents, but dozens of others came in and out of the project over the years. Though I had very little to do with this particular project directly, I have a huge passion for urban parks, and I was really inspired by the philosophy and the design that we developed for Downsview. It was a long process (11 years so far), but it looks like they’re finally building a version of the park, more-or-less according to BMD’s final Design Development specifications. Here’s the original concept: http://www.downsviewpark.ca/eng/park_design_concept.shtml. Here’s an update on the construction: http://www.downsviewpark.ca/media/constructionmap_may2011.pdf, although this suggests that it’s significantly more banal than we envisioned: http://www.downsviewpark.ca/eng/illustrations.shtml.
Eating: There’s no way around it, my time in the studio involved a lot of great eating. My first official day at the studio I went to New York with the rest of the studio to celebrate Bruce winning the Chrysler Award. Bruce spent the prize money bringing us down, and feting us at a number of great restaurants. It was a great introduction to what was to follow. Shortly after returning the trip, I remember going to a Scaramouche (for my first time ever) for a last minute meeting with Bruce, André Lepecki, and Bill Boyle (Harbourfront Centre), where the idea for our video installation STRESS was launched. Our trip to VIenna to meet with the curator and the director of the MAK involved, of course, seriously great meals. And on it went. Some of my favorite or most memorable meals? Every meal we had in Lisbon, whether haute or peasant, back in September, 2001, a very strange but fantastic time. All my meals with Shaw Contract (carpet), whether they were in Atlanta, the outskirts, Chicago, or Toronto: they were all such fun dinner dates, and brought a gregarious and open-minded spirit to the table. Cheesecake Factory (don’t laugh) with Sara Weinstein Kohn in Marina del Rey (LA). Christmas parties at Bruce and Bisi’s house, and then a few in the studio (see Xmas below). Eating cake tops from Dufflet, when our studio was above her Dovercourt factory, when I was still a client (Dufflet was connected to the studio from the beginning in various delicious ways. All birthdays and other festive occasions were celebrated with a variety of her cakes, Bruce lived above her store for many years, and that apartment became an extenions of the studio when Bruce bought a house. Eventually we even redid her identity, taking the spiral design that Lisa Naftolin developed in the 80s, and making a system that was chocolatey, delicious, classic French and American fun. It was one of those projects that many of us worked on, but Helen Sanematsu eventually cracked and perfected. As light as the whole thing seemed, I frequently showed prospective clients the Dufflet standards manual because it was so clear and tasty.). Long days that would often start at lunch and go till closing time at the Queen St. W. location of Le Select, at a table I called “the office”, the only one without the dangly bread basket. The only restaurant where we had a corporate account, though we should have had one at Bar Italia in the late 90s and Terroni throughout the last decade, and probably Mildred Pierce in the mid-90s, again when I was a client, but often found myself discussing everything that mattered with Bruce and company over a great meal. A few great meals at Susur Lee’s various establishments, most impressive with out-of-town clients, but also of interest when we were working on a cookbook with him (we left the project, but our stamp seems to be on the finished product in any case). Great meals were also had with clients at Canoe, still one of the great Toronto experiences. Elaborate, impeccable Italian meals at the home of Rolf Fehlbaum, then CEO of Vitra, and his wife, the curator and architecture scholar Frederica Zanco. Over the top, old school steak dinners in Chicago, one at Smith & Wollensky’s with Bruce, Bisi, Joanne, and Kris Manos (Herman Miller), the night that Massive Change opened at the MCA; and several at a place whose name I always forget, but it seems like it’s right out of the height of gangland culture, Chicago in the 1930s (when I find the name, I’ll revise this). Breakast with Joanne often, in various cities, but my favorite being Lou Mitchell’s in Chicago (http://www.loumitchellsrestaurant.com/). Everything I ever ate in Denmark, a country where everything is perfect including the food. And the best for last: ice cream cones and sundaes with Kris Manos, Bruce, Amanda Ramos, and Judith in Holland, Michigan.
