Yahoo Lifestyle Melitta Baumeister, Kim Hastreiter and Others Win National Design Awards
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s National Design Awards resonate with innovators and creatives of all disciplines. And this year is no exception.
In its 25th year, the awards were introduced as one of the White House Millennium Council’s official projects. With its public programs, including ones skewed toward students, the National Design Awards are meant to highlight how design radiates throughout everyday life. As in years past, the 2025 winners hail from different sectors of the ever-widening design sphere, including a standout for climate action design. The winners will be celebrated on April 3 at an event at the Upper East Side museum that was once home to Andrew Carnegie. For the first time afterward, the larger design community will be invited to a “house party” to toast the National Design Award winners from the past quarter century.
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Kim Hastreiter, cofounder and copublisher of the now-shuttered Paper magazine, will pick up the Design Visionary award. After starting Paper in 1984 as a Xerox-ed zine out of the kitchen in her TriBeCa loft, Hastreiter helped keep it rolling through November 2017. During that time, she often discovered emerging designers, photographers and artists. Hastreiter green-lighted the magazine’s 2014 cover that Jean-Paul Goude shot of Kim Kardashian that set out to break the internet and that went viral. For seven-plus years, she has continued to be a consummate connecter, as well as a writer, editor, curator and by her own description an “ideator.”
This year’s Fashion award winner is the German-born, New York-based designer Melitta Baumeister, who started her signature label with the visual artist Paul Jung in 2013. She now works closely with her partner, Michal Plata, a former car and context designer at BMW Advanced Design. The label’s sculptural assortment plays up new materials and forms as its core process. After earning an master of fine arts in fashion design and society at Parsons School of Design in 2013, she presented the first Melitta Baumeister collection in the fall of 2014 with support from VFiles in New York City. Being picked up by Dover Street Market helped the brand be selected for the 2015 Vogue Talents in Dubai. Her designs were also featured in the Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial exhibition in 2016.
To be eligible, candidates must be nominated. Once they need to submit more materials, what Baumeister described as “basically an in-depth application.” The recognition is meaningful in different ways – namely “knowing that that the design that you’re doing has an impact,” she said. The independently financed operation is based in a 2,000-square-foot space in Long Island City. “Receiving this award is an incredible step for the brand, being based in America,” said Baumeister, whose company won the 2023 CFA/Vogue Fashion Fund award.
Plata said, “It feels like we have arrived a little bit even though it does seem like the landscape in fashion is slightly different than what we do. That can sometimes result in not being seen, but now we are part of the landscape.”
Plata highlighted how the six-person team is multi-disciplinary and come from different fields and have different ideas about design, and how that can be evident in its photography and designs. “Pretty much everything that is outward-facing, or as much as you can imagine, we make inhouse. Looking at designs beyond disciplines is what design should be in the future,” he said. “That’s why we are particularly proud of this award.”
This year’s emerging designer is Nu Goteh, who is the founder and principal of the studio practice Room for Magic and cofounder of Deem Journal. Michael Maltzan Architecture is being awarded the Architecture honor and IlumiNación by Resilient Power Puerto Rico will be saluted with the Climate Action one. Developed by the nonprofit Resilient Power Puerto Rico, IlumiNación is a web-based platform meant to create equitable climate solutions while strengthening communities’ capacity to respond and rebuild after hurricanes and other extreme climate-related events. The Digital Design award will go to Emerging Objects’ Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, whose forte is in innovations in 3D printing architecture, products, software, hardware and materials. Pentagram partner and graphic designer Matt Willey is the Communication Design winner. Little Wing Lee is the Interior Design honoree, and Terremoto, which was founded by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi in 2012, will take home the Landscape Architecture award. Jules Sherman, who specializes in pediatric medical device design, will pick up the Product Design award.
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