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Industrial Design vs. Architecture, Which Is Harder? Ask Karim Rashid

By Rain Noe - November 13, 2014

in Architecture | Designer Profiles

It's far easier for a standup comic to do drama than it is for a dramatic actor to do standup comedy. Because nuanced comedy has drama within it, but the reverse is not true.

A question more relevant to this blog is, is it easier for an industrial designer to do architecture, or for an architect to do industrial design? Obviously this is a broad question, but which one do you think is "harder?" As ID'er Karim Rashid has shifted towards architecture—he's currently working on some 11 buildings around the world, from Russia to Latvia to Malaysia to Tennessee, and four in New York—he gave an interview to The New York Times where he discusses the crossover. The third paragraph below is the one that working industrial designers are likely to find gratifying:

There's a lot of press and remarks, "Oh, Karim is a designer, not an architect," which is strange because there are many architects who are very successful that were not necessarily educated. A lot of the design architects tend to use what they call an architect of record who tends to be doing the construction implementation.

I have a team of nine architects. And we work very closely with mechanical engineers and structural engineers and all that. There's no naïveté here.

I have to say, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, that architecture, in a sense the more pedestrian architecture, is generally quite simple compared to industrial design. In other words, it's far more sophisticated to do something like a mobile phone than it is to do an average building.

Read the rest of the interview here.

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David Hard

10 years ago

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Depends.
Architects can design really beautiful furniture and lamps. But don't ask them to design a smart phone or a car.
Industrial designers can be good at doing interiors. But don't ask them to design a high-rise.
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Billy

10 years ago

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...says the guy who's not registered as an architect. Go take the ARE, come back and tell me how that went for you. Unless it's too "pedestrian".
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gork

10 years ago

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Well, if you look at his architecture, it is rather pedestrian, while his interiors are much more imaginative and expressive, matching his industrial designs. So there is that.
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