The 18 winning projects shortlisted in the Field Constructs Design Competition flag a range of pressing socio-environmental issues through whimsical takes on interactive public art. The exhibits will occupy an old landfill and brownfield in Austin within the Circle Acres nature reserve, turning the site into a bizarre outdoor museum teeming with site-responsive sculptures and unforeseen creatures. Here, we take a look at some of the winning proposals to be displayed from November 14–22. Cloudfill by Blake Smith, John Cunningham, Seth Brunner (New York) This three-part installation is made of plastic bottles stuffed in bags. Each piece is specifically designed for either forestland, wetlands, or dry land, and references a different environmental issue, from deforestation to strip mining and microplastics in the ocean, to advance the educational mission of the Ecology Action of Texas. A floating bridge is planned for the park’s wetland area, which used to be a quarry.

Commpost by Daniel Gillen, Colby Suter, Gustav Fagerstrom (Beijing)

These disorienting camel humps rising in the middle of a field are an educational commentary about composting. Visitors scan QR codes or use the on-site WiFi to learn about ecological food disposal. Like a LEGO set, it comes with a step-by-step assembly manual and can still function with minimal component parts. Visitors can throw scraps and water into pits within the sculpture and watch them turn into dirt. Dis-Figure by Aptum Architecture (Syracuse) This vaguely equestrian sculpture looms out of the swampy shadows like a guardian angel. Built from a wood frame covered in latex, the sculpture reportedly “glows” and changes appearance throughout the day. “Through the intertwining of skeleton and mutilated skin, a digitally enhanced structure and its biodegradable latex ornamentation disfigures the form and, in turn, alludes to a new reading of ‘form meets nature’ as the grotesque, the uncanny, and the unexpected,” said the architects. Las Piñatas by Goujon Design (Austin) This exhibition bespeaks the proverbial tension between development and preservation. The giant piñatas pay homage to a local family-owned piñata store that was razed in early 2015 by a pair of transplanted property developers in the city’s rapidly gentrifying East Austin neighborhoods. “The low-income and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Montopolis”—where the park is located—“will inevitably become another friction point between the development of a ‘new’ Austin and the preservation of ‘old’ Austin,” according to Field Constructs. Meat Church Field Kitchen by Jordan Bartelt, Scrap Marshall (Los Angeles) The design for this short-lived smokehouse riffs on a lone church standing in the Texas barrens, where seasoned grill-masters prepare juicy meats to be consumed with others like at a church picnic. However, folks of all faiths are welcome at this non-denominational gathering.

On a man-made island in East Amsterdam, this isn't your traditional campsite. The so-called Urban Campsite Amsterdam is an open-air exhibition that features 14 publicly accessible installations that can be booked for an evening under the stars. From trampoline roofs and hemispherical windows, each unique shelter is created by a wide array of designers, architects, and artists. Pictured at top is an installation from social design project collective Treehouse Fest or Boomhuttenfest entitled Solid Family. This bone-shaped icosahedron, created by graphic designer Tobias Berg and furniture designer Sander Borsje, is made from recycled materials and is deceptive with its seemingly unaccommodating shape. Surprisingly, it houses 2 queen-sized beds and can lodge up to four people at a time. From a four-person geo-structure to a two-person trampoline. Designer Vince Vijsma' coined Trampotent for his trampoline/tent hybrid that allows for an entertaining fun house and an eclectic gathering space. Exploring the "flux of garbage and its recycling and utilization in architecture and design," Refunc created IBC Shrinkwrap, housing a queen sized bed for two protected by, of course, shrinkwrap. Refunc believes that "creative reuse" is a better alternative to recycling and that there is potential in discarded materials to transform into something extraordinary. The concept behind the exhibit is to allow the public to interact with contemporary art and showcase its ability to transform a barren stretch of underused land into a common ground for tourists and locals. Urban Campsite also eliminates the barrier between a work of art and its audience through the participatory aspect of the campsite, thereby transcending the viewer-art piece relationship. So park the camper for the summer and crash in a spaceship for the night. The installations are available to book through August 31st.  

