TROPHY | BIOGRAPHIES

Michael Bierut is a partner at Pentagram. Before joining the firm in 1990, he was vice president of graphic design at Vignelli Associates. Bierut has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of museums around the world. He has served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and as that organization’s national president. For the last dozen years he has been a Senior Critic in the graphic design program at the Yale School of Art. He is the co-editor of the Looking Closer anthologies of design criticism, and a founder of the weblog DesignObserver.com.

Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989, to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003, and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. Last year, he was named winner in the Design Mind category of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.

Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience at the Philip Johnson Glass House. She designed the public tour experience as well as programs, strategic partnerships and products to position the Glass House as a catalyst for inspiration and innovation. She is project director and producer for Glass House Conversations and the Glass House Oral History Project.

Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she envisioned and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions. She produced numerous international conferences and tours, including Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). As the former Program Director for AIGA, the professional association for design, she produced national conferences on design and business and envisioned and repositioned the International Design Conference at Aspen to the change and advocacy-focused Aspen Design Summit and Aspen Design Challenge.

Elizabeth Edwards Harris, PhD. is well-known in California for her leadership in architectural preservation. As the Vice President of the California Preservation Foundation, Dr. Harris promotes education and advocacy for saving the state’s character defining 20th century architecture and is currently chairing CPF’s 2009 preservation conference scheduled for April in Palm Springs. Co-owner of Richard Neutra’s 1947 Kaufmann House, Dr. Harris first put her expertise and knowledge to work when she embarked on its meticulous restoration followed by three other significant mid-century and post-modern houses. In addition to numerous conference presentations and papers, Dr. Harris is a freelance writer and contributing editor to Modernism magazine and has recently written on the complexity of preserving modern commercial buildings in today’s cities and is now researching public and private patronage as it relates to the contemporary architectural preservation movement.

Gary Hilderbrand is a partner of Reed Hilderbrand Associates, Inc., in Watertown, Massachusetts. The firm has been recognized with over forty design awards in the United States, including the Award of Excellence in Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Hilderbrand and Reed were selected as Emerging Voices by The Architectural League of New York.

Hilderbrand is Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard, where he is currently conducting sponsored research on sustainable urban forestry practices. He is widely published as an author and critic on twentieth-century landscape architecture practice. His publications include two monographs, The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism, with David Dillon and Alan Ward, and Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti & Webel. Hilderbrand is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and of the American Academy in Rome.

Chip Kidd is a writer and designer in New York City. His book jacket designs for Alfred A. Knopf, where he has worked since 1986, have been credited with helping to revolutionize book packaging in America. His novels, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners, have been widely lauded and are required reading in many design curriculums across the country. In 2007 he was given the prestigious National Design Award for Communications, the highest honor in his field.

Armand Limnander is a Senior Editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Prior to that, he was the Editor of V Man Magazine and a writer at Vogue. Limnander grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to the United States to attend the University of California at Berkeley. He landed in New York in 1996 and worked briefly in advertising and as a freelance writer before beginning his career in publishing.

Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center which opened to the public in 2007. With the goal to "reshape the historic house museum model," MacLear and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2009, completed a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a "center for Modernism" to co-lead the National Trust's investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the "conversations" series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site.

MacLear is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large-scale projects through opening and on-going operations. She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company's new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE. She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship. She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago's Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.

Bobbie Greene McCarthy is the Director of Save America’s Treasures at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a public-private partnership developed in 1998 as the centerpiece of the White House Millennium program and now operated as a joint initiative between the National Trust, the National Park Service, and the major federal cultural agencies. Established to address this country’s enormous unmet preservation needs, over the past ten years, Save America’s Treasures has designated over 1,600 official projects, visited over 85 historic sites, and generated more than $57 million for projects across the United States. These funds compliment $270 million in Save America’s Treasures challenge matching grants recommended by the President, appropriated by Congress and administered through the National Park Service.

