LAST NIGHT WITH THE STARS

Newark native son Richard Meier—architect of LA's Getty Center, New York's Charles and Perry Street towers, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art—received the Decoration & Design Building's Lifetime Achievement Award last night, 49 years after he opened his office in NYC.
We headed over to the Decoration & Design Building at Third Avenue and Designer's Way last night for building owner Charles Cohen and company's sixth annual Stars of Design awards. With Charles: '07 art category winner Michele Oka Doner and Richard, whose trophy shelf also includes a Pritzker, AIA Gold, and an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. Charles has owned the building for 16 years and says the Red Building (in LA's 14-acre, Cesar Pelli-designed Pacific Design Center) is wrapping up now, seven years after its announcement.

We also snapped this year's architecture winner Allan Greenberg, who says the work doesn't get easier with age and experience, as he expected, but he keeps at it for love of the work nonetheless. His firm worked on Simon & Schuster's offices and the Decoration & Design Building's lobby and exterior renovations.
Frenemies Laura Starr and Tom Balsley (right, with Andrew Fox) may be competitors, but Tom a former winner, also nominated Laura's firm, Starr Whitehouse, and she won, along with partners Steve Whitehouse and Jeffrey Poor. Laura does a lot of BID and residential work and says rooftops are everything nowadays. Her firm just completed one for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Building and is bidding on one for a SoHo not-for-profit. (We like it: if donors don't pay up, the wind will blow cash out of their wallets). Andrew shared a composer's cocktail party secret: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is actually slowed down bluegrass. Who knew?

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