Chicago's Graham Foundation today announced nearly half a million dollars in grant funding for “groundbreaking” architectural projects by organizations, including the first major career survey of architect David Adjaye, an urban planning program in Ukraine, and architecture festivals in Norway and Portugal. The Graham Foundation, whose director Sarah Herda sits on AN's editorial advisory board, will award $496,500 to 49 projects that “chart new territory in the field of architecture.” The award recipients were plucked from a pool of over 200 submissions representing 22 countries. The Adjaye show, titled Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye, opens September 19 at the Art Institute of Chicago and will be “the only North American venue for this globally focused exhibition,” according to the Art Institute. Other grant recipients include a plan to exhibit sound sculptures designed by Harry Bertoia at Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio, the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s biannual World Wide Storefront event, and the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. The announcement follows the Graham's “grants to individuals” program, which in May awarded $490,000 for architectural research to 63 projects. Here's the full list of recipients, organized by category: EXHIBITIONS [23 awards] Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL) Chicago Design Museum (Chicago, IL) Columbia College Chicago-Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL) Elmhurst Art Museum (Chicago, IL) The Jewish Museum (New York, NY) MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House (West Hollywood, CA) Materials & Applications (Los Angeles, CA) Monoambiente (Buenos Aires, Argentina) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL) Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) National Trust for Historic Preservation (Washington, DC) Oslo Architecture Triennale (Oslo, Norway) Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art (London, England) Serpentine Gallery (London, England) Slought (Philadelphia, PA) Socrates Sculpture Park (Long Island City, NY) Southern California Institute of Architecture (Los Angeles, CA) Swiss Institute (New York, NY) University of California, Berkeley-Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA) University of Chicago-Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (Chicago, IL) Video Game Art Gallery (Chicago, IL) Yale University-School of Architecture (New Haven, CT) FILM/VIDEO/NEW MEDIA [2 awards] Wavelength Pictures (London, England) The Wende Museum of the Cold War (Culver City, CA) PUBLIC PROGRAMS [12 awards] Archeworks (Chicago, IL) Architectural League of New York (New York, NY) Association of Architecture Organizations (Chicago, IL) CANactions (Kiev, Ukraine) Chicago Architecture Foundation (Chicago, IL) Chicago Humanities Festival (Chicago, IL) Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL) The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture (Scottsdale, AZ) Lampo (Chicago, IL) Ohio State University-Knowlton School of Architecture (Columbus, OH) Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York, NY) Van Alen Institute (New York, NY) PUBLICATIONS [12 awards] Anyone Corporation (New York, NY) Art Papers (Atlanta, GA) California Institute of the Arts-REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) Columbia University-Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (New York, NY) LIGA-Space for Architecture (Mexico City, Mexico) Lisbon Architecture Triennale (Lisbon, Portugal) MAS Context (Chicago, IL) Primary Information (Brooklyn, NY) The Renaissance Society (Chicago, IL) Rice University-School of Architecture (Houston, TX) Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) Zone Books (Brooklyn, NY)