Frank Gehry and his studio gave us the best opportunities imaginable, and not just the opportunity to work with the world’s most important living architect. Frank invited us into an astonishing group of projects, always demanding that we play the role of the cultural research team, and inventors of innovative approaches to user experiences, whether we were developing graphics and wayfinding systems, as in the case of the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the M.I.T. Stata Centre or whether we were conceiving an entire museum from the ground up, as was the case of the Panama Museum of Biodiversity. What Frank never did was engage us in pointless, meandering research or strategy exercises. There was always a real world design deliverable. Some of those projects came to pass in very big ways: Walt Disney Concert Hall, M.I.T. Stata Center, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the IAC headquarters, the Gehry exhibition at the Gugggenheim, and various books along the way.The Panama Musuem of Biodiversity, one of the studio’s most ambitious projects is under construction. A number of projects never ultimately came to pass, at least not for BMD, like the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia, Saks Fifth Avenue, and many others. Almost as important are the projects that came into the world through Gehry but became programmatic challenges for BMD even after the Gehry studio left them: Riversphere in New Orleans is the most significant of these (http://riversphere.tulane.edu/), but so, too, were the Connecticut Historical Society; the Bathurst Jewish Culture Centre; and the World Youth Centre (Toronto Olympic Bid 2008). When we were hanging around the Gehry studio in Playa Vista (L.A.), we were usually aware that we were in the middle of something special, even if our colleagues there, Frank included (usually), were just down-to-earth, experiencing the same daily struggles as the rest of us. I learned a lot from Jim Glymph, George Metzger, Craig Webb, Marc Salette, Keith Mendenhall, and many others, sometimes just by standing around, drinking coffee and waiting for Barry Diller to show up at the studio in order to dismiss our collective efforts one more time. Even then, I like how L.A. days were usually far less stressful than NY days, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to go from meeting to meeting to meeting. Our days would wind down by 4 or 5pm and then evenings might be spent eating Mexican food (or Cheesecake Factory!) back in Marina del Rey, or wandering around Santa Monica, the easiest part of L.A. for a Torontonian to love (and I do love it).
Gagosian: So many books, exhibitions, special projects, invitations, advertisements, crazy meetings, dinners, nightclubs, angry phone calls, happy phone calls. At the end of the day, however, we got to work on these projects, often with these artists (the ones who aren’t dead): Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Warhol, Douglas Gordon, Richard Prince, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Beuys, Ellen Gallagher, Picasso, Cindy Sherman, Franz West, Schnabel, Glenn Brown, Artschwager, Bacon, Basquiat, Boetti, Calder, Michael Craig-Martin, John Currin, Dexter Dalwood, de Kooning, Gorky, Gursky, Richard Hamilton, Neil Jenney, Jasper Johns, Mike Kelley, Kiefer, Martin Kippenberg, Koons, Vera Lutter, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Elisa Sighicelli, Taryn Simon, David Smith, Phillip Taaffe, Al Taylor, Robert Therrien, Richard Wright. Holy crap! That was an incredible time and I’m reminded that I left the AGO back in 1998, because I thought I would have a better chance of engaging with the living culture at BMD. I was absolutely right on at the time, and now things have come full circle, because the AGO seems like the right place to be. Regardless, that’s a staggering list.
Hospitals, like the Massachusetts General Hospital, elements of which were designed by our client nbbj, the “largest architectural firm you’ve never heard of”. They asked us to produce a monograph because they liked something we had done for Pelli Clarke & Associates. With Bruce’s encouragement, I somehow convinced them to let us take on a much more ambitious scope. Without going into all that, I’ll just say that this seemingly unsexy megafirm changed my ideas about what constitutes good architecture. The journey we went on with them over the next couple of years was an education on dozens of levels. Because they were all great people - smart, generous and social - it was also a great time. Yes, great meals were part of the equation: in Seattle, Columbus and New York. We didn’t produce as much as we wanted to, but the main book for the firm, Change Design, has some great ideas in it, backed by compelling stories that demonstrate a very different role architects can play in designing change.
Identity: Identity was at the core of everything we did, and still is for BMD as far as I can see. That started, it turns out, with Zone Books and certainly carried to Massive Change. For every client, and for every self-generated endeavour, our work always involved crafting a client’s story, “by any means necessary”: a visual identity; a story or approach to language; actions, events, environments, etc. So Tree City, STRESS, Too Perfect, the Panama Museum of Biodiversity, and Massive Change were no less identity projects than the more conventional visual branding systems we developed for Indigo, Roots, the AGO, Harbourfront Centre, or the Gagosian Gallery. This notion was very attractive to me, and I try to bring it to bear on my work whenever it makes sense.
