50 Manifestos

50 of the most influential designers and architects for Icon’s 50th issue.  via Icon

Manifesto #1 Peter Saville | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Being a designer used to be like being on a crusade – we were fighters, evangelists. But in the last ten years, since the recession of the early Nineties, the situation has changed.

Manifesto #2 Jasper Morrison | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution .

Manifesto #3 John Maeda | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 In the far past, designers were charged with designing solely for the physical environment.

Manifesto #4 Rem Koolhaas | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Europe is doing almost ridiculously well.

Manifesto #5 The Bouroullecs | Designers icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #6 Vito Acconci | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 A tale of two or more architectures (An architecture of fairy tales)

Manifesto #7 Marcel Wanders | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Design is not as it seems today – just a style!! It makes no sense to still follow the rules of ancient machinery.

Manifesto #8 Bruce Mau | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 You probably don’t want to hear this, but it is time we stopped talking about architecture.

Manifesto #9 Stefan Sagmeister | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Having guts always works out for me

Manifesto #10 Greg Lynn | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Organic design is not just a style. Design, architecture and life will continue to become more and more biological, not merely biomorphic.

Manifesto #11 Julien de Smedt/JDS Architects icon 050 | August 2007 Architectural aesthetics often contradict architectural performance: the appeal of a video game is directly dependent on its fluidity, its gameplay… too-fancy graphics slow down the pace but too-simple environments take away the illusion.

Manifesto #12 John Thackara | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Articles of association between designers, human beings and technology.

Manifesto #13 Yves Béhar | Designer icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #14 Fabio Novembre | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 I am a three-dimensional storyteller who believes that everything should begin on an autobiographical basis: it’s all about turning experiences into stories, life into a universal parabola.

Manifesto #15 Enric Ruiz-Geli/Cloud 9 | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Contemporaneity is an urgent issue. There is an urgent need to build the theoretical, utopian legacy of the Seventies today and, with the same intensity, there is an urgent need to create a utopian legacy for 2025.

Manifesto #16 Constantin + Laurene Leon Boym | Designers icon 050 | August 2007 Reading to our small son Bobby, we met our unlikely role model. Curious George, a cute little monkey who travelled from the jungle to live in the exciting modern world, is driven by curiosity to play and experiment with everything that surrounds him.

Manifesto #17 UN Studio | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 We live in an image-driven culture, and architecture too is subject to an obsession with images.

Manifesto #18 Zaha Hadid | Architect icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #19 Hernan Diaz Alonso/Xefirotarch | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Notes on Mutation and the Pursuit of Horror (and sometimes the Grotesque).

Manifesto #20 Peter Eisenman | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 “The spectacle is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity.”

Manifesto #21 Valerio Olgiati | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 The current discussion about not making architecture as objects is misguided.

Manifesto #22 OSA (Office For Subversive Architecture) icon 050 | August 2007 Passivity can’t be wrong… it’s safe.

Manifesto #23 Matali Crasset | Designer icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #24 Philippe Rahm | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Global warming is renewing our perception of the climate, but also of architecture.

Manifesto #25 Joep Van Lieshout | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 A good artist makes those things that nobody asks for.

Manifesto #26 Ken Livingstone + Richard Rogers + Peter Bishop icon 050 | August 2007 The diversity of London’s people is matched by the diversity of its built environment.

Manifesto #27 City Mine(D) | Intervenors icon 050 | August 2007 WHITE NOISE! We need White Noise! Definitely. Like the unprogrammed slot on your radio set, cities have spaces not yet harnessed for starchitecture or polished by design.

Manifesto #28 Random International | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 We believe in the making of Progress and Engagement.

Manifesto #29 Foreign Office Architects icon 050 | August 2007 I guess this is proving so difficult to do because we are actually about not doing manifestos, not making too many a priori, generic claims.

Manifesto #30 Bjarke Ingels/Big | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 The traditional image of the radical architect is the angry young man rebelling against the establishment.

Manifesto #31 Joshua Prince-Ramus/Rex | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 The media sells simple, catchy ideas; it reduces teams to individuals and their collaborative work to genius sketches.

Manifesto #32 Committee | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Beware of fashion: engine of shit and transcendent wonder!

Manifesto #33 Hussein Chalayan | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Growing up in Cyprus, my innate curiosity was fuelled by the isolation, which encouraged my desire to explore.

Manifesto #34 Tom Wiscombe/Emergent | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Nature is filled with variation and complexity that architecture has yet to fully explore.

Manifesto #35 Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator icon 050 | August 2007 I would like to propose that any attempt to forecast the future is both a provocation to rethink the past and an opportunity to better come to terms with the present.

Manifesto #36 Richard Hutten | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Being a Homo Ludens, the playing man, I can only say one thing: Let’s play!

Manifesto #37 Bernard Khoury | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 I work for the private sector. My clients are involved in private ventures driven by finance and commerce, and this is where I operate.

Manifesto #38 Sam Jacob/Fat | Architect icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #39 Dunne & Raby | Designer icon 050 | August 2007 Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions about the role products play in everyday life.

Manifesto #40 Thom Mayne | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Reading them now it is impossible to escape the magnitude of the ambition, the enormous optimism in the potential and power of architecture.

Manifesto #41 Gross Max | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Landscape architecture should once again become a source of aesthetic experimentation.

Manifesto #42 Paola Antonelli | Curator icon 050 | August 2007 I consider design the highest expression of human creativity because it is concise and distilled.

Manifesto #43 Steven Holl | Architect icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #44 Urban Think Tank | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 Far from being irrelevant to the development of the informal city, architects are much needed. But they will have to be a different kind of architect.

Manifesto #45 Anteeksi | Designer icon 050 | August 2007

Manifesto #46 Geoff Manaugh | Blogger icon 050 | August 2007 Everything is relevant to architecture – from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel.

Manifesto #47 Teddy Cruz | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 In the context of a post 9-11 political equator that divides the world and the city between enclaves of mega wealth and sectors of poverty, urbanities of labour and surveillance, the formal and informal, our institutions of architecture have lost their socio-political relevance.

Manifesto #48 Patrick Lynch | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 The time for manifestos is past. For 200 years people have been using them as an excuse to fuck the planet up for money.

Manifesto #49 Jürgen Mayer H | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 The inflation of weather extremes might be the effect of man-made pollution or climate rhythms – in any case it is perfect news.

Manifesto #50 Muf | Architect icon 050 | August 2007 You are cordially invited to the launch of the muf manifesto. via icon