Designer Karim Rashid has been selected as this year’s Laureate of the prestigious American Prize for Design by The Chicago Athenaeum. He joins previous a world class list of designers previously given the award including British architect/designer Sir Norman Foster, Gorden Wagener, Chief Designer at Daimler, and Italian Ferrari Designer, Flavio Manzoni.
“What stands out,” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, President of the award body, The Chicago Athenaeum, “is that the man is driven. Scratch that. Hyper-driven. At any given point in time he’s got a dizzying array of projects going all over the globe. Just following his twitter feed is exhausting. The man is PRO-LIF-IC. There is no living designer today that bends design with such originality, that reshapes and reinvents the object in its own unique and impressive presence, that recreates the figure, the form, and the aesthetic into something so entirely tantalizing, so fresh, and so completely unprecedented, novel, and inventive.”
Karim told us that he is honored and humbled to receive this distinction. “I am so grateful to be recognized as an American designer, since opening my office in New York City, 30 years ago. Design is a way of creating human experiences, a betterment of society, shaping culture and growing an economy. In these last 30 years I observed that design has touched every aspect of human living, and continues to improve the world”, Karim says. Karim has more than 4,000 designs in production, nearly 300 awards to his name, and client work in over 40 countries.
Karim lives and works in Hell’s Kitchen. W42ST interviewed him last month during the pandemic. You can read his interview here >>
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