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Information About

Victor Papanek




Papanek was born in Vienna , Austria, in 1927. 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 postgraduate 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 .

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 England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, and Australia.

Papanek created product designs for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) and the World Health Organization ( WHO ). Volvo of Sweden contracted him to design a taxi for the disabled. His designed products also included a remarkable transistor radio, made from ordinary metal food cans, that was designed to be produced cheaply in developing countries.

Interested in all aspects of design and how they affected people and the environment, Papanek felt that much of what was manufactured in the U.S. was inconvenient, sometimes frivolous.

As Papanek traveled around the world, he gave lectures about his ideas for ecologically sound design and designs to serve the poor, the disabled, and the elderly. He wrote or co-wrote eight books. Papanek received numerous awards, including a Distinguished Designer fellowship from the National Endowment For The Arts in 1988. The next year he received the IKEA Foundation International Award.


BOOKS

  • Papanek , Victor (1971) .''Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change'', New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN 0394470362.

  • Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1973) .''Nomadic furniture: how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, collapses, stacks, knocks-down, inflates or can be thrown away and re-cycled'', New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN 039470228X.

  • Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1974). ''Nomadic Furniture 2'' , New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN 0394706382.

  • Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1977) . ''How things don't work'', New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN 039449251X.

  • Papanek , Victor (1983) . ''Design for Human Scale'', New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold . ISBN 0442276168.

  • Papanek , Victor(1995) .''The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World'', New York, Thames and Hudson . ISBN 0500278466.



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