Victor Papanek
| Victor Joseph Papanek | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
23 November 1923 Vienna |
| Died | 10 January 1998 (aged 74) Lawrence, Kansas |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Cooper Union; Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Practice | J.L. Constant Professor of Architecture and Design |
Victor Joseph Papanek (22 November 1923 – 10 January 1998) was a designer and educator who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless. His products, writings, and lectures were collectively considered an example and inspired many designers. Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations. He wrote that "design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).
Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923. He attended public school in England and emigrated to the U.S. where he studied design and architecture. Papanek worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at Cooper Union in New York (1950) and did graduate studies in design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.A. 1955).
Papanek was interested in humankind as such and pursued an interest in anthropology, living and working for several years with Navajos, Inuit, and Balinese. Indeed, Papanek felt that when design is simply technical or merely style-oriented, it loses touch with what is truly needed by people.
"One of my first jobs after leaving school was to design a table radio," Papanek wrote in Design for the Real World. "This was shroud design: the design of external covering of the mechanical and electrical guts. It was my first, and I hope my last, encounter with appearance design, styling, or design ‘cosmetics’." And further, he opined: "Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics."
In the same book, Papanek wrote: "Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer."
Victor Papanek taught at the Ontario College of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, Purdue University, the California Institute of the Arts (where he was dean), and other places in North America. He headed the design department in the Kansas City Art Institute from 1976 to 1981. In 1981, he became the J.L. Constant Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas. He also worked, taught, and consulted in Sweden, England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Finland and Australia.
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