prospective students,
and friends of the program,
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With all my best,
The new SVA MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism is now accepting applications for Fall 2014. This rigorous one-year program equips students with tools for researching, chronicling, and interpreting all aspects of design. Each student is asked to identify an individual research territory to explore during the year. Through workshops, seminars, lectures, and site-visits, students learn about the issues and policies that shape the man-made environment; deploy research methods, reporting techniques, and theoretical models; while experimenting with media for communicating their research, such as writing, podcasting, video, exhibitions, and events.
The program, which has evolved out of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism (2008-2014), is suited to mid-career design or media professionals who wish to deepen their multi-dimensional research practice and enrich their understanding of design, architecture, and urban infrastructure. The program is also aimed at recent graduates, holding BA and BFA degrees, interested in strengthening their writing and critical thinking and developing an area of expertise. With an unparalleled core faculty comprised of celebrated curators, editors, critics, and designers such as Paola Antonelli, Murray Moss, Robin Pogrebin, Karrie Jacobs, and Interboro Partners, and more than 30 guest lecturers and critics visiting the department per semester, the program connects students to inspirational mentors and helps them to forge relationships with potential employers and colleagues.
Tuition is $20,000, a below-cost figure made possible by scholarship funding.*
* The estimated full tuition for the year-long program is $36,000. Scholarships of $16,000 are offered to all candidates, reducing the total tuition to $20,000.
Applications will be considered on a rolling admissions basis, as space remains available.
Admission to the program is by online application, the submission of required documents, and an interview by phone or in person. All applicants will receive an admissions decision in writing.
If you have any questions about your application please do not hesitate to contact the department. We are happy to arrange for prospective students to tour the department, meet with the department chair, and to attend a class or a Tuesday evening lecture.
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Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Since 1994, Paola has curated the following landmark exhibitions: "Design and the Elastic Mind," “Achille Castiglioni: Design!;” “Humble Masterpieces;” “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design; “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk;” “Thresholds: Contemporary Design from the Netherlands;” “Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer:” and “Workspheres.” For these accomplishments she received the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt NationalDesign Museum Design Mind Award. She was also appointed senior fellow at the Royal College of Art, London and given an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. Prior to joining the staff at MoMA, Antonelli was the editor of Abitare and a contributing editor to Domus. Among the books she has written are: Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design and Objects of Design from the Museum of Modern Art. She also writes for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Design,I.D., Seed, Metropolis, Nest, and Paper. -
Akiko Busch
Akiko Busch writes about design, culture, and nature for a variety of publications. She is the author of The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science (Yale University Press, 2013), Nine Ways to Cross a River: Midstream Reflections on Swimming and Getting There from Here (Bloomsbury U.S.A, 2007), and The Uncommon Lives of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday (Metropolis Books/D.A.P, 2004), among other publications. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She has taught at the University of Hartford and Bennington College. Currently, she is a regular contributor to www.nextavenue.org, the recently launched PBS website. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation and NYFA. She lives in the Hudson Valley. -
Karrie Jacobs
Karrie Jacobs is contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, "America," about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape, and is a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure, where she writes about destinations of interest to the architectural tourist. She is author of The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (Viking, 2006), a book about housing in America. Between 1999 and 2002 Karrie was the founding editor in chief of Dwell, a San Francisco-based magazine about modern residential architecture and design. Prior to launching Dwell, Karrie served as the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and she has written about design, technology, and visual language for many periodicals including The New York Times, ID, and Fortune. And in the early 1990s, Jacobs was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors. -
Alexandra Lange