At the Aronson Galleries at the New School, a wall of pickle jars taped with black-and-white cutout portraits of twenty dictators lines the windowsill. A standard 8 ½ x 11 paper sign invites visitors to Pick Your Own Dick by placing a poker chip in a jar. Chairman Mao, a world-class “dick” whose Cultural Revolution starved and murdered millions of Chinese, and Turkish President Erdogan, an elected Muslim fundamentalist morphing into a military strongman, handily won opening night. Romancing True Power: D20, the mischievous exhibition designed by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss of NAO and conceived by Nina Khrushcheva, associate dean and professor at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at the New School, cheekily invites public debate about the nature of and difference between types of dictatorship, taking special glee in thumbing its nose at ostentatious symbols of power. The exhibit was accompanied by a journal compiled by Khrushcheva with Yiqing Wang-Holborn and by a book of graphic novellas designed as a result of Weiss’s seminar on new ideologies at Columbia GSAPP, both profiling selected dictators and their trappings. The co-curators selected twenty of the world’s biggest dictators—dicks for short, according to the lingua franca of the exhibition—considering them by various yardsticks and quantitative measures. It’s a pun that offers itself willingly and fluently throughout, and why not? Mark Halprin may have had to resign as an analyst at MSNBC in 2011 for disrespectfully characterizing President Obama’s as acting like “kind of a dick” after a press conference, but it’s good to know there’s still some humor left in academia. In the exhibition space, celebratory tchotchkes and representative “dick kitsch” adorns a roomful of stacked white cubes Scotch-taped with information about each leader. On the gallery walls, informational print-outs graph in three dimensions the greatness or infamy each of the selected dictators, and a video collects scenes of the symbolic displays of power—choreographed military parades, building-scale posters, salutes--that are the trappings of authoritarianism. In the hallway, a hall of dictators designed by NAO composed of photocopied black-and-white sheets invites you to compare each dick’s stature—with the exception of Margaret Thatcher all of the prime examples chosen are men—and each is crowned by his dick palace. Inflected by a distinctly Slavic black-humor, underlying Romancing True Power is an academically rigorous examination of the forms dictatorship takes relative to different systems of government. Most of the exemplars are conventionally accepted members of the group: President Vladimir Putin, a true dick by any standard, evinces a visible pleasure in flamboyant dissembling, willfully erratic behavior, and contempt for his opponents. Putin is joined as co-representative of Russia by his typological predecessor, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Community Party of the Soviet Union, one of the great mass-murderers and political assassins of all time: another order of dick altogether. Vice President Dick Cheney, great fabricator of post 9-11 conspiracies and silencer of political opponents, is placed alongside another legendary Dick, President Nixon, known as Tricky Dick long before he was uncovered spying on Democratic opponents during the Watergate scandal and forced to resign. Khrushcheva and Weiss selected the twenty dicks in a lively debate while developing the book and exhibition, and created appendixes listing second and third tier adherents of the club. The European fascists of the WWII era fall into this latter category, along with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, currently a leading proponent of the genocidal category; possibly they’re too intellectually obvious and uncomplicated to make the first cut. Apart from academic credentials Nina Khrushcheva had special access to this field: she is the great-granddaughter of Soviet First Secretary of the Community Party Nikita Khrushchev, an honorary third-tier dick notorious for taking his shoe off and banging it on the table for emphasis at the UN. The twenty chosen “dicks,” the D20, are offered as a counterpoint to the G20, the leaders of the world’s 20 most industrialized countries who meet in Geneva each year to decide the fate of the international economy. The sole function of the twenty dicks, by contrast, seems to be to intimidate, harass, punish, dominate, silence, and display their true power. That is, their dickpower. The beauty of the show at the New School is the opposite. It constructs a public display about dictatorship that is itself an open public debate. The opening night panel discussion with Bobby Ghosh, a CNN Global Affairs analyst, exposed that debate to public scrutiny. Its exhibits are all paper monuments created samizdat style, in the manner of the Soviet dissidents of old, who secretly distributed photocopies of books and political pamphlets as handmade productions that were no less important because of their improvised character. Both the exhibition and the hardcover journal, available as an online journal, with informative chapters such as “Dicks and their Love of Sports” and “Dicks and their Music,” repudiates abuse of power by making it the subject of debate, play, and mockery. Nothing is as worthy of ridicule as the exercise of dickpower.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's announcement that Chicago would launch an international festival of art and architecture—its own take on the famous Venice biennale—drew jeers and cheers from the design community both near and far from The Second City. AN called for the show aspiring to be North America's largest architectural exhibition to go beyond tourism bromides. Now the upstart expo has a name, as well as its first show. The inaugural Chicago architecture biennial will begin in October 2015, and will be called “The State of the Art of Architecture,” in reference to the controversial conference organized in 1977 by architect Stanley Tigerman. Tigerman's show celebrated the postmodern rejection of Chicago's old masters like Mies van der Rohe, forging the position of architectural protest group The Chicago Seven. A press release from the organizing committee alludes to the upcoming exhibition's wide scope:

More than a profession or a repertoire of built artifacts, architecture is a dynamic cultural practice that manifests at different scales and through various media: buildings and cities, but also art, performance, film, landscape and new technologies. It permeates fundamental registers of everyday life—from housing to education, from environmental awareness to economic growth, from local communities to global networks.

