Seoul Searching
GORDON BRUCE PICKED UP the phone. It was his boss, college president
David Brown. “Ever heard of Samsung?”
“Yeah!” Bruce laughed. “But they make really terrible stuff.”
“Well, they’re coming here next week, and I have no idea what they
want.”
A philosophical, introspective man with wire-rimmed spectacles, Bruce
was vice president at the renowned ArtCenter College of Design in
Pasadena, a feeder school for large corporations and design houses. He was
the school’s point man for companies in Asia, and his job entailed setting
up a campus in Japan.
But Samsung? Samsung was known as a cheap follower. The phrase
“Made in Korea” was an international laughingstock.
“The request puzzled me. Maybe they wanted corporate training,” Bruce
told me.
Gordon Bruce was a master designer, a protégé of the descendants of
the renowned school of Bauhaus designers, the German movement that
unified arts, craft, and technology with its simplicity, and that influenced
Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, among others. Gordon had spent years creating
IBM’s famed Watson Center, along with sleek products and buildings for
Siemens and Mobil Oil.
The following week he saw four limousines pull up outside. Gordon
recalled, “Seventeen executives and designers disembarked; I counted
them.”
The employees acted with all the deference and discipline of a secret
service unit. The woman at their head was Miky Lee. She was joined by