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic. Her essays, reviews, and features have appeared in Architect, Domus, Dwell, Medium, Metropolis, New York Magazine, The New Yorker blog, and The New York Times. She is a featured writer at Design Observer. She has taught architecture criticism in the Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts and the Urban Design & Architecture Studies Program at New York University. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014. She is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), a primer on how to read and write architecture criticism, as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka Press, 2012), which considers the message of the physical spaces of Facebook, Google, and Apple. She has long been interested in the creation of domestic life, a theme running through Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle Books, 2010), which she co-authored with Jane Thompson, as well as her contributions to Formica Forever (Metropolis Books, 2013) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006). -
Adam Harrison Levy
Adam Harrison Levy is a documentary Producer/Director and interviewer, who has worked on an extensive of range of television documentaries primarily for the BBC. He has specialized in arts and history films and has contributed to the award winning BBC films and series such as Hiroshima, The Genius of Photography, and Auschwitz. Trained in London with the BBC, Mr. Harrison Levy has specialized in the art of the interview. Over the past ten years interviews have included Meryl Streep, Chuck Close, Philip Glass, Harry Belafonte, Sting, Tony Bennett, among others. He has conducted interviews for the BBC arts strand Imagine, landmark history series such America: the Story of Us, D-Day to Berlin, and the BBC’s Hollywood Greats. Mr. Harrison Levy was the US producer of the BBC’s Selling the Sixties, a film about the New York advertising world in the 1960s (BBC4, winter, 2008), and David Ogilvy: Original Mad Man (spring, 2008). He was the US Producer for Imagine: Chuck Close (2005). In addition to being a ributing writer for Design Observer, his journalism has appeared in the UK’s The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent on Sunday. He co-wrote the BBC book Decisive Weapons (based on the BBC series) with Executive Producer Martin Davidson. -
Andrea Codrington Lippke
Andrea Codrington Lippke is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer specializing in design and visual culture. With 18 years of experience in New York’s art, design and architecture worlds, Codrington has been a columnist for The New York Times, an editor at Phaidon Press, senior editor at I.D. Magazine and a guest critic and lecturer at Parsons School of Design, Yale University, Cranbrook Institute, University of the Arts and Pratt. She is the co-author of Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics and sole author of Kyle Cooper: Monographics and has written extensively for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Metropolitan Home, Metropolis, and Cabinet. -
Leital Molad
Leital Molad leads the production team as Senior Producer for PRI’s “Studio 360” with Kurt Andersen, public radio’s premier national program on arts and pop culture. In her time at “Studio 360,” Molad has worked as a producer, editor and reporter, and was the sound designer for the Peabody Award-winning episode American Icons: Moby-Dick. Molad came to New York from Austin, Texas in 1999 to study at NYU’s Graduate School of Journalism and to break into the world of public radio. -
Robin Pogrebin
Robin Pogrebin has been a reporter at The New York Times since 1995. As a culture reporter she covers arts institutions, architecture and other issues. She previously covered the magazine industry for the Business Section and city news for the Metro Section. Prior to joining The New York Times, Ms. Pogrebin worked as an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News. Before that, she was a staff reporter at The New York Observer. Ms. Pogrebin has also written freelance articles for various publications including Vogue, Departures, Architectural Digest, and New York Magazine and her work has been featured in several anthologies. She teaches a journalism seminar at Riverdale Country School and has taught on the SVA MFA in Design Criticism and the SVA Design Writing & Research Summer Intensive. -
Elizabeth Spiers
Elizabeth Spiers is a media launch consultant, entrepreneur, and writer. She is acting editorial director for Flavorpill Productions and until Fall of 2012 was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and editorial director of Observer Media Group. She is an advisor to HalogenNetwork and Carlos Watson’s TheStimulist.com, among others, and has launched fourteen commercial sites, including Dealbreaker.com, AboveTheLaw.com, Fashionista.com, Flavorwire.com, HalogenLife.com and several blogs for mediabistro.com. She was also the founding editor of Gawker.com, Gawker Media’s flagship property. As a writer, she is a contributor at Fortune and has also written for New York Magazine, Fast Company, Slate, The New Republic Online, Salon.com, The New York Times, The New York Sun, and The New York Post. She has spoken at various media and technology conferences and been a guest commentator on CNN, Fox News, CBS Marketwatch, MSNBC, VH1, and NPR. -
Alice Twemlow
Alice Twemlow is the founding chair of the SVA MFA Design Criticism and SVA MA Design Research, Writing & Criticism programs. She writes about design for publications including Design Observer, Eye, and The Architect’s Newspaper, and has recently contributed essays to Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Berg, 2014,) Lolita—Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (Print, 2013) and The Aspen Complex (Sternberg Press, 2012). She has directed several design conferences, and frequently moderates and presents at seminars and conferences, most recently at "Blunt: Explicit and Graphic Design Criticism Now," the 2013 AIGA Design Educators Conference.
