Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli is awarded the Lucky Strike Designer Award 2010

The Lucky Strike Designer Award goes this year to Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one of the world's most influential design experts.

With Paola Antonelli the Raymond Loewy Foundation, founded in 1991 by British American Tobacco in Hamburg, is honouring "the internationally successful and well recognized activist for the democratization of sustainable and style-setting design" – thus the jury.

After studying architecture in Milan, Italian native Paola Antonelli started working for magazines like Domus and Abitare. From 1991 to 1993, she was a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ms. Antonelli joined the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1994 and is a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design. In 2007 she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine. Her visionary view of design, combining creative work with culture and technology, science, economy and ecology, has brought her and her spectacular exhibitions a worldwide reputation.

The exhibition "Workspheres" (2001), for example, featured built concepts of work tools and environments which brought to life realistic visions of the near future. "Humble Masterpieces" (2004) surprised visitors with more than 100 everyday objects, from paper clips through pencils to zip fasteners. The show "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" (2005) presented more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances. The 2008 exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind" placed scientific and technological achievements in the context of design.

It is said that Paola Antonelli does not just create exhibitions, but that her exhibitions make one or another designer into a star. The MoMA Collection is certainly a collection of design icons, such as Richard Sapper's Tizio lamp, Braun record players designed by Dieter Rams, Ingo Maurer's lamps "Bulb" and "Lucellino", Philippe Starck's lemon squeezer "Juicy Salif", the soy sauce dispenser designed by Kenji Ekuan and posters by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. And there is something else besides that links these famous designers: they are all among the winners of the Raymond Loewy Foundation's Lucky Strike Designer Award.

“It is an unbelievable honour to follow in the footsteps of such idols of mine. It is a very important award, which I will cherish and flaunt in every occasion”, says Ms. Antonelli.

By selecting Paola Antonelli as winner of the 2010 Lucky Strike Designer Award, the jury of the Raymond Loewy Foundation follows its tradition of illuminating the entire spectrum of design in terms of both content and form, and making it known to a wider public.