If you're a design lover in Chicago, don't miss the upcoming Jurgen Bey lecture hosted by the Architecture & Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bey will be speaking for a few hours on Monday, September 20th, from 6:30-8pm at the museum's Fullerton Hall. The lecture precedes a solo exhibition of the work of Makkink + Bey opening at Chicago's new Modern Wing from December 11th, 2010 through July 20th, 2011. Tickets range from five to ten dollars and can be reserved here.From the A&D invitation:

Dutch designer Jurgen Bey is known for investigating the emotional meaning of everyday objects in order to highlight their overlooked attributes. As he explains, "I appreciate the unsung qualities of things that most people would consider clumsy, unwanted, or no longer cool. Instead of treating them as waste, I let people look at them in a new way." Conceptually-driven and playful projects such as Slow Car (2007), which takes the ubiquitous cubicle out on the road serving as a "desk that you can drive," or the Tree-Trunk Bench (1999), produced in collaboration with influential Dutch design collective Droog, feature Bey's trademark reuse of materials and reworking of old traditions, as well as the privileging of social rather than economic concerns.

Studio Makkink & Bey was founded in 2002 in Rotterdam by Jurgen Bey and his partner Rianne Makkink. Bey is currently the director of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and senior design tutor at the Royal College of Art in London. His work will appear in the upcoming exhibition Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design, that explores how contemporary practitioners are sharing resources, ideas, and ways of making across all disciplines of architecture and design. The resulting new projects are helping us further our relationships with the world around us.