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A humongous hammer hovered menacingly over the cocktail area, and although fashioned entirely out of bubble wrap, it must have weighed close to a ton. Had it come crashing down, it could easily have flattened a hapless baby elephant. In addition, so many cardboard boxes had been crammed into Manhattan’s Pier Sixty at 23rd Street, the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported a serious shortage of packaging materials for the remaining Tri-State Area that night.
Not really. But the place did have a distinct Office Depot warehouse feel to it. Designer David Stark had chosen the cardboard-box-bubble-wrap-and-twine motif for the Museum of Arts & Design’s (MAD) 14th Annual Visionaries! Awards Gala in order to signify the museum’s impending relocation to 2 Columbus Circle.
Hobnobbing amidst artfully mounted packing peanuts and reams of wrapping paper were MAD director Holly Hocher, MAD Board of Trustees chairman Barbara Tober with sugarhubby Donald, MAD chairman Jerome A. Chazen, MAD trustee Ted Hathaway of Oldcastle Glass, Bloomingdale’s CEO Michael Gould, fur designer Adrienne Landau, Edward and Patricia Farber, Barbara Lee Diamonstein, and Carl Spielvogel.
Four individuals received honors for exemplary vision, innovation, and entrepreneurship in their respective fields: Nadja Swarovski of Swarovski Crystal, philanthropist Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, Bloomingdale’s Frank Doroff, and Dutch designer Marcel Wanders. Various works of art, travel and dining packages, and luxury items were up for grabs at the silent and live auctions, including a shopping spree with Liz Claiborne CCO Tim Gunn.
In all, the evening raised $ 1.7 million for MAD, the country’s leading cultural institution dedicated to the collection and exhibition of contemporary objects. Those among the 750 attendees that wanted their dessert to go found plenty of containers within convenient reach. The fire hazard posed by hundreds of table candles in perilous proximity to all that cardboard was ingeniously offset by the Pier’s proximity to the water.
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