The biennial's first commission was announced Wednesday by co-directors Joseph Grima—a former curator of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and director of the Ideas City platform of the New Museum—and Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation and AN editorial advisor. Renowned photographer Iwan Baan will contribute an original photo essay about Chicago featuring aerial shots taken at sunrise. The work will “capture the city during a moment of its daily routine,” according to the press release. “Like the Biennial itself, Baan’s expansive photographs interpret Chicago as a realm of architectural possibility, past and future.” The free festival's home base will be the Chicago Cultural Center, but organizers say it won't be restricted to downtown. “Using the city as a canvas, installations will be created in Millennium Park and other Chicago neighborhoods, including new projects and public programs developed by renowned artist Theaster Gates on Chicago’s south side,” reads a press release. “The Biennial will also feature collateral exhibitions and events with partner institutions throughout the city, and will offer educational programming for local and international students.” Tigerman, whose 1977 exhibition is the inspiration for the 2015 show's title, sits on the biennial's International Advisory Committee, which also includes architects David Adjaye, Elizabeth Diller, Jeanne Gang, and Frank Gehry, along with critic Sylvia Lavin, Lord Peter Palumbo and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ty Tabing, former executive director of the Chicago Loop Alliance and founder of Singapore River One, will serve as the biennial's executive director. Oil giant BP has agreed to donate $2.5 million for the show, but Mayor Emanuel is reportedly seeking $1.5 million more.

Chicago, in a bid to boost its tourism industry and cultural cachet,  will host an international design exhibition next year modeled after the Venice Biennale, which every two years draws contributions from architects and artists from around the world. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the Chicago Architecture Biennial Tuesday. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin, Emanuel said he hopes to use the city’s reputation as a hub for modern architecture to encourage economic development:

"Obviously there's an economic benefit in tourism and travel. Chicago will continue to be seen worldwide as an epicenter of modern architecture… The real question is: Why wasn't Chicago doing this before?"

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and the Graham Foundation will present the show, which will be based in the Chicago Cultural Center. The Chicago Architecture Foundation, whose annual Open House Chicago will coincide with the start of the initial biennial, will help coordinate the first exhibition, which is planned for October 1, 2015 through January 3, 2016. Oil company BP donated $2.5 million for the first show. Kamin reported that Emanuel personally solicited BP’s grant funding, and that the city’s still looking to raise $1.5 million more. While the Chicago event makes no secret of taking after its prestigious namesake in Venice, there will be several differences from that event, which reportedly drew more than 175,000 visitors in 2012. Admission to Chicago’s event will be free, and the show will not have national pavilions. It will have a theme, which has yet to be determined, and will seek to compete in an increasingly crowded field of international design exhibitions. Venice has mounted its exhibition 14 times in 34 years, deviating occasionally from its biennial schedule. If Chicago’s initial event is deemed a success, officials say they’ll duplicate it every two years. Joseph Grima, who co-curated the Istanbul biennial in 2012, and Graham Foundation Director Sarah Herda will co-direct the inaugural Chicago event. Another Chicago-based design curator, Zöe Ryan of the Art Institute of Chicago, is coordinating Istanbul’s next biennial, which will run concurrently with Chicago’s.

St. Louis’ Grand Center neighborhood has gone through a lot of changes. Though it was hit hard by suburban flight during the 1950s, in recent years the historic and predominantly African-American community area has enjoyed an artistic revival bolstered by theaters and cultural institutions like the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Now a confluence of development corporations and nonprofits want the midtown neighborhood “to become the premiere cultural and entertainment tourist destination in the Midwest.” Part of that plan involves sprucing up the urban fabric. With a Great Streets Projects grant from the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, local groups are looking to do some placemaking. Read the full Grand Center Master Plan, named The Growing Grand Plan. On a neighborhood scale, the plan envisions corridors of development along Spring and Theresa streets flanking the “spine & transect” of Grand Boulevard and Washington Avenue. Within that framework, the plan pinpoints several intersections and cross-block connectors that could be activated by public programming to function as “outdoor rooms.” Trees and green infrastructure are meant to alleviate some of St. Louis’ flooding issues by retaining and filtering stormwater. The Great Streets plan even describes a new catchment area for Grand Center. Branding, wayfinding, lighting, and transportation analyses are also a focus of the plan. To help spur discussion, The Creative Exchange Lab of the Center for Architecture is mounting an exhibition on the topic. Titled Great Streets Project: Grand Center, the show kicks off with two presentations on May 22 and May 23 at The Creative Exchange Lab of the Center for Architecture + Design STL, 3307 Washington Ave., from 6-8:30 p.m. both evenings.