Jonasson, Cathy: When I was 21, I started colaborating with Cathy Jonasson. She was the film curator at the AGO and I was a university student with ambitions to make the Innis Film Society a force within the tiny, insular world of avant-garde film. Colaborating with the AGO on the premiere of Bruce Elder’s 8 hour Lamentations (his best film, in my opinion) was an important stepping stone. Then, in 1988 Cathy and I collaborated on a series and catalogue for the AGO called Recent Work from the Canadian Avant-Garde. Then Cathy was on the Board of Directors that hired me to coordinate the International Experimental Film Congress in 1989, an event that changed my creative and professional life like almost no other. When the Congress was over, Cathy hired me to stay on at the AGO to clean up a few things administratively, but then asked me to manage the Peter Greenaway series that Bart Testa was programming, The Body in Film series that Bruce Elder curated, an Ulrike Ottinger series, and so forth. I never left until 1998 when I came to BMD. Cathy left the AGO in 1996 to go to BMD and, with Bruce, hired me to manage a project, Mutations, that never happened, at least not for BMD. See a pattern? I don’t know why I was so blessed with someone who made such leaps of faith, but there you have it. Thanks Cathy!
Kevin Sugden: Kevin is one of the reasons I wanted to join the BMD studio. I first worked with him on the Michael Snow Project film catalog. For that book, we had an insanely small budget, and I was really impressed with how Kevin and Bruce were invent creative ways of making it work. I look at it today and it doesn’t feel compromised at all, and I doubt that more cash would have made it a significantly better book. Good design and good art requires open-ended entrepreneurship. And that’s what Kevin is at the end of the day: an entrepreneur, always cooking up ideas, and not daunted when any one of them - or dozens of them in a row - were rejected by the client, by Bruce or by his colleagues. At the studio Kevin was a master on both our identity projects and what we called “programming” projects, but I guess they could be called cultural invention or something along those lines. Riversphere in New Orleans, the Panama Museum of Biodiversity, the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia, the “Culture of Work,” and even the initial concept for the Institute without Boundaries were all led by Kevin, or had his stamp on them. And I should never forget that his role on S,M,L,XL went from design assistant to design manager by the end of the project, his brutal aesthetic an integral characteristic of the book. And as far as the identity projects go, Kevin’s graphic design approach wasn’t always immediately attractive - in fact, it was often clunky and unappealing - but he proved that a smart and rigorous process would lead to the best, most intelligent solutions and they would invariably be beautiful. Hence, the identity for the UCLA Hammer Museum, which Kevin developed, has proved to be one of the most effective, and attractive, visual identity systems in the studio’s history. Similarly, Kevin was able to help the studio develop and articulate their most ambitious identity projects at the time: Indigo, the Rotman business school, and Access Storage Solutions. Finally, I admired and emulated Kevin’s openness to the world. As the studio has matured over the years, it became mandatory that everyone have an openness to the world, to all the crazy possibilities that might present themselves. But in my early days there, I remember certain prospects emerging, like the Taco Bell account with a San Francisco advertising agency, and there was general disdain, of the “I’ll quit before I work on that” variety. But Kevin was open to it, as he always was, and that inspired me on the best of days.
Life Style: It’s too big, so like S,M,L,XL it doesn’t get read. Those who do read it seem to only come upon the Incomplete Manifesto. At the time, the book was a fantastically crazy essay on where the image economy was going, but it went there so fast that the book looked quaint and naive only a few years later. Research for the book was not primarily accomplished online: that really only happened at the end of the image research. Only three years later, the entire Massive Change project was researched and developed almost exclusively online, which sort of proves what Life Style was all about. Most people, even those who work in the studio, never caught on to the Life Style thing and just write it out as Lifestyle. We developed it at the same time that we developed STRESS. Kyo, the book’s main editor and champion, became my best friend in the studio for a while. We were the the leads on both the Life Style and STRESS teams, she being Bruce’s right hand person creatively, and with me as producer on both. We kind of were the whole Life Style team, but then added Bart Testa to help push the editorial work uphill, and then we were joined by an evolving team of designers, eventually led by Chris Rowat, with Reto Geiser, Michael Barker, Dave Wilkinson, Nancy Nowacek, and others. It was so difficult to get from 90% to the 100% that Phaidon needed or the 110% that Bruce wanted, that Phaidon sent the editor, Megan McFarland, up to Toronto to park herself in the studio to get the job done. It got done, we took everyone to New York to launch it and it was a great success. I joined Bruce on the road for some of the launch tour and, while the book is a wonderfully succinct articulation of Bruce’s approach to typography and identity, to which I still refer people, the less baked discussions of the image economy, optimism, collaboration, and the future would end up determining the shape of the studio’s work for the next decade. Definitely one of my favorite moments in the studio.
