What do the Parisian chocolatier and sculptor Patrick Roger, the makers of the trendy Oslo fashion label Norwegian Rain, T-Michael and Alexander Heller have in common with the Stuttgart optician Andreas Kraft? They all believe in the magic and allure of well-designed shops. And that is not all – as entrepreneurs, they must make their shops the ambassadors of their brand, philosophy and products. This book is an exploratory tour of offbeat retail hotspots worldwide. The focus is on interesting personalities who make a relevant contribution to the topic of shop design and product presentation.
Text in English and German.
“To my mind, Koen is the photographer of the instant. Whatever the subject, the format, the colour may be, the emotion that is implied is always expressed vigorously; either with a sense of humour, seriousness, or with lots of tenderness. Unlike other photographers, he is not the prisoner of a style; his goal is to express the sincerity of the moment in its widest variety. Koen’s freedom also lies in a real physical need to be in motion, on a journey. In this way, systematically taking pictures beyond the borders allows him to focus, to find himself, and to come as close as possible to the essence of his soul.” Antoine Reyre, CEO CAPA Pictures
Shot in Time
is the first anthology by the Belgian photographer Koen Lauwaert, who displays his talent for developing an original and poetic language that alternates the different registers of contemporary photography, from portraiture to abstraction through reportage. Partly academically trained, studying at the Brussels Filmschool and the Photo Academy Rhok, Koen Lauwaert devised his own language in the field, working as a film operator during his military service and for an agency specialising in portraits of children and families as well as a cover author for rock band albums. Shot in Time is an autobiographical narrative in which the passion for photography goes hand in hand with Koen’s nomadic soul, the images are taken all over the world, notably in Italy, a country for which the author has a predilection.
Text in English and Italian.
‘Essays in Context’: all results of the investigations into Bruegel’s drawings and paintings collected in a special anniversary edition
The focus is on insights derived from the artworks themselves. The results of the investigations into Bruegel’s drawings and paintings using modern imaging techniques, the natural sciences and dendrochronology, as well as the observations by the paintings’ restorers, provide brand-new information. The analysis of Bruegel’s compositions and what he actually depicted (objects, clothes, gestures) is seen within the wider context of the life and times of the artist and his patrons. Rounded up by the latest research into Bruegel’s life, the historical art market and previous attitudes to his oeuvre, the entire volume is intended to offer new directions for future study.
Bruegel’s inventions and stories create artworks with a timeless power, and this volume, containing 24 essays and more than 500 illustrations, provides a comprehensive survey of the artist’s oeuvre and will be an indispensable resource for Bruegel fans and scholars alike.
New York City is a metropolis in a constant state of metamorphosis. Amidst continuous construction, the redevelopment of the existing cityscape plays a fundamental role in the evolution of the Big Apple as a place to live, work, and visit. This pocket guide to highlights of modern and contemporary architecture features 85 famous skyscrapers, cutting-edge projects with abandoned infrastructure, post-industrial buildings, and inventive low-cost housing models. Each building is accompanied by text describing its history, use, materials, and architectural profile, in addition to directions, and public accessibility.
The effervescent, creative synergy among Italian artists and designers in the post-war, post-fascist period is the subject of this exhibition catalogue for a show in Paris held at the end of 2019. Forty works of avant-garde art and design highlight the common aspirations and experimental spirit of this visionary generation, featuring artists and works that mirror each other in their approach to the world. Included here are works by Lucio Fontana, Carlo Mollino, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, Carlo Scarpa, Gino Sarfatti, Dadamaino, Alighiero Boetti, Mimmo Rotella, Gio Ponti, and Piero Manzoni, among others. In this show, Italian artists, architects, and designers reveal their exceptional ability to overturn the boundaries between art and design. Their visionary modernism is still influential today.
This book serves as a critical review of Social Urbanism, defined as a socio-political and practical approach to urban globalisation, deriving from a planning strategy and portfolio of built projects that seek to alleviate the social consequences of urbanisation.
It emphasises both the political processes and the urbanism projects that simultaneously consider socio-economic and ecological components of space, and which highlight a greater focus on social sustainability. In a context in which geography defines space and culture, and through challenges of a global magnitude, we are inextricably united in an era of environmental uncertainty, where shared experiences and values place us within a collective culture, inspiring mutual agency in service of this vision for Social Urbanism.
