Designer Karim Rashid has built his brand (one that boasts more than 300 design awards and encompasses some 3,000 designs in production) on foundations of Popsicle-colored spaces, amorphous product design, and well-followed Twitter philosophizing—but don't mistake his work for child's play. In recent Q&A, New York Times writer Vivian Marino "asked" Rashid this "question": "But you're not a licensed architect."
"I am doing 11 buildings in the world, but I don't have a stamp as an architect and I wasn't educated as an architect. There's a lot of press and remarks, 'Oh, Karim is a designer, not an architect,' which is strange because there are many architects who are very successful that were not necessarily educated. A lot of the design architects tend to use what they call an architect of record who tends to be doing the construction implementation.
I have a team of nine architects. And we work very closely with mechanical engineers and structural engineers and all that. There's no naïveté here."
Oh, and then the Times asked Rashid about his controversial HAP building in Harlem, which recently got drained of its magenta-and-turquoise coloring. Marino posed the question: "What was the thought process behind the original color palette anyway?"
"Neighborhoods need color added. The closer we live to the Equator the more colorful our built environment — our clothes, our architecture, everything — but the farther away we go the more monochromatic and gray. Now the perversity is it should be flipped." The whole interview is right this way.
· The 30-Minute Interview: Karim Rashid [NYT]
· All Karim Rashid coverage [Curbed National]
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