Design for a new time

For this year’s Design Annual issue, we began as we usually do when brainstorming a story. We sat around a table and talked about what we thought was cool and what we thought was worthy of criticism. New buildings, old buildings, funky graphic t-shirts, pretty plantings—plenty of local designs and designers’ names came up in our discussions of the stuff that caught our eyes this year, and many of them are featured in brief in the pages that follow.

These are the things around here that made us stand up and say, hey, someone designed that thing over there. Someone started with a blank sheet of paper or a blank space, or maybe an existing, ugly space, and he created something compelling or even mundane but something. Or maybe he started with something that already was monumental, say Carter Mountain, and made radical adjustments to the landscape without even consciously worrying about design. In any case, these are the images around here that proved worthy of our reflection, and we thought you should stop and notice them too.

And then we were curious: If this is what piques the interest of our pupils, what are the everyday designs that catch the designers’ eyes? And so we asked eight of them to give us their current most cherished commodities. But what to do about an in-depth analysis? Which discipline to shine a light on this year? Architecture? Graphics? Permaculture? Design is serious business around here, what with UVA’s School of Architecture and the No. 1 ranked architecture school in the country, according to Design Intelligence (Virginia Tech), in our midst, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site looming over us and influencing almost every local institutional design project with its grandiosity. Plus, there are more architects in this town than you can shake a mechanical pencil at, so it seemed daunting, at first, to settle on one person or project for our cover story until, during our research, much of the recent design buzz seemed to lead to one, well, not individual or single discipline per se, but an amalgam of all of them: a design firm that unites several different design disciplines under one company roof and is called, appropriately enough, Alloy Workshop.