It looks like design history is in the air here in Chicago. The Chicago Design Museum is in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign to launch an exhibition looking back at 100 years of graphic arts. Chicagoisms just opened at The Art Institute—a meditation on Chicago’s architectural history and mythology that builds off a previous exhibition of unbuilt work reviewed here. Now another exhibit glances at Chicago's design history to better assess its present and future. Chicago’s design history will be on the menu at a new exhibition, CHGO DSGN: Recent Object and Graphic Design, which opens at the Chicago Cultural Center on May 30, from 6:00–10:00p.m. The exhibition runs through November 2, 2014. “Chicago has long been regarded as an international center for design, and this retrospective celebrates the region’s creative and innovative spirit,” reads a press release for the show. Curator Rick Valicenti, who won Cooper Hewitt’s 2011 National Design Award for Communications Design, and display designer Tim Parsons said in a statement that they want to celebrate Chicago’s design history, from early print developments through international modernism, and probe its future with more than 200 works that range from functional objects to theoretical proposals. Among the pieces on display will be Ania Jaworska's 8-foot-tall architectural model, Monument for Them, and an 80-foot print by Chicago photographer Sandro that includes 115 of the exhibitors—an homage to Richard Avedon's famous portrait of the Chicago Seven.  

Building the Picture National Gallery London April 30 through September 2014 At the end of April, the National Gallery will present a new exhibit spotlighting the handling of architecture in various paintings by prominent Italian renaissance artists. Building The Picture will feature works by Duccio, Botticelli, Crivelli and others chosen from the museum's permanent collection along with paintings gathered from other institutions in the U.K. These 14th, 15th, and 16th century images will be complemented by a series of five films that offer contemporary ideas on the theme of real and imagined architecture from Peter Zumthor, filmmaker Martha Fiennes, art historian T. J. Clark, film historian John David Rhodes, and computer game cinematic director Peter Gornstein. The Renaissance bore witness to several breakthroughs in terms of realistic representation, particularly in the realm of architecture. Techniques like perspective enabled artists to depict increasingly life-like architectural compositions. Such skills were used towards the rendering of real structures or the creation of imagined and compelling architectural scenes that still maintained believable spatial qualities. Despite these developments, the period was still largely lacking in the concept of an architectural education, meaning that prominent figures like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo trained in other artistic fields before venturing into building design. Exhibit curators see a contemporary resurgence in these blurred boundaries between art and architecture, a fluidity that is reinforced by the diverse roster of figures contributing to the show's film program. Within Renaissance Art History, architectural compositions traditionally receive second billing to the human figures that populate them. Building the Picture hopes to show how in many cases, buildings acted as foundations for the resultant paintings, dictating the layout and direction of the remainder of the work. The exhibit opens in London on April 30. It will be accompanied by an online catalog permanently available on the National Gallery website.

