Presenting six bright talents who are lighting up our visual landscape

Interview, June, 1999

1. Laurie Hawkinson

Selected by Bernard Tschumi, dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University, NYC

GIVE HER SOME SPACE

If you accept the conventional wisdom that architects don't build big until they're fifty, then Laurie Hawkinson, whose new Wall Street ferry terminal is currently under construction on Manhattan's Pier 11, is three years ahead of schedule. Created out of acres of steel and glass, the crisply modern terminal is a striking example of Hawkinson's heroic vision for what can often be drab, utilitarian places: stations of mass transit. And, as our cities grow evermore congested, her long-standing passion to dignify these most neglected of public spaces - the ones we hurry through - has become more timely and necessary than ever. She got her first opportunity to do so in 1990, when she and her husband and partner, Henry Smith-Miller, were contracted to help Continental Airlines "emerge from their red and gold period." To that end, Hawkinson hung a glistening glass-and-Kevlar canopy over the ticket counter at LaGuardia airport in New York. Now, with the Wall Street project nearing completion, Hawkinson is already anticipating the pride people will take in the space when it finally opens. The terminal's epic, fifty-foot-long airplane-hangar door will lift up to reveal a panorama of New York Harbor. "You'll be waiting there for the ferry under a glass canopy, looking right at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. And in Manhattan," says Hawkinson, "if you can see it, you own it." CRAIG KELLOGG

2. Warren Corbitt

Selected by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, Sagmeister, Inc., NYC

BARRIER-BUSTING GRAPHICS

Twenty-eight-year-old Warren Corbitt bristles at the constraints of conventional 2-D graphic design. In a growing body of highly experimental work, the breakout designer is bringing a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to graphics that bears little resemblance to traditional print design techniques. In a series of computer-animated posters, for example, Corbitt combined preprinted images with video-projected text fragments and cartoon characters. The fusion appears seamless, if ephemeral ("When the video's off, it doesn't exist," says Corbitt). Most recently, he was one of two designers chosen to restyle the leading-edge magazine Raygun, and he co-created a series of promo spots for MTV in which pixilated fish chomp on screenfuls of animal heads. If Corbitt's healthy disrespect for boundaries (to his mind, any medium, technology, or source material is fair game) distinguishes him as a designer to watch for the twenty-first century, there's nonetheless a hint of nostalgia to his creations. He confesses to a fixation with the Fisher-Price toys of his youth, which twisted into kinky poses are a recurring presence in his work. "My stuff is about peripheral vision; things that you're not quite sure you've seen," he explains. "I don't do this to disturb children. I want to disturb adults." C.K.

3. Chico Bicalho

Selected by graphic designer and Interview creative editor at large Richard Pandiscio, Pandiscio, Co., NYC

WINDUP WIZARD

With his bare-bones industrial aesthetic, Brazilian-born Chico Bicalho is teaching toy designers a lesson in anti-cute. Turn the key on one of his Critters and the spindly animal comes spasmodically to life, its gears propelling four tiny booties in a tap-dancing frenzy. Perhaps the least cuddly plaything imaginable, a Critter is a much-coveted design object these days, thanks to its simple, efficient use of materials and fully visible technology. It signals a whole new approach to toymaking: stripped down to near abstraction but no less fun because of it. The thirty-eight-year-old Bicalho - also an accomplished photographer - began producing his creatures in 1992 out of surplus innards originally slated for the classic old-school novelty item, chattering teeth. Now, as sales approach four hundred thousand for the best-selling second-generation Critter ($10 each), Bicalho is introducing an arachnid sister, Katita. "If you think about it, they're ugly little mechanical things," says Bicalho. "So some kids feel they have to dress them up in Barbie clothes. But most people like them as they are - the way people like lizards." C.K.

4. NL Architects

Selected by Droog Design, interior and product design collective, Amsterdam

BRAVE NEW BUILDERS

Whip-smart in taut black rubber, NL Architects' new project outside the Dutch city of Utrecht is unlike anything you've ever seen: As inviting to the eye as to the touch, it looks like a lunar hybrid of an inner tube and a slippery sex toy. The building, a heat-exchange station, speaks in an entirely new and wickedly subversive architectural vocabulary. The Amsterdam-based partners, Pieter Bannenberg, Kamiel Klaasse, Mark Linnemann, and Walter van Dijk, incorporated into the station's polyurethane skin a habitat for bats, a rock-climbing wall where the toeholds spell a secret message in Braille, and a basketball hoop with a glass backboard that serves as the structure's only window. If the future of building design is about invention, efficiency, and ecology, but not at the expense of style and humor, then NL's building offers a knowing glimpse of where we are headed. Until the station is put into service supplying heat to eleven thousand houses, most of which are yet to be built, "it just sits in the backyard of a farm, with meadows, cows, and trees," the architects note. But in a few years, after the city arrives, "it will be a tactile part of the public domain." C.K.