By Ellen Shapiro
blok DESIGN
She's not the bionic woman. It only seems that way. She traverses continents, convinces an international roster of clients to move in new directions and takes care of business and family. Vanessa Eckstein, the willowy, thirtysomething, Argentineanborn principal of blok design, seems to be doing it all beautifully and if not quite effortlessly, at least in a way that 99 percent of professional women would find inspiration al, if not intimidating. ''I'm a juggler” she says. "You can't really do it all, but it's worth trying." he's recently moved her offices to the trendy Condesa district of Mexico
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City. There, in a building designed by top Mexican architect Alberto Kalach—concrete, Ibeams, frosted glass, terraces with views of treetops
and tile roofs—she runs a firm that serves clients in Mexico, Canada and the U.S., and that develops its own products and projects. This, after successfully heading the firm in Toronto for five years. Before that, she worked on brand identities at Maddocks in Los Angeles and was a senior designer at Drenttel Doyle in New York City, where she moved after completing her MFA at Art Center College of Design in 1994. On a chilly October morning, in between conducting business in two languages, talking with staff, clients and printers, she graciously serves cappuccino in the conference room, all the time making sure her assistants, Patricia Kleeberg, from Germany, and Mariana Contegni, from Argentina, are finishing the projects that need to be completed before she leaves the next morning for Bangkok with her toddler son Luka and infant daughter Uma. There, the family will meet her Mexicanborn husband, director Fernando Arrioja, who has spent three weeks in Malaysia filming a Coke commercial. "We're taking a vacation. I'm not sure how many countries we will visit," she says. "Pretty much we jump on trains. Traveling is one of my creative energizers. We believe in seeing the world. Of course, in places where there are unique hotels with local atmosphere." Eckstein was born in Buenos Aires—where architecture, graphic design, personal passions and entrepreneurism all seem to converge. Especially in her family. Her mother is a ceramicist. And her father, a chemist, has spent twenty years transform ing a crumbling old building called El Zanjon into a national monument with spaces that can be rented for events. Naturally, his daughter's firm designed the marketing collateral, with elements based on vintage postcards and the building's handpainted tiles. Encouraged to pursue higher education—not always a choice for Latin American women— Vanessa entered the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1988. "Graphic design was a new career then," she explains. "The faculty were selftaught and had come from architecture. After the end of the military dictatorship [19761983], the country was hungry for design. Everybody rushed to open studios. I hadn't even graduated and had a bank as a client, but I still wanted to learn. I started looking at schools in the U.S. and got this amazing brochure from Art Center." Her brother was working Vanessa Eckstein is creative director for all projects and provided the caption information. Right: "A historic building in Buenos Aires undergoes an eighteenyear restoration, during which many discoveries both intentional and unintentional are made. We wanted it to have an identity as complex and layered as the building. Pattern designs inspired by 150yearold tiles, old city maps, visual ephemera, illustrations and photos of the building at various times and stages become our building materials." Frances Chen/Vanessa Eckstein/Stephanie Young, designers; El Zanjon, client.
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March/April 2008