Through the work presented here, Social Urbanism is expanded as a worldview that considers the cultural values of a given place as interconnected to the geographical landscape of the region, and therefore, as the driving forces behind future models of globalisation and urban growth. The points of view of multiple colleagues and experts across differing fields provide introspection on the implementation of Social Urbanism. These shared opinions strengthen the significance of this work and affirm the joint values and visions for the global urbanisation challenges we are confronting in the 21st century, and which continue into the future.
Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop: Bioclimatic Ceramic Assemblies IV presents terra cotta design research, conducted under the auspices of the annual Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop (ACAW), between architectural firms and terra cotta manufacturer Boston Valley Terra Cotta. It chronicles the work of architectural firms Kieran Timberlake, Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), HKS, Payette, Pelli Clarke Pelli, SHoP Architects, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), Studios Architecture and two academic teams from Alfred University and the University at Buffalo. The book presents a unique model for exploring the state of the art in terra cotta design through the production of experimental prototypes. These include rain screen facade systems, urban sound devices, structures, massive wall systems and furniture. Now in its fifth year, this invitation-only workshop has teams collaborate with the manufacturer to develop a design that engages bioclimatic concerns and pushes material and manufacturing possibilities.
Landscapes are forged by many forces and are dynamic, not static. Yet most landscape designs are designed as static; that is, they are designed not to change substantially for 20-50 years. As cities become the dominant living space for humans, allowing non-human forces to contribute to our designs as landscape architects will make for more resilient landscapes and a healthier planet. Making these dynamic landscapes with our non-human partners will require a new landscape aesthetic, changing the public perception of “landscape,” and changing maintenance practices.
Dynamic Geographies
seeks to address these perceptions with a series of our projects as examples. The book is divided into three segments of overlapping geographies: Invisible geographies, Layered geographies, and Unleashing geographies.
The genesis, development and life-long occupation of the McIntyre house, built in 1972 as part of a multiple-dwelling subdivision, provides possible answers to some very pressing contemporary design questions. How might one live near the city and be respectful of nature? How might efficiently built dwellings also be spacious and dense site occupation still allow for privacy? This history is recounted through text augmented by photographs and site diagrams, house sections and plans. They reveal a modern architecture on the west coast that resulted from an interplay of both the physicality of the land and a culturally imbued landscape.
Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations charter, this visually driven book tells the story of the special relationship between the UN and New York City through the interrelated lenses of architecture, real estate, and urban planning. It is fully illustrated with rare archival photographs and architectural drawings, as well as newly commissioned photographs. The book also includes written contributions from UN-affiliated individuals of note, including current and former UN secretaries-general, ambassadors to the UN, mayors, governors, historians, architecture critics, and other luminaries.
The book begins by chronicling how New York came to be the permanent home of the UN, including the individuals, institutions, and other forces that helped the city secure the headquarters of the UN – among them the Rockefeller family, William Zeckendorf, and Robert Moses. The book then presents the architectural and urban design journey to create the iconic UN campus by a global team of architectural giants such as Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer, with archival photos and architectural drawings and renderings. It also charts how the real estate needs of the UN evolved over time, leading to the creation of the United Nations Development Corporation (UNDC) and its commissioning of three architecturally significant buildings at UN Plaza that have helped keep the UN in New York City. Also included are sections on the $2 billion renovation and restoration of the UN campus and proposals past and present for additional architectural commissions. Additional sections document how New York City and the UN have helped shape each other over the years; and how both continue to change and evolve.
Unique for its architectural and urbanistic focus, A Home to the World: The United Nations and New York City celebrates this important global organisation’s many accomplishments past, present, and future.
In the South of France, sited on a hill of olive trees, pinus pinea, and a vineyard, a family retreat was designed with a key mission of maintaining the vitality of the site. A small agricultural plot, the site offered the possibility of amplification. With the introduction of a garden and many outdoor living spaces, the family had the intention of cultivating the landscape as part of their stewardship. In part a response to a programmatic brief, but moreover, a discursive response to architectural predicaments of geometry, typology, and anomaly, the house is also a response to Preston Scott Cohen’s pedagogies on architecture.
