Art and Science Monday, November 09, 2009 The gardens of Versailles sculpted from shredded paper. Old posters made modern as centerpieces and lanterns. A wall constructed from hundreds of stacked coffee cups. The one thing clients expect from David Stark Design and Production is the unexpected. High-profile institutions and companies look to Stark’s four-year-old firm to design events that are branded, exciting, and fun. From galas and celebrations to product launches and pop-up stores, David Stark, founder and leader of the 20-person event firm that bears his name, delivers signature environments that exude the host’s look and feel through atypical and unexpected materials. His philosophy? “We approach this as art-making—as if it’s installation art or as important as any museum exhibition or high-minded design element,” says Stark.      Jacks of All Trades Stark’s Brooklyn-based team of designers, project managers, and fabricators works together to stretch the vernacular of design materials in ways that give each event its own unique look. Unlike many event design firms, Stark has two of its own production studios—one that focuses on craft-oriented projects and another that houses a woodshop and paint area. This hands-on approach enables the team to get very creative with how things are made—and what they are made from. Stark himself is a trained artist. He started his career as a painter who also worked as a waiter. While he loved the events business, he recognized that unless he wanted to end up the world’s oldest and best waiter, he needed to diversify. He selected floral as a medium that combined his passion for art with the event world he loved. Stark went to work with partner Avi Adler at the firm Avi Adler Inc.  Word spread and the team landed an appointment with the New York City Opera in 1998. At the time, the Opera was starting the planning process for its gala which would coincide with a production of Macbeth. This appointment marked a turning point in Stark’s career. Designer and socialite Carolyne Roehm, who was part of team planning the gala, admired the team’s portfolio. Then she made the comment that transformed his perspective of event design and décor: This evening is really not about flowers. And this production isn’t really about being pretty, she said. Stark stopped in his tracks. “That’s when it all started to coalesce that there were so many other things we could do,” says Stark. Extraordinary in the Ordinary “I like the surprise of a material that shouldn’t be in a situation that becomes the star; the transformation of everyday things or unique elements to create a double take,” says Stark. Trash, paper coffee cups, and alarm clocks are just a few of the unlikely items he’s turned into event décor—beautiful décor that fits the tone, brand, and theme of the event.   Stark says that’s what it takes to make an event stand out. Most of the people who attend events have been everywhere and done everything. They’ve all seen events with piles of flowers and dripping with crystal. “Sheer quantity of expensive items is not something that’s impressive anymore, and it’s not even something that’s appropriate right now,” says Stark. So how does Stark’s design team generate ideas? Stark describes his team as a communal think tank. In its brainstorming sessions, team members reach far and wide to find new points of view. Team members bring in photographs of art they like, look at material samples, and do relevant and ancillary Google searches as they seek inspiration. And they bounce ideas off of one another to see where that leads. When they arrive at a potential concept, they take a hard look at how that concept can fulfill the client need: How can the team bring that idea to a place that’s conceptually interesting, exciting, accomplishes what is necessary from a corporate standpoint—and succeeds on an artistic level? A big focus of these sessions is a discussion about what objects or materials have a relationship to the organization—and how those materials can be used in an unexpected way. “It’s the usage of those kinds of materials that takes the realm of what we do to a different place,” says Stark. Selecting the right item or material for each project is something the Stark team invests a lot of time and thought on. For a material to work in a specific application, it has to be something that is immediately identifiable to the guest and organization—but it also has to be interesting and cool-looking in its own right. The material’s relationship to the client can be literal, symbolic, or emotional. For The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Stark team was charged with creating a simple, minimalist approach to décor for the celebration marking the opening of the building. Its solution was to utilize film itself as a decorative and sculptural element. Although the film’s relation to the Film Society was obvious, its fabrication into thrilling rollercoaster-like twisting and curving configurations was totally new. Stark’s sustainable design for the National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt was a Versailles-style garden constructed of shredded waste paper. “There’s a conceptual layering of the choice of materials—it’s not just random, there’s meaning infused,” says Stark. So while the form is familiar—spiral topiaries and classical garden urns—the material is what makes you stop and do the double-take. Another favorite Stark approach is to construct large items out of