Marigold Lodge: Herman Miller was one of my 3 or 4 favorite clients and, no, we didn’t sit around talking about Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. Our time with them was not about chairs, as much as we were all fans (like, I wish I had an Aeron in my office at the AGO - I get by with some Staples reject, but I’m not actually complaining). Instead, this was an opportunity to finally explore the Culture of Work and, as it turns out, the inherent values driving a company like Herman Miller. Something I learned doing this project is that I don’t know always know what I want. I would always default, if given the choice, to clients in New York, San Francisco or similar centres. For Herman Miller we had to fly to Detroit or Cleveland, then fly to Grand Rapids, where a car would take us to Holland, Michigan, about an hour away. What I found out the first time I was there was that that meant going to the Marigold Lodge on Lake Macatawa, a stunning group of buildings designed by its owner Egbert Gold, all set within a horticultural utopia. There, to put it simply, we were taken care of. It worked, The early core team on the project - Bruce, Amanda Ramos, Judith and myself - were completely eager and engaged. Whether we were at Herman Miller’s main campus in Zeeland, Michigan, or at Marigold Lodge, where we often worked, ate and slept, they were special times, creative in ways that 45 minute meetings in New York never made possible. In the context of the rest of our work, it was such a pleasure to slow down, be civilized, enjoy the lake, the flowers (especially the tulips - it’s Holland after all), and our colleagues at Herman Miller. In the end, as far as I know, nothing concrete came of our work with Herman Miller. This was distressing at the time, but I really learned a lot from it. When we started the work, we were careful to describe, in painstaking detail, exactly how we would realize the various projects and initiatives we were proposing. By the end of the project, we were producing Power Point presentations about brand hierarchy and strategy. Deadly. Necessary, I guess, but there are hundreds of agencies that are good at that song and dance. Ultimately I feel that Bruce Mau Design was about cultural insight and creative execution. A simple image explains it all: when we started the project, we wowed the Herman Miller folks, in their pristine offices, with our crazy foamcore boards that didn’t quite fit, but allowed us to look at fields of information and ideas, and work together, moving them around and revising them, and creating something out of the noise; by the time we finished the project, we were creating single channel Power Point presentations. So the frustrating inertia that developed helped me understand what mattered to me (culture, creativity), and what didn’t (hideous “marcomm” consultantspeak).
New York: My favorite place on earth, aside from wherever I’m currently living with my family (so far always Toronto). I spent so much time there over the years that it eventually made sense for me to get an apartment in Brooklyn, which was both a magical time, and the worst time of my life. Not New York’s fault: it just coincided with some mental and emotional difficulties that came to a head during that time. But my first day on the job was spent in New York, and as many as 100 other trips followed. I’m so lucky to have had that experience, learning in ways not otherwise possible, and meeting an insanely talented, eccentric and just plain interesting cast of characters. I’m not sure if it’s true now, but for many years at least half the studio’s revenue was generated out of New York. During my time there we were able to work with: MTV, the New York Jets, the New York Giants, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Gagosian Gallery, Saks Fifth Avenue, Terry Winters, IAC, Phaidon, the Cooper-Hewitt, OMA-NY, Ian Schrager, Rockwell Group, and dozens of other artists, galleries, museums, and businesses. And, while my heart is in New York, over the years I also enjoyed my less passionate flings with Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Holland (MI), Seattle, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Rotterdam, Ghent, Essen, Basel/Weil am Rhein...