We are pleased to announce the lineup for the SVA MFA Design Criticism Spring Lecture Series for Spring 2014. We have another great season of provocative thinking and inspiration in store for you, via some of the most thoughtful and innovative writers, editors, designers, and curators in the interrelated fields of design, architecture, and urban planning. Each Spring the first-year students select and host the speakers, enhancing the D-Crit core curriculum with new voices and approaches. Each lecture is followed by a lively Q&A session and refreshments in the D-Crit Reading Room.
Register now for lectures by executive director of Storefront for Art and Architecture Eva Franch, WNYC's "Radiolab" co-host Robert Krulwich, author, designer and educator Ellen Lupton, ARTBOOK / D.A.P. publishing group president Sharon Helgason Gallagher, British design critic Rick Poynor, and Works That Work founding publisher Peter Bil'ak. If you missed any lectures in previous series, you can view the videos at your leisure.
Thanks to the generous support of our series partner, Mailchimp, lectures are free and open to the public, but you do need to register to reserve your space.
Tuesdays, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
136 West 21st Street, 2nd Floor
Register at dcrit.eventbrite.com
Follow @DCrit for updates
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January 28Eva Franch
Corporate Avant Garde and the Return of Disruption
Storefront for Art and Architecture is a nonprofit organization with a vibrant program of exhibitions, talks, publications, and screenings, intended to advance experimentation in architecture, and the built environment. Storefront director, researcher, and architect Eva Franch will discuss the need for contemporary forms of radical practice in a world dominated by consumer culture, user experience-oriented interfaces, and disarticulated expertise.
Eva Franch is the executive director and chief curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture. An architect, researcher, curator, teacher, and founder in 2003 of OOAA (Office of Architectural Affairs), Franch has lectured internationally on art, architecture, and the importance of alternative practices in the construction and understanding of public life. At Storefront, her most recent projects include exhibitions such as "POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions," the launch of the Storefront International Series, commissioning major design projects such as the Speechbuster, and developing a new publications series in partnership with Lars Müller Publishers.
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February 25Robert Krulwich
Hard Stories Told Easily
There are lots of ways to take technically complex stories and tell them to a lay audience—not dumbing them down, not ignoring the hard parts, but making them compelling, and even fun by drawing from the talents of the most adventurous, daring explainers. The award-winning science correspondent Robert Krulwich shows how voice, movement, music, dance, design, writing, drawing, and animation can attract lots of ordinary, curious people to difficult subjects and get them thinking. Krulwich will share his insights on the art of explication, the narrative potential of radio, and will discuss in particular the innovative techniques used on "Radiolab," the WNYC show for which he is a co-host.
Robert Krulwich works on radio, podcasts, video, and the blogosphere. He has been called “the most inventive network reporter in television” by TV Guide. Krulwich is a science correspondent for NPR. His NPR blog, Krulwich Wonders, features drawings, cartoons, and videos that illustrate hard-to-see concepts in science. He is the co-host of the award-winning "Radiolab," a nationally distributed radio/podcast series that explores new developments in science for people who are curious but not usually drawn to science shows.
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February 27Rick Poynor
Dom Sylvester Houédard: Letters in Space
In the mid-1960s, concrete poetry was an international art world phenomenon and Dom Sylvester Houédard—Benedictine monk, religious scholar, creator of "types tracts" and a leading theorist of visual poetry—was one of its most tireless ambassadors. In his visual poems, tapped out an Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter, Houédard built abstract, non-semantic space-frames from a rigorously purified palette of dots and dashes. After a period of obscurity following his death in 1992, Houédard has been rediscovered by a new generation of artists, designers, and cultural historians. This richly illustrated lecture will explore his visual poetry, his connections to the concrete poetry scene, and his work's legacy today.
