"What I do is to simplify the natural object," says designer Ted Muehling. "I make it easier to see the beauty of it, the soft, smooth shape of it."

This ethos runs through all of Muehling's work, from his signature sculptural earrings to his iconic (and much appropriated) "bird beak" hair clip to his coral-and seashell-inspired filigree-thin cups, translucent egg lanterns, and spiral bowls for Germany's legendary Porzellan-Manufaktur Nymphenburg.

Ted Muehling sees shapes and colors in shells and rocks and translates this into his work. His jewelry and decorative objects, whether fashioned from finely hammered metal or delicately fired porcelain, are informed not by their verisimilitude to nature but by the imaginative recasting of nature's beauty. Drawing inspiration from found objects, he combines the trenchant scavenging of Joseph Cornell with the elemental purity found in the Finnish design tradition.

After graduating from Pratt Institute in 1995 (where he dropped out of his sole jewelry class), Muehling's early work found a receptive audience at Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman. He later designed accessories for Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake before establishing his own studio and jewel box-size shop in New York's SoHo. Ted Muehling's philosophy: "In this technological age, we can still be charmed and touched by the delicacy and grace of a cup."

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Kathryn Gustafson

"Designing a landscape is about connecting the body, soul, and mind to the land and to itself."

Kathryn Gustafson believes in the power of nature-and in the power of the human ability to shape it and to be shaped by it. Gustafson defines her field as anything under the sky or any interior space that may be perceived as a landscape. At times, this includes the landscape of the mind. By harnessing intuition and emotion, she manages to create spaces of extraordinary serenity. She herself reflects that, "All our senses receive a formidable amount of information. There is a need for places where one can stop and clear out the excess and the non-essential, so as to put some semblance of clarity in the rest." Over the last twenty years, Gustafson's meditative spaces have taken root in the soils and psyches of France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. From her beginnings in fashion to her deeply evocative landscapes of today, the notion of the human body remains her starting point. "I'm very onnected to the land," Gustafson says. "I can feel it physically inside me."

Gustafson's grounds and hardscapes are surprising in their textures and contrasts. The sweeping curve of her bougainvillea-festooned pedestrian bridge in Costa Mesa which traverses a mall parking lot is punctuated by projections that resemble heron wings, a bird native to the Southern California area. Delicate masts impart swirls of industrial light to organic shapes at the Shell Petroleum headquarters in Rueil-Malmaison, France.

Most recently cited by the British Arts Council for France's graceful high-tension pylons, Gustafson has been named an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Institute of British Architecture and awarded London's Jane Drew Prize. She earned her degree in landscape design from L'Ecole Nationale du Pays in Versailles, France. It was there that she got her start as a landscape architect working on the late French President Francois Mitterand's Grand Projets, specifically Parc de la Villette. Current projects breaking ground include her Shoulder Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park, Seattle's eight-city-block theater district swaddled in colored light, and a Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut, Lebanon.