Open: The weirdest project ever. A trip to a Renaissance castle in Lisbon, where Bruce, Hamilton Fish (who runs The Nation Institute), a photo editor, and a client who we just discovered was recently released from prison for fraud. If we hadn’t discovered it, she was going to tell us one night over drinks to shock us. Anyhow, this strange meeting, in this stunning but bizarre setting where we also had a staff at our beck and call (and a tour guide and bus driver), all managed to happen during 9/11. So the magazine we were to develop, OPEN, about the new, open world we saw, was threatening to become CLOSED. I can’t quite put into words who weird this whole experience was, but I have to say I remember it fondly. We were incredibly productive, if argumentative, ate exceedingly well, and probably had a good distance from which to watch the insanity unfolding in the U.S. and Canada. For Hamilton it was especially difficult, however, because he lives in TriBeCa and his wife and young daughters experienced the horror that morning, so his trip was mainly taken up by figuring out how to get back. Weirdest moment: when the client and I took the bus one afternoon to check out Fatima, truly one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had. After promising to bring all of our families to a lovely setting in the south of France at Christmas, the client stopped paying our bills, and stopped answering our calls. Petra Chevrier, Bryan Gee and Helen Sanematsu continued to develop fantastic prototypes in our studio, and we didn't want to stop even when it was obvious it wasn't meant to be. The best ideas from Open ended up in Massive Change so it’s just as well. Developing a new magazine proved to be one of the stupidest things one could do in the 21st century.
People. I’m going to screw this up, so I’ll keep revising it as new memories surface. Names will be misspelt here and there. Some of these people remain good friends of mine. Some were not friends. But I fondly remember each. It’s not meant to be a complete list of people with whom I worked. A small number are deliberately missing, either because I didn’t get to know them very well, or where the word “fond” would be nothing but a lie. In no particular order: Joanne Balles Crosbie. Kyo Maclear. Anita Matusevics. Jason Halter. Mary Moegenburg. Amanda Sebris. Amanda Ramos. Amanda Happé. Ruth Silver. Quinn Shepherd. Cynthia Budgell. Eha Hess. Henry Cheung. Andrew Clark, Paul Kawai, Rafael Santos, Harry Choi. Rob Sawden. Kevin Sugden. Chris Rowat. Chris Pommer. Louis-Charles Lasnier. Cathy Jonasson. Aaron Currie. Kelly McKinley. Michael Waldin, Julie Ezergailis. Koto Sato. Judith McKay. Breanne Woods. Natalie Black. Beth Mally. Chris Bahry. Barr Gilmore. Danella Hocevar. Julie Netley. Peter Blythe. Heather Thelwell. Mark Cohon. Jackie Rothstein. Alan Belcher. Lisa Molnar. Catherine Rix. Kristina Ljubanovic. Jyhling Lee. Christina Bagativicius. Laura Stein. Carolina Soderholm. Dane Solomon. Elva Rubio. Monica Bueno. Seth Goldenberg. Simon Chan. Reto Geiser. Sara Weinstein-Kohn. Sarah Newkirk. Eric Leyland. Robert Labossiere. Petra Chevrier. Bryan Gee. Julie Fry. Pauline Landriault. Alex Quinto. Alex Seth. Tyler Millard. Alexis Victor. Alita Gonzalez-Vucina. Ayla Newhouse. Britt Welter-Nolan. Chris Braden. Clementina Koppmann. David D’Andrea. Dan McGrath. Dave Gillespie. Jonathan Seet. Maris Mezulis. David Shantz. Dieter Janssen. Donald Mak. Doug Chapman. Jill Murray. Jennifer Leonard. Ilene Solomon. Eha Hess. Duncan Bates. Enoch Chan. Emily Waugh. Rochelle Strauss. Evelyn Wang. Gisele Gass. Glenna Wiley. Gina Doctor. Grant Cleland. Gary Westwood. Greg Van Alstyne. Helen Papagiannis. Ian Rapsey. Jayne Brown. Greg Judelman. Jack Fisher. Jason Severs. Jeremy Stewart. Jill Holmberg. Joanne Freedman. Kelsey Blackwell. Kar Yan Cheung. Jonathan Seet. Jonas Skafte. Leilah Ambrose. Leslie Alpert. Lisa Mamers. Marc Lauriault. Mark Beever. Lorraine Gauthier. Nancy Nowacek. Michael Dudek. Doug Chapman. Mike Bartosik. Milena Vujanovic. Anthony Murray. Neeraj Bhatia. Paddy Harrington. Diane Mahoney. Philip Wharton. Sarah Dorkenwald. Whitney Geller. Tanya Keigan. Tobias Lau. Keely Colcleugh. Tania Boterman. Kate MacKay. David Shantz. Robert Kennedy. Blair Johnsrude. Vannesa Ahuacztin. Vanessa Ward. Randi Fiat. Norah Farrell. Judith Hoogenboom. Sonny Obispo. Lisa Santonato. Lena Senstad. Nina Ladocha. Angelica Fox. Laurel MacMillan. Gina Doctor. Randi Fiat. Jeremy Stewart. Helen Sanematsu.