smaller items. “Like bricks and mortar in a building, they become the brick and mortar of creating a structure,” says Stark. For the Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty in New York City, the team built walls and structures out of thousands of the donated items Robin Hood collects. One entire wall of a pavilion was made out of alarm clocks. There was also a house that was made out of thousands of folded towels on shelves, and a giant pencil made out of pencils. After the event all of the items were donated to those in need. Old Elements, New Application Challenged with designing a celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera, the Stark team looked to the Opera’s own archives for inspiration. Touring the Opera’s gallery of old costumes, ticket stubs, sets, and programs the team stumbled onto its holy grail—old opera posters. Stark recognized the potential of the posters right away. Although the copy and graphic styles varied, there was a commonality to the color palette—creamy parchment with red and black type. When Stark started to examine the posters, he was told that there was an archive in the building with more of these posters that his team could use. Through the design process the solution evolved: reproductions of these posters at a variety of scales that became lanterns, flower containers, and hanging banners that brought down the ceiling height. Although using the antique poster scheme spoke to the history of opera, the interpretation was in no way literal. “What we were really looking to accomplish was a graphic sampling or a quilt of 125 years of different graphic style—that spoke about the visual history of the opera as a company,” says Stark. Graphics were cropped at interesting angles, and some were exploded and others shrunk to create a variety of sizes. The result is an interesting push and pull created by the scale of the different elements that adds visual impact. Graphics applied as a visual element or texture rather than as signage is an approach the Stark team turns to frequently. “The graphic development or identity of things that we create can be as integral to an event décor as any three-dimensional prop, and oftentimes those graphics become a three-dimensional element in their own right,” says Stark. Other examples include supersizing letters or words, and constructing text out of other objects, so the text is both an object and the message. Repeat Yourself Repetition of graphic elements appears in many Stark team projects. For Target’s Bull’s Eye Bodega (four simultaneous pop-up stores in New York City) the team used Target’s red, white, black, and yellow color scheme punctuated with the Target Bull’s Eye to give the stores their own unique personality without losing the implied connection to Target’s permanent retail outlets. The stores were created as a celebration of ten years of partnerships with top designers including Michael Graves, Thomas O’Brien, and Liz Lange and were designed to look like a Target-ized version of a corner bodega. “The point of these pop-up stores is you’re creating a very specialized fantasy world so we created a different kind of atmosphere than at a traditional Target,” says Stark. “You go to the corner bodega for everything that you need and for things at wonderful prices so it provided a wonderful visual metaphor for a Target marketing message,” says Stark. The interior of the store had the typical sorts of items and fixtures found in a convenience store, from wire shelving to a drink cooler. Products representing each of the designers that Target works with were for sale—bedding, housewares, and clothing. The items for sale were juxtaposed against prop items like soup cans and soft drink bottles all labeled in the store’s custom Target-ized graphic language. The repletion of these items on their shelves made it easy for customers to visually differentiate between the products for sale and the products that were part of the environment. A clever detail was the soup display in the front of the Bodega—22 flavors of soup which was the Stark team’s way of calling out the 22 designer partnerships showcased in the store. Making History Stark says that his clients’ ability to trust his team’s design instinct and their confidence in implement non-traditional solutions comes from his long-term relationships with them—many which go back eight or 10 years. “You develop both a shorthand and a history together, and you rise through different times, different concerns, and different initiatives,” says Stark. Over time, this enables his team to establish a way of thinking and a language for that specific client. He advises other designers that it takes time to get there. Along the way, he thinks designers should give great service, learn how to organize and mobilize a group of people, be a leader, solve problems, and think very quickly on their feet. “Through the process of doing that, you teach your clients that you’re unflappable, that you can be trusted—and little-by-little they trust you to try out different things,” says Stark. Stark says that the joy and the curse of what event designers do is that they are always trailblazing and making new things. When you goof, you learn lessons very quickly. “You have to take the long history of things that you’ve learned in different ways and apply them to new things that you aren’t quite familiar with,” he says. From there, anything is possible.
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