“You have to be interested in Culture to Design for it”...
Lorraine Wild

We all know that the term “global village” is closely associated with Marshall McLuhan describing how electronic technology is shrinking our world into a village. With this light-speed movement of information and images bringing ideas together to create this heightened awareness to the forefront of our minds; we can’t ignore how this effects our design community as the ability to read, spread and react to new ideas is becoming not only prevalent in our eyes, but our client’s eyes as well. We certainly kept this ‘global’ theme in mind while putting together this issue for you. Inside you’ll find we literally traveled the world to share with you what the global design scene is up to and you’ll get a glimpse of award winning projects from all four corners of the world.

It all started back in October when I had the opportunity to travel to Hangzhou, China, to sit on a panel of international judges for a design competition there that coincided with Shanghai’s Creative Industry Week. I had the privilege of sitting on this panel with two additional representatives from the Midwest, Joseph Rosa, The John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design at The Art Institute of
Chicago and Donna Robertson, Professor and Dean of the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. As guests of the Hangzhou Government, we had the opportunity to meet and speak with hundreds of designers and architects from around the Pacific Rim and share our ideas on design together. In this issue we hand picked a small representative of some of the award winners in the following pages for you to see. This competition was sponsored by the Asia Pacific Federation of Architects and Interior Designers (IAI) an organization which is now opening a North American Chapter here in the city of Chicago, hoping to promote and exchange ideas among architects and designers globally. If you would like more information on the 2010 the Asia Pacific Federation of Architects and Interior Designers (IAI) awards competition which will take place in Shanghai this October during the World Expo, you can call 773.523.0203.

After that whirlwind trip, I hardly had time to recover from my jet lag before I attended the AIA sponsored DesignNight where 24 local architecture firms were recognized with Design Excellence Awards. This year’s winners were honored for exceptional work in four separate categories: Distinguished Building, Interior Architecture, Regional & Urban Design, and Divine Detail. Check out some of our favorites.

Taking a look at the upcoming calendar I see we have a full plate in the next few months, KBIS in April, Art Chicago in May and NeoCon in June. I look forward to sharing with you on these pages what we find at these events as we work on our 4th Annual Suite Sixteen issue. Until then…. i4