Quiz: Two advertisements we placed in Now, the first one full-page and the second one two full pages, took the form of elaborate cultural quizzes one had to answer and then submit to us, along with other crucial pieces of evidence. These were audacious, perhaps a bit arrogant, and tons of fun. The first quiz, which has a history to it before we placed it in Now, is reproduced in the book Life Style. About a hundred people took the trouble to reply to quiz #1, and a couple of hundred to the quiz #2. Almost everyone we hired out of the process proved to be major contributors to the studio creatively. The names I remember include Michael Barker, Maris Mezulis, Alan Belcher, Amanda Ramos, Bryan Gee, Robert Labossiere, Kelsey Blackwell, Julie Fry, but I know there were a few others.
Rem Koolhaas: “Fondly remember” “Rem Koolhaas”? Well, yes, I do in a qualified way. I remember this fondly: I was in New York with Bruce doing the rounds. One night we were to meet Rem Koolhaas at Da Silvano to discuss Mutations, and probably a handful of other projects. I was new. I was green. I was in awe. I was nervous. Rem arrives. Bruce excuses himself because he’s suddenly violently ill. So I’m left with Rem, and I’m freaked out. He alternated between questions about the project, to pointed questions about my qualifications for Bruce’s studio. At one point he told me that he wasn’t afraid to go bankrupt, that he’d done so several times, but that Bruce was terrified of it so I must promise to do whatever I could to make sure it didn’t happen. After two full meals and a dessert, which Rem shared with me, he took off, I picked up the bill, and then our relationship proceeded to get much weirder over the next three years. Still, I remember it fondly.
STRESS: An eight-screen video installation (+ objects in some variations), this was one of my favorite projects, not because of the content, which I no longer love, but because I love to work in situations where, regardless of all the obstacles, hardships and whatnot that one experiences, the final product is never in question. From the time we started STRESS to the time we finished, DVD technology was introduced, the G4 was launched, Final Cut Pro was launched. That all sounds primitive now, but it allowed us to actually do the project completely in our studio and, since we only finished it 11 years ago, it’s a reminder that one should never get too comfortable with hardware, software, or standards. More importantly, it was a great experience because we discovered that we could produce work as a team, taking Bruce’s direction when he was available and ready, but taking the bull by the horns when he wasn’t. We produced a couple of iterations of this installation. The internal team - mainly Bruce, Kyo, Robert Kennedy, Maris Mezulis and myself - were joined by André Lepecki, a dramaturg who helped shape the piece, and John Oswald and Phil Strong on sound. In a new version we created for an exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, we redid the sound with Kyo and Dave Wall.
Too Perfect: The idea behind this project was pretty promising: a kind of “applied Massive Change”, working with Danish architects and designers. In a letter describing the project we said: “Dear Denmark, Remember the late 1940s? That was when a group of young Danish architects anddesigners decided to throw off the shackles of tradition-bound design. They formed a distinctly Danish movement, inspired by natural materials, organic forms, handcrafting, and Danish humanism. Worldwide, Danish Modern became a sign of being innovative and experimental. Today it means nothing – an invisible image. Fifty-odd years later, Danish Modern is so pervasive in Denmark that it's become a stylistic canopy blocking the light necessary for new developments to flourish, a formal straitjacket that's "too perfect." Isn't it time for a new generation to break free? The Danish Architecture Centre (DAC) had a hunch that in order to cut a clearing in the forest for reinvention and to return Danish design to a leading position on
the international scene, it was necessary to look at Danish culture and tradition with
new eyes. DAC called in our Canadian design studio, Bruce Mau Design, to work with
a team of Danish architects.” The execution: simultaneous exhibitions of seven propositional projects by Danish architects and designers as well as BMD itself, presented in Toronto, as part of the Superdanish festival at Harbourfront Centre, the original comissioner; in the Danish pavilion at Venice Biennial of Architecture; and at the Danish Architecture Centre. A funky looking catalog. A website of sorts. The funny thing is, because this opened at the same time as Massive Change, it was strangely underwhelming. Also, Massive Change had the distinct advantage of being a documentary project, whereas these propositional exercises were less compelling. Once again, however, what I remember more is the experience: in this case, of being immersed in Copenhagen as we (usually Bruce, Amanda Ramos, Angelica Fox and me) planned this project with Kent Martinussen, director of the DAC, as well as PLOT, a young architecture firm led by Bjarke Ingels, who is now a superstar, and Julien de Smedt, and a brilliant young guy called Rasmus Bech Hansen from the firm Kontrapunkt. Yes, we liked to make fun of his “Beck Hansen” name. I could go on and on, but I’ll just say this. Denmark may be “too perfect” but it is perfect. Everything about it: buildings, infrastructure, parks, transportation, public bicycles, maintenance, theatres, museums, and, of course, food. I just love it there.