Ever since the firm’s establishment in 1989, Frankfurt-based Stefan Forster Architekten (SFA) had a special focus on housing. A starting point for this was the urgent necessity of refurbishment and modernisation of the vast housing developments constructed of prefabricated concrete slabs as part of the urban rebuilding programmes in the newly founded federal states of eastern Germany following the country’s re-unification in 1990. From the initial ‘Haus 07’ in Leinefelde, Thuringia, SFA have moved on, creating a remarkable body of work in metropolitan housing. Their designs comprise large-scale public multi-unit blocs and single-family town houses on small plots, as well as the transformation of former office and public administration structures.
This first monograph on SFA highlights how the firm has constantly worked on raising the standards in residential architecture, years before the current shortage of housing in urban areas has made such improvements so urgent. The book features 30 designs that exemplify SFA’s approach and philosophy.
Text in English and German.
Richard Manion Architecture creates distinctive residences and estates with a respect for traditional forms and historic imagery adapted to modern living. The curated selection of rarely published projects in this second volume of RMA’s work, Streamlined, demonstrates the firm’s signature classicist style, which draws upon traditional and streamlined classical, regional, and contemporary influences to reflect authentic details, proportions, and a sophisticated sense of place for the 21st century.
In this book, the firm’s focus is on the integration of modernism within an overall framework of simplicity and restraint, discretion and harmony. Academic studies of European modernism, with its visionary approach and embodiment of the machine age, have come back to inspire, but with the understanding that many of its roots can be traced back to the heritage of classical design principles. This exquisite, fully illustrated volume showcases RMA’s goal to unite ideas about tradition, history, and modernity in a synergy and explores the meaning of shared architectural imagery and heritage for our time.
A strong visual identity is hard to miss, instantly catching the eye. In children’s spaces, it is best tailored with their unique outlook in mind as children perceive the world around them differently from the rest of us, responding to specific sets of details.
Design and Visual Identity for Children’s Spaces shares a variety of contemporary creative designs for children’s spaces all over the world; they combine children-friendly visual elements with smart space design to tailor comfortable and conducive environments where they can learn, have fun, flourish, and be themselves.
Over 35 projects that focus on educational institutions, enrichment centres, recreational clubs, play zones, concept stores, and children’s hospitals, among others, share concepts that transform spaces to make them more relatable for children through thoughtfully considered visual identity and interior layouts that resonate specifically with them. Designers dig deep, even consult with children, to create designs that call out to them in fun, inspiring spaces that unleash imaginations, while they foster a sense of connection and belonging.
Discover the rationales and inspirations behind these concepts, which also unify aspects of the business with a cohesive brand identity to promote the desired brand impressions and top-of-the-mind consumer recall. Through the projects in these pages, the reader is offered a host of thoughtful and creative solutions in designing children’s spaces, making this book a handy tool for anyone in the business of managing children’s spaces, or keen on designing children’s spaces.
The concept of Layered Morphologies is a theoretical and methodological approach that investigates the coevolutionary nature of architecture and settlements, to propose an organic and integrated approach to their reading, protection and design enhancement. Transcending some usual spatial ontologies and operating across interdisciplinary fields, it promotes a renewed notion of built heritage as historicised architecture, and landscape as a structure of structures, where any act of modification should start from recognising pre-existing signs, typo-morphological structures, and writing of the ground and formal orders. Advancing critical-theoretical propositions while verifying their operational value in the case study of Fenghuang (Shaanxi) – a famous historic and cultural town in China – the methodology reveals a new reading and the potential underlying of Chinese settlements forms. Architectural and urban-rural design projects are not the colonisation of a void (a tabula rasa) but rather an understanding and interpretation of an existing text with its erasures and absences (tabula plena), which also presents the principles for future writings.
Arnaldo Coen (1940) is one of the most prominent Mexican artists. As a result of his restless, transgressive and irreverent creativity, his work has never ceased to be fresh.
He has made important individual exhibits in the Museum of Modern Art and in the National Hall of the Palace of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, featuring in important collections and exhibitions in different cultural venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Tlatelolco Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Isidro Fabela Cultural Center, Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and the Bank of Mexico, to name a few. This award winning artist has also been the focus of several recognised art critics such as Octavio Paz, Raquel Tibol, Carlos Monsivais, Juan Garcia Ponce, Salvador Elizondo, Teresa del Conde, Sigrunn Paas, Josephine Siller.