Rick Poynor is a British writer, lecturer, and curator, specializing in design, photography, and visual culture. He is visiting professor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London. Poynor was the founding editor of Eye magazine and he has written its Critique column since 1999. In 2003, he was a co-founder of Design Observer, where he writes a wide-ranging regular blog. His column for Print magazine has been running since 2000, and his work has appeared in Metropolis, Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Creative Review, Domus, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other publications. Poynor’s books include Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001), Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008), and No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism, which was reissued in 2013.
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March 11Phillip Tiongson
Invention and Intention: Building Experiential Stories
Designing for interaction is a moving target. Moore’s law speaks to the massive disruptions to hardware, software, and the information networks around us. As a result, what barely worked yesterday becomes the assumption of today—and tomorrow’s cliche. Potion, a New York-City based interaction design firm, finds inspiration in this state of constant flux. For clients ranging from the Tenement Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, to Maharam and the Albers Foundation, Potion builds interactive experiences using the different expertise and perspectives of its many collaborators. Phillip Tiongson will discuss some of his firm's most fruitful collaborations at the intersection of design, architecture, narrative, and computation.
Phillip Tiongson is the principal and a founder of Potion, a design studio dedicated to creating smart, delightful interactions in all forms, from iPad apps to large-scale interactive installations. Tiongson studied at the MIT Media Lab, under the mentorship of John Maeda and Glorianna Davenport, before earning an MFA in Film Directing at Columbia University. Tiongson has worked in the software industry, including at IBM’s Advanced Internet Technology Group, where he was awarded two US patents for his innovative approaches to interface design. With Potion, Tiongson aims to create experiences that bring the craft of storytelling together with the tools of a software engineer.
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March 18Sharon Helgason Gallagher
The Book and the Bicycle
Why do we enjoy riding bicycles? Why do we take pleasure in reading books? In both cases, the design of the object is an excellent fit for both the human body and the human mind. Books and bicycles have a way of inviting us to use them; and they reward that use with pleasure. With the book's future the subject of debate, Sharon Helgason Gallagher of ARTBOOK | D.A.P. looks at the book from a functional design perspective and challenges digital forms of content publishing and information design to take the human body—and its sense of pleasure—into account.
Sharon Helgason Gallagher is the president and publisher of the ARTBOOK | D.A.P. publishing and distribution group, representing international book publishers in the arts as well as museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Walker Art Center. Gallagher is also the co-publisher of Metropolis Books, whose titles include Vishaan Chakrabarti’s A Country of Cities, Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, and Architecture for Humanity’s Design Like You Give a Damn. The group also runs ARTBOOK@MoMA P.S.1, ARTBOOK@WALKER, and pop-up stores at the major art fairs such as Frieze New York, Art Basel Miami, Design Miami, and Art Los Angeles Contemporary.
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March 27Eva Franch
Corporate Avant Garde and the Return of Disruption
Ellen Lupton keeps telling stories. In this talk, she will tell the stories behind some new and recent projects, and she will explain how the art of narrative has come to dominate her understanding of design practice. She will draw examples from her work as senior curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, as well as from her projects as an author and educator at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.
Ellen Lupton is a designer, curator, educator, a public-minded author and critic, and an AIGA Gold Medalist. Recent projects at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum include "Graphic Design—Now in Production," an exhibition on national tour through 2014, co-organized with the Walker Art Center. As director of the Graphic Design MFA Program at MICA, Lupton has authored numerous books on design processes, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, and Graphic Design: The New Basics.
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April 1Peter Bil'ak
Works That Work: Making Magazines Today
A year ago designer and publisher Peter Bil'ak launched Works That Work, a twice-yearly magazine devoted to international examples of unexpected creativity that improve our lives. Bil'ak will share his experience of starting a new magazine at a time when many printed periodicals are disappearing. He will also discuss the business models for publishing periodicals, and the ways in which they affect editorial decisions.
