Karen Nichols, FAIA and Donald Strum, IDSA will be found on the campus of Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design during the first week of April 2018. Karen and Donald carry a combined 70+ years at Michael Graves Architecture & Design and will share their unique experiences of being part of an evolutionary practice of making the ordinary, extraordinary.
Using examples from hospitality, workplace, healthcare and education, Karen and Donald will show how their personal experiences promote humanistic environments and create value in the user experience through design. Most importantly though, they will share how planning, architecture and interior design marries with industrial product design, forming the roots of a unique, multidisciplinary practice.
Those who will attend can expect to learn:
• How an integrated multi-disciplinary practice functions.
• How architects and industrial designers influence each other’s designs.
• How multi-disciplinary design produces meaningful outcomes in healthcare, education and workplace projects by enhancing the user experience.
• How one of the world’s largest hospitality projects was created by leveraging multiple disciplines to design at every scale: from master planning and buildings to interiors and furnishings.
Lecture will be held on April 6, 2018
About Karen Nichols, FAIA
Since joining the firm in 1977, Principal Karen Nichols, FAIA, has played a key role in the integration of planning, architecture, interior design and product design, which is the hallmark of the Graves practice. She is currently the Project Executive for a 2-million-SF nationwide workplace transformation for a large financial institution. She has been Principal-in-Charge of multiple phases of renovation and expansion of the Newark Museum spanning 40 years, including a 1980s renovation that received a National AIA Honor Award. The latest phase opens to the public in February 2018. A long-standing proponent of education and raising public awareness of architecture, Karen is a member of the Advisory Boards of NJIT’s College of Architecture & Design and Kean University’s Michael Graves College. She is the 2018 Chair of the AIA’s Jury of Fellows and a champion for women in architecture.
About Donald Strum, IDSA
With the firm since 1984, Donald Strum is the Principal in charge of product, furniture, and graphic design and has played a key role in the development and the success of the firm’s product design practice. His first project for the firm was the now ubiquitous “Whistling Bird Teakettle” for the Italian manufacturer, Alessi. In 1997, under the leadership of Mr. Strum, the firm began a relationship with Target Stores that led to what many in the critical press have hailed as “the democratization of design”. In 2005, after witnessing firsthand the issues Michael Graves was experiencing with an illness that left him paralyzed, Mr. Strum and the product design group made a commitment to transform healthcare design services for the aging and physically disabled population, as well as for the people who care for them. Mr. Strum and his product design group have brought over 2,000 consumer products to market over the past three decades.