Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman, Norman Kelley
Recorded June 26, 2014
Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman founded the Brooklyn- and Chicago-based design collaborative Norman Kelley in 2012. Through their work Kelley and Norman seek to “vulgarize, satirize, and reposition (lofty) material to elevate the ordinary.” Recent projects include Wrong Chairs, in which they “purposefully disrupt the notion of ‘correctness’” with stylized abstractions of the iconic Windsor Chair, and Shape Shape Evolution, an interior playhouse for the Early Learning Play Foundation in Chicago.
Norman Kelley is one of the winners of the 2014 Architectural League Prize, one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects and designers. The prize, established in 1981, recognizes exemplary and provocative work by young practitioners and provides a public forum — through lectures, an exhibition, and a catalogue — for the exchange of their ideas.
In their League Prize lecture, Norman and Kelley describe their aspiration to “elevate the ordinary,” alternating between the conventional and the hysterical. The two present six recent projects: Rubin’s Barrel, a tequila barrel converted into a sculpture with a visual game; N.A.W.T. Balloons, an entry for the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative competition using floating sculpture for clean energy generation; Shape Shape Evolution; Wrong Chairs; wall drawings at the American Academy in Rome that create optical illusion; and the Overlay exhibition.
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