Peter Bi'ak was born in Czechoslovakia and lives in the Netherlands. He works in the interrelated fields of editorial, graphic, and type design, and teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. In 1999 Bil'ak launched his type foundry, online publication and design firm Typotheque and in 2000 he launched the journal Dot Dot Dot with co-editor Stuart Bailey. In 2009 Bil'ak formed the Indian Type Foundry to create and distribute fonts in Indic scripts, and among his most recent projects is Works That Work, a bi-annual publication featuring in-depth essays and stories on subjects connected with design.
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May 2Lingua Franca: The 2014 D-Crit Conference
Save the date for the fifth annual conference organized by, and starring, graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, scheduled for Friday, May 2, 2014 at the SVA Theatre in New York City. For a taste of what's in store, visit the website for last year's conference. This year's conference will be moderated by architecture critic and curator Justin McGuirk who will be providing simultaneous translation among topics and ideas, between the D-Crit Class of 2014 and a headlining roster of keynote speakers representing our interests in curation, literature, theory, and design futures. Join us for an afternoon of provocative discussion about such issues as: the branding of emergent nation South Sudan; design education and identity in the Gulf region; the ethics and aesthetics of body modification; the role of tiny houses and micro-apartments in twenty-first century urban planning; and the new complexion of urban American surf culture.
The MA department has its own full floor in an SVA building in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. There are three individual classrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a Radio Podcasting Recording room. Each student has her own desk within an open plan workspace whose layout is modeled after a design studio or library reading room. Along with a desk, each student receives their own lockable cabinet and a sturdy storage locker. The department is available to students 24-hours a day.
The program takes advantage of its New York City location by arranging frequent visits to design collections, archives, libraries, design and architecture studios, and behind-the-scenes access to new exhibitions, buildings, and urban planning developments.
With more than 30 guest lecturers and critics visiting the department per semester, to supplement the core curriculum, the program makes a point of connecting students to inspirational mentors and helping them to forge relationships with potential employers and colleagues. Students are introduced personally to professionals in the lines of work they are interested in, and, at the end of each semester, are given a database with the contact information of everyone who had visited the department.
The department is supported by a full-time program coordinator, and the offices available to all students or departments within SVA such as Academic Affairs, Admissions, Career Development, Computer Services (CAVA), Financial Aid, Health and Counseling Services, Registrar, Residence Life, Security, Student Accounts, Student Galleries, SVA Theatre, Visual Arts Library and the Milton Glaser Design Archives, and Writing Resource Center. Online, each student is given an sva.edu Gmail account with 30 gigabytes of storage, plus access to my.sva.edu, an online portal for school-wide news and communication.
Applications will be considered on a rolling admissions basis, as space remains available.
Admission to the program is by online application, the submission of required documents, and an interview by phone or in person. All applicants will receive an admissions decision in writing.
If you have any questions about your application please do not hesitate to contact the department. We are happy to arrange for prospective students to tour the department, meet with the department chair, and to attend a class or a Tuesday evening lecture.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
- Applicants must have a bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited college or university. Applicants must supply official transcripts from each college or university attended. Transcripts from foreign institutions must be officially translated into English and U.S. grading equivalencies.
- One letter of recommendation from an instructor or practicing professional. The letter should be written on school or company letterhead and returned to the applicant in a sealed envelope with the recommender’s signature across the seal.
- A written statement (500 words) of the applicant’s reasons for pursuing graduate study in design research.
- A writing sample of published or unpublished writing (1,000–2,000 words). The piece should demonstrate the applicant’s research and analytical skills and facility with language. The published sample can be from any context, including contributions to academic or commercial publications, books, catalogs or exhibition wall texts.
- Résumé, including professional experience as well as related activities such as research, internships, publications and awards.
- Proof of English proficiency (required of applicants whose primary language is not English).
Upon acceptance to the program, nonimmigrant alien applicants are required to submit documentation of sufficient financial resources to attend SVA.
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You can access the old DCrit site here.
Design Criticism Department
School of Visual Arts
136 West 21st Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
Email: dcrit@sva.edu
Follow: @DCrit
Telephone: 212.592.2228