Greene previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and helped her create the Save America’s program. She has over 25 years of non-profit experience, including 12 years as Vice President of People for the American Way. Earlier in her career, she spent 10 years as the chief of the oral history program at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

In 1972, Greene took a leave of absence to play a major role in Vice President Joe Biden’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate. A graduate of Syracuse University with a double major in Journalism and Political Science, she was among the first Peace Corps Volunteers in Kenya.

Chef Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute and The Italian Culinary Academy, both of which reside in New York City’s International Culinary Center. Chef Nils is the embodiment of the new international chef: disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity.

Previously he served as Executive Chef for Aquavit. During his tenure there, Chef Nils helped to demonstrate to the world the fine tastes and techniques of Swedish cooking. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden, Chef Nils also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin.

Philippe Petit, universal poet laureate of the high wire, was born in France. He took his first steps on the wire at age 16, learning by himself while being expelled from five different schools. Performing on five continents, he taught himself Spanish, German, Russian and English, and developed a keen appreciation for architecture and engineering.

On August 7, 1974, Petit accomplished what may be the most astounding “artistic crime” of all time. He walked a high wire illegally stretched between the rooftops of the Twin Towers of the World Center, making eight crossings over the course of an hour, a quarter mile above the sidewalks of New York. His book, To Reach the Clouds, which recounts Petit’s WTC adventure, is the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary film, Man on Wire.

Petit has performed on the high wire more than 80 times around the globe, crowning with his wire such architectural monuments as Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge and creating unique artworks for such momentous events as the French Bicentennial at the Eiffel Tower witnessed by 250,000 spectators, or the 1200th anniversary celebration of the city of Frankfurt before an audience of 500,000. He has done more than a dozen walks in New York City where he has been an Artist-In-Residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine since 1982. Philippe was presented with the prestigious James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, is the recipient of the New York Historical Society Award and was recently made Chevalier des Arts & des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

In addition to walking the high wire, Petit writes, draws, performs close-up magic and street-juggling, practices lock-picking and 18th-Century timber framing, plays chess, studies French wines and was once seen bullfighting in Peru. He continues to give lectures and workshops internationally. His seventh book, L’Art du Pickpocket, was recently published in Paris; he is now at work on his eighth, On Building a Barn.

Robert Rubin is a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the history and theory of architecture at Columbia University. He curated the exhibitions Jean Prouvé: A Tropical House at Yale University and the UCLA Hammer Museum and Jean Prouvé: Three Nomadic Structures at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, both in 2005. A book on the Tropical House, which he co wrote, has just been published by the Pompidou Center. He is currently working on a book about Pierre Chareau, and an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale of France planned for 2010 on the book collection of the artist Richard Prince. He has been chairman of the Centre Pompidou Foundation since 2007, and was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians.

He retired from the financial services business in 2000. He is the developer, controlling shareholder, and CEO of The Bridge, one of the most acclaimed new golf courses in North America. Rubin graduated from Yale College and received a masters degree in modern European history from Columbia University. He lives in Pierre Chareau's Maison de verre in Paris and in New York City.

John Stern is President of the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. Widely known as one of the world’s outstanding sculpture parks, the Storm King Art Center is located approximately one hour north of New York City, in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Art Center’s permanent collection of sculpture, dating from 1945 to the present, includes works by many of the twentieth century’s most influential artists, integrated into a 500-acre landscape of rolling hills, fields, and woodlands. Several of these works, like Maya Lin’s four-acre earthwork Storm King Wavefield which will open to the public on May 9th, 2009, have been specially commissioned by Storm King. The collection is regularly complemented by temporary installations, both outdoors and in the museum building, and by public and education programs.
Stern is also Associate General Counsel, International Affairs, at Verizon Business and was formerly Deputy General Counsel at Loral Space & Communications. He has held multiple positions at the Federal Communications Commission and in the New York City Law Department. John is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He has served on the board of trustees of several non-profit art and educational organizations.

Oldcastle Glass is the exclusive sponsor of Glass House Conversations.