(The New) Urban (Deal): A major project in Tokyo, our first big thing after Life Style and STRESS, sharpened our thinking about cities, globalization, and design. For the Mori Building Company and their monumental Roppongi Hills development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roppongi_Hills) we produced a book on the future of Tokyo; a video installation on the same theme, Tokyo Countdown; a mile-long collage on the construction hoarding; an identity; product; and a public programming concept for the information centre. It was a huge learning experience for everyone involved (Bruce, Amanda Sebris, Donald Mak, Maris, Jason, Bruce, Julia, Michael, and myself - though I’m probably forgetting someone), one that I was certainly grateful for. Aside from the all the funny things one learns about dealing with another culture, what I took away from it was that (almost) everything is design; that this fact is a reason for great optimism; that all my assumptions about cities might be wrong, and I should open my mind if I really want to learn anything, and effect positive change. By the way, “The New Urban Deal” was an essay by Mr. Mori that directed his thinking about the development.
Vitra: The great designer and cultural force Tibor Kalman had just died and Rolf Fehlbaum, the CEO of Vitra, was looking for a new designer to help steer he creative communications direction for his company, the manufacturer of great designer furniture (http://www.vitra.com/). We were going to have a blast. An initial meeting suggested that Rolf was open to our “Culture of Work” concept, a project Bruce had cooked up a number of years earlier as a way of engaging with one of his obsessions: the cultural significance of the changing world of work. Could we use Vitra as an incubator, a think tank for generating research and ideas around this topic, in a manner so robust that they would “own” this territory and that the value of the intelligence created by the Culture of Work project would transfer itself to the Vitra brand. Many trips to Germany and Switzerland (Vitra’s operations were split between the twin cities of Basel and Weil am Rhein), side trips to New York, visionary work, not-so-visionary work, an ambitious and complicated exhibition on Barragan at the Vitra Design Museum, lovely meals at the Kunsthalle in Basel, and many nights (completely sleepless) in the strange, lovely but ultimately alienating (for me) Teufelhof Hotel (http://www.teufelhof.com/de/teufelhof.html): all this didn’t add up to much. I can’t remember why. It would be easy to say it’s because Rolf was ultimately more interested in “design” in the fussy, precious sense; and we weren’t quite ready to put a stake in the ground about our different perspective on design, the way that Massive Change allowed us to five years later. Even so, it struck me that Bruce, Kevin and I, the usual suspects on the Vitra junkets (along with Anita, who led the Barragan project, and took over the overall Vitra relationship later on), were more interested in culture, and less in the world of celebrity design. So what though? Ten years later, I realize that our inability to realize the “Culture of Work” ambitions, except in a kind of watered-down form in a few publications, isn’t that important. It may have been a bit of a bummer at the time, but the experience, like all experiences, allowed the studio to move forward, learn a lot about itself (as I did about myself personally), refine the ideas and approach, and realize the ambitions in a more profound way later on. The chase is better than the catch, to quote Motorhead. I assume that Rolf and Vitra learned a lot about themselves, too, and I was impressed to see how they continued to engage communication designers after our stint with them in ways that were probably more in sync with their needs.
