Every day, for the entire year of 2021, I posted a birthday bio of a famous (or less famous) designer or architect.

My 'pandemic project' thanks to Michael Bierut and Princeton Architectural Press, is becoming a book to be published on June, 25 2024 and available here!

Asked on January 1, 2021, how hard it might be to sustain a year’s worth of birthday mini-bios of architects, designers and artists I might have said ‘how hard could it be?’.

Asked a few months later and I would have known how hard it could be!

Ask me now and I know precisely how hard it has been; like every marathon it’s been fun to start and exceeding gratifying to finish. In between? Well, mixed.

Worth it? Absolutely. A beating? Totally. A fuck-load of info? Of course.

Meaningful for society? Doubtful, but happily it meant something to all followers.

It’s was a daily marker for a stressful year, our second living with the pandemic. Given how time has been warped by our lost years, it’s interesting how the series collapses time across centuries and occasionally millennia; Bob Gill and Guarino Guarini share a birthday, despite the 3 centuries between their births; the following day Philippe Starck and John Nash do as well, but missed each other by 200 years.

Birthdays flatten time.

How we sort things has an impact on how we understand them; sort your books by topic and you get one take, alphabetize them you get another, and sorting them by color or size allows for entirely different accidental adjacencies. 

Sort people by birthdays, an entirely illogical but compelling variable, gives you birthday buddies that somehow generate meaning. 

That Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Florence Knoll’s birthdays fall 2 days apart is both meaningless and absolutely right at the same time; they are forever linked by much more than birthdays, but discovering that they share a week of birthdays just seems to cement that relationship.

My one complaint? People, why can’t we spread these birthdays out a bit?! Richard Neutra and Jean Prouve on the same day? Merde! Not to mention the days when, ahem, ‘no one was born’. Both brutal.

The Architect and Designer Birthday Book will be out on June 25, 2024 and is available here!