Jan Lorenc

According to Jan Lorenc, “design is a journey…we learn from the world around us.”

Lorenc's journey began across the Atlantic. The Polish-born designer immigrated to the Midwest when he was 8.

Straight out of the Illinois Institute of Technology, he began his own design firm in Chicago. Several years later, he and wife Barbara journeyed around America, meeting other designers and appreciating the regional differences. He settled in Atlanta and today partners Lorenc Yoo Design, a multi-disciplinary firm that creates signage, museum and trade show exhibits, furniture, store planning, sculpture and environmental design.

“Design is his life and his hobby,” says partner Chung Yoo. But despite this intensity, he is said to have a wacky sense of humor.

In 1962, my mother and I traveled from our village to Warsaw by steam-engine train. We stayed wtih friends in their (fifth-floor) high-rise apartment. This is where I saw my first television program and took my first bath in a bona fide bathtub. At home, we'd had family bath night — we filled a big iron basin (in the kitchen) with water heated on our wood-burning stove.

To embody the sense of place, to provide for a sense of entrance and to work in context with the overall design. In its best light, it's seamless with the physical landscape, interiors and architecture. Envrionmental graphics is the appropriate use of form, materials and place-making attitude.

Habitat for Humanity has an annual artist's birdhouse show and sale. The first one I designed was a multiplex community where birds and bugs could live in harmony. Birds could invite their insect neighbors over to “dinner” — and eat them. Hence, the circle of life.

As a husband and a father, I would have to say the birth of a child. As a designer, it always changes. When I attended the Cirque du Soleil, the Alegria performance was such an emotional event for me. Listening, seeing and feeling the choreographed energy of the multi-sensorial extravaganza brought tears to my eyes and resonated from my head to my toes.

America's urban and suburban sprawl, particularly the retail strip centers with immense parking lots and purely consumer-based, anti-social attitudes. The realization that we have an energy crisis will eventually catch up to us, and we'll plan better communities wherein our children can walk to school.

I may not have started my design firm straight out of school, since I knew nothing about design or business. But it's good to pursue your dream when you are passionate, perhaps naíve. You can do anything without those perceived boundaries.

I admire Ralph Applebaum, a major force in museum design today. His projects — the Holocaust Museum, the Newseum and the planned Civil Rights Museum — have become major landmarks. He not only orchestrates a great story, but the end product is crafted so tastefully and powerfully. I met him several years ago when we both received SEGD's “25 Most Significant Contributors” and my respect for him compounded.

Most of it is “follow the lead,” or “follow the successful risk-taker.” I guess this is the way of all industries, but experimentation should occur more frequently in retail than in other design fields, since fashion changes so often.