Maggie's Centres: A Blueprint for Cancer Care New York School of Interior Design, NYSID Gallery 161 East 69th Street, New York. Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm Through April 25, 2014 These are the requirements that were put to Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Piers Gough, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and thus far eleven other architects when asked to design Maggie’s Centres, buildings in the U.K. where “free practical, emotional, and social support to people with cancer, their family and friends” are provided. When diagnosed with breast cancer, Maggie Keswick Jencks suffered not only the disease and its treatment, but the environment where she spent many precious hours of her waning life. She wrote, “we waited in this awful interior space...waiting in itself is not so bad—[it] is the circumstances in which you have to wait that count. Overhead (sometimes even neon) lighting, interior spaces with no views out and miserable seating against the walls all contribute to extreme mental and physical enervation. Patients who arrive relatively hopeful soon start to wilt.” Determined to change that, garden designer and author Maggie Keswick, who married architect and critic Charles Jencks in 1978 after meeting at the Architecture Association in London, set about creating a new paradigm. After living with the last round of the disease for two years, she died in 1995 at age 53 and never lived to see the completion the next year of the first drop-in center in Edinburgh by Richard Murphy, although she worked closely with him on the design and developed a blueprint for the concept. (Maggie knew 14 of the Maggie’s Centre architects.) This first center was shortlisted for a 1997 RIBA Stirling Prize, setting the tone for quality architecture to improve the quality of life. The exhibition displays how the architects interpreted the brief differently. The concept for Rogers’s Charing Cross Hospital center is of a heart wrapped protectively by the optimistic orange-colored exterior walls and capped by a sheltering, overhanging roof. Built on a parking lot between a busy road and the large early 1970s grey, modernist hospital block, the building is inward looking to a world of courtyards and social space, more like a Roman or Islamic dwelling, according to Rogers. It won the 2009 RIBA Stirling Prize. Gehry’s center in Dundee, Scotland, is a white, cottage-like structure with a crenellated roofline and conical tower that has become so iconic it graced a postage stamp. Gehry’s stated goal was to make it “heymish,” Yiddish for homey. The heart is the kitchen, and the exterior garden designed by Arabella Lenox-Boyd is a concentric circular maze of stone and grass. Gough’s Nottingham centre was a collaboration with city-native fashion designer Paul Smith who designed the interiors. The building sports bright green symmetrical facades of interlocking ovals (the model in the exhibition resembles a soup tureen, but the building has been described as a green treehouse with Prince Charles ears). Koolhaas’s centre at Gartnavel Hospital, Glasgow, is a refuge nestled in a wood. Its interconnecting rooms obviate the need for a corridor. They are spun in a circle around a central courtyard. The facade is white concrete, and the interior garden by daughter Lily Jencks is like bones with mirrors. OMA project architect Richard Hollington wanted to achieve the spirit of their Maison Bordeaux, a house built around a hydraulic platform elevator for a wheelchair user. The as yet unbuilt St. Bartholomew’s in London by Steven Holl is planned as a 3-story contrasting lantern with colored light washing the interior walls and floors. The exterior of the building features matte glass organized in horizontal bands like a musical staff, while the internal concrete structure branches like the hand. The exhibition logo uses a Holl watercolor as its field. If cancer is a form of life, then Maggie’s Centres attempt to harness that power and turn it into healing force.

What was the most popular architecture or design exhibition in 2013? If you guessed MoMA's Le Corbusier spectacular or SFMOMA's landmark Lebbeus Woods: Architect (coming to New York's Drawing Center April 15) you're close but off the mark. In fact the most popular architecture exhibition in the world, according to The Art Newspaper's 2013 Visitors Figures was MoMA's Henri Labrouste exhibition that drew 438,680 viewers (4,100 a day) compared to the Le Corbusier show that had 405,000 visitors (4,010 a day). In fact, MoMA had the top three architecture exhibitions in the world last year with their 9+1 Ways of Being Political the third most attended exhibition with 2,594 visitors a day during its eight-month run on 53rd Street. Lebbeus Woods: Architect was the fourth-most-attended architecture exhibition with 210,122 (2,287 a day). With both Le Corbusier and Henri Labrouste in the top fifty exhibitions of any kind worldwide, clearly MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll has done something right in his time at the museum.

Ray Eames: In the Spotlight Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery Art Center College of Design, Hillside Campus 1400 Lida Street, Pasadena Through May 4 Ray Eames: In the Spotlight features; letters, sketches, notes, photographs, paintings, films, process drawings, furniture, and collections that follow the great American designer’s interests and interactions with key places, people and institutions. Taken altogether, the presentation is an intimate study of Ray Eames’ world and seeks to get to the heart of her intensive hands-on creative process and the “way-it-should be-ness” that defined how Ray and Charles Eames lived and worked. In the Spotlight allows visitors to make their own connections to this great body of work, to explore their own creativity, and to apply Eames’ tools to their own lives.