World Leaders: A high moment for me at BMD, a project that was rooted in doing Harbourfront Centre’s visual identity, grew to helping them with their communications approach in general, and then inventing, with Bill Boyle and his staff at Harbourfront Centre, World Leaders: A Festival of Creative Genius. Secretly, I always wanted to work at Harbourfront Centre because I love the who they are and what they do, but this was better, because I got to be the consultant and, therefore, naively recommend something so ambitious, risky and audacious, that I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened had I been a staff member there. In other words, Bruce and I were unencumbered by reality. Not everyone’s going to want to hear this, but that’s often we did our best work at BMD. The upshot of this project: 14 gala evenings celebrating 14 creative geniuses who each changed their fields forever, such that no artist coming after them could do their work without taking into account the contribution of the genius in question. Lily Tomlin dropped out owing to 9/11 fears, but later made it up to Harbourfront Centre. The other 13 were Frank Gehry, Philippe Starck, Issey Miyake, Robert Lepage, Guy Laliberte, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Sondheim, Quincy Jones, Harold Pinter, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Gabriel, Pina Bausch, and Bernardo Bertolucci. On top of the gala evenings, Harbourfront Centre organized another 100 supporting events that were free to the public and focusing on local talent. An amazing organization.
Xmas: We loved Christmas at BMD. Dinners at Bruce and Bisi’s were incredible, and sometimes featured guests, like Jamie Kennedy cooking for us one year, including a special meal for the kids who played in the basement, and a portable fryer for his frites, the best in town. In those years we were still very much about books, so everyone in the studio would get a special book not produced by BMD, chosen by Bruce (later by me and Bruce’s assistants), and spouses and partners would get one of the studio’s books. We grew out of the house, so tried various restaurants around town, and a few years where the party moved into the studio, a lovely idea with mixed results, owing to obsessive working happening in tandem with dinner. We also had a few years where we invited Bootysmacker to play for us, first at their default venue, the Winchester on Parliament St., so we were able to invite clients, suppliers and friends to join our Christmas festivities, and later the Drake, probably the most successful of our hipster venue parties (more so than the Spoke Club and other places). The whole tradition continued to evolve and, while I don’t want to sentimentalize, there was a certain energy to the whole thing that seemed impossible to continue capture no matter what we did after 2002.
YYZ: I spent huge amounts of time in airports while at BMD, but nothing close to Bruce, and probably a few other people. I’m sure I was at Pearson departures 200 times during my time there (so 400 visits in total) and got quite used to getting my shoes shined there, eating lots of marble cheese, buying every magazine and newspaper that might possibly be of interest, dealing with delays, the institutional food, and occasionally drinking too much (happily, not in the last few years there). So that must have meant 100 or so trips to New York, 20 to Chicago, 10 to Atlanta, 10 to Los Angeles, 10 to Grand Rapids, 25 to various places in Europe, 5 to Vancouver, and another 20 misc. trips. While I don’t miss all that travel, I’m so grateful that I had that opportunity. There’s no better and faster way to learn about the world than to travel.
Zone: In 1985 I bought a copy of Zone 1|2 at Pages Bookstore. I was craving interdisciplinarity, so was seduced by the collision of architecture, design, literature, philosophy, urbanism, and film. Since that time, interdisciplinary publications have exploded (in fact, I’m on the advisory board of a very good one, Alphabet City), but it was somewhat rare in 1985. I was also seduced by the graphic design itself, which I later found out was meant to model the City, the theme of the first issue, rather than illustrate it. And it kind of does that. All I knew then was that I loved he book I was holding, that it was a new thing, and that maybe the 80s weren’t going to be entirely terrible. Shortly after that, I met Bruce Mau at the public launch of Zone Books, an event that took place at the Rivoli which I attended because Michael Snow was a guest and would be “playing” The Last L.P. That’s literally what he did: he put it on a turntable and walked away (and even then, I found out that what was actually playing was a cassette tape of the LP). Anyhow, I was totally intrigued by Zone, Mau, the books they were putting out (these were the days when I got pretty jazzed by Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille, et al), and the whole promise of the enterprise. Looking back, buying that copy of Zone 1|2 was the moment I became interested in architecture, design, and urbanism, and none of that has waned since. It was also the moment I knew I needed to work with Bruce Mau, and so was jealous when my friend Greg Van Alstyne became the first person that Bruce ever hired. By the early 1990s, however, I was working with BMD on the Michael Snow Project, then The OH!CANADA Project and, then, in 1998, in the studio. By then Zone’s place in the studio was less central and it seemed to me that the ambitions of the early Zone project got taken up by BMD, while Zone settled down into a perfectly fine, but no longer ground-breaking, academic publishing outfit. I still get excited when I see a new book, reliving what I felt in the 1980s, but I rarely go so far as buying the books. I’m grateful that Zone gave birth to BMD, however, and that BMD, in turn, afforded me the opportunity to take an extraordinary creative journey.