Phil Patton

Lewis Foster Patton was born in Durham, North Carolina, and was given his life-long nickname, Phil, after the airman who saved his father's life in World War II. severely injured in a bombing raid over Japan, and Mildred Wilson (née Dwyer) Patton (1914-1985), a bibliophile who passed her love of books to her son, and in whose honor the Mildred Dwyer Patton Award was presented annually by the Raleigh Fine Arts Society. He had one brother, David Burton Patton (1956-1999). Having grown up at an airbase in Florida and in North Carolina, Patton graduated from Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh in 1970, later attending Harvard University where he was an arts editor of The Harvard Crimson, graduating in 1974 with a degree in English and history. He moved to New York City, graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in comparative literature, and briefly worked as a fact-checker for Esquire and as editor of Sky Magazine, the now defunct in-flight magazine of Delta Air Lines. an Overall Best Story writing award was presented annually in Patton's honor by the Raleigh Fine Arts Society. An extensive collector, he curated a personal assemblage of antique cameras including Kodak Brownies and Polaroids. As a professional writer, he favored an Olympus SLR. Recognizing his seminal I.D. magazine article on the design of coffee cup lids, the Cincinnati Art Museum featured his collection of the lids in an exhibit entitled Caution: Contents Hot (2007). Patton and his first wife, Joelle Delbourgo, had two children, Caroline and Andrew. He lived in Montclair and Woodland Park, New Jersey, for most of his career. Patton died in September, 2015 at age 63 of pneumonia, as a complication of emphysema. ==Career==

As freelance journalist The New York Times carried Patton's reportage as well as his humor writing, and a contributing editor for Wired, Departures and I.D. magazine, Patton's freelance work was published across diverse publications including American Heritage, Architectural Digest, Art in America, ARTnews, AutoWeek, Automobile, Car and Driver, Condé Nast Traveler, Connoisseur, Core 77, Design Applause, Design Observer, Dwell, Geo, The New Republic, New York, Omni, Seven Days, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, Vogue, The Washington Post Book World and The Village Voice. As book author Patton authored or contributed to more than 30 books and exhibit catalogs, most notably: • Razzle Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Professional Football, The Dial Press, 1984 • Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Simon & Schuster, 1986 As speaker A frequent speaker at museums and design conferences, Patton often served as nominator and juror for programs including the Chrysler Design Award and EyesOn Design. He spoke and presented at the International Design Conference in Aspen; the Industrial Designers Society of America International Conference; ACD Living Surfaces; Knoll Cranbrook Design Conferences; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami; Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He was a regular commentator on CBS News and helped develop and appeared on a number of television series, notably Divided Highways, on the Interstate highway system (PBS); The Autobahn (History Channel, 2000). Other Patton wrote catalogs and essays for exhibitions at museums around the United States, including Surrounding Interiors: Views Inside the Car at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center of Wellesley College as well as at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2002–2003); Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004); SAFE: Design Takes On Risk at the Museum of Modern Art (2005); Curves of Steel: Streamlined Automobile Design at the Phoenix Art Museum (2007); and On the Job: Design and the American Office at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (2018). He served as editorial consultant for The Art of the Motorcycle at the Solomon R. Guggeheim Museum (1998); curatorial consultant for Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century at the Museum of Modern Art (1999); and consultant for Blobjects and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design at the San Jose Museum of Art (2005). == References ==