Arnaldo Coen is the first monograph covering the artist’s pictorial and sculptural works from the 1960s to date, with some 300 images complementing this contemporary, provocative and irreverent compendium of Coen’s legacy.
In 2015, the Cologne photographer Harald Schwertfeger travelled to Istanbul for the first time. His initial aversion to the noisy, overcrowded urban jungle quickly turned into profound fascination. For Schwertfeger, ‘Polis’ – quite simply the ‘City’, as the Greeks used to call it – became a photographic treasure trove that transcended the purely geographical divide between Orient and Occident. His works present a kaleidoscope of overwhelming images and impressions.
Schwertfeger was spellbound not so much by the Ottoman palaces and monumental mosques – his photos focus above all on Istanbul’s hectic hustle and bustle and the people with their vastly different attitudes and lifestyles.
In capturing the metropolis with all its scars, vulnerability and roughness, Schwertfeger creates a moving portrait of the city that challenges the usual stereotypes.
Text in English, German and Turkish.
Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was a pioneer of 20th-century avant-garde. Remarkably versatile and immensely gifted, she produced an oeuvre that encompasses the entire range of the modernist movement from applied and fine art and dance to architecture, interior design, and teaching.
Equlibre, created in 1931, marks the beginning of Taeuber-Arp’s career as an accomplished painter. She moves away from figuration to focus on shape and colour. Circle, square, and rectangle define her future vocabulary. While in her earlier textiles she used multiple shades and hues, she now reduces her palette to primary colours alongside black and white, signalling a markedly changed sense of colour.
The painting’s posthumous title emphasises Taeuber-Arp’s constant striving for an ideal balance of colour, shape, and indeed all the elements in her paintings. From here, she sets out to explore movement, circles, and spaces, and later gradations and lines. Equilibre, a landmark of Taeuber-Arp’s oeuvre, looks ahead to her future subject matter, while at the same time referencing her earlier work.
Text in English and German.
Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, have been drawing a great deal of attention for years with their monumental projects. In 2021 many thousands of art lovers will once again be on the road, this time to Paris. To celebrate the spectacular wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, the Centre Pompidou is paying tribute to this unusual pair of artists with a large exhibition.
The show and its companion book focus on the period Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent in Paris. Paris means a great deal to the couple’s personal and artistic development. They met here in 1958 and devised the ideas for their first projects together here, as well.
Paris is also the place where Christo and Jeanne-Claude were able to produce their first large public art project, in 1985: the wrapping of the Pont Neuf – a project that has gone down in art history.
Through rarely seen early works, studies, drawings, and collages, the book sheds light on the trailblazing character of the Paris years, as well as on their great significance to the couple’s artistic development afterward.
To the artistic highlight of 2021: wrapping the Arc de Triomphe!
McInturff Architects are renowned for their innovative and creative zeal and have been awarded hundreds of awards for their beautiful, stylish houses plus other projects. For this book, McInturff’s fourth with IMAGES, this award-winning firm takes us on a journey through nearly 50 works, which include dozens of stunning new homes and interiors, incredible renovations of residences, and innovative and modern commercial and cultural centres, hotels, stores, and much more. Complete with beautiful photographs and detailed plans and diagrams, the architects walk us through this significant selection of works, celebrating craft, light, and site. Looking back and looking forward, this book summarises many lessons learned over more than 35 years of a very successful architectural journey.
“…a significant contribution to the study of Chinese photography.” – The Art Newspaper
From political leaders to celebrities, photographic portraits exert considerable influence over our reaction to public figures. As the first academic publication focused on the Taikang photography collection, this book explores both the mechanics of portraiture and its psychological effects.
Taikang Space is one of the most important non-profit art institutions in China. Based in Beijing, they focus on contemporary art and photography. The Chinese Portrait: 1860 to the Present is based on the framework of the eponymous exhibition, which ran at Taikang Space from March 2017. This book introduces the curator and researchers involved with the exhibition, as well as researchers such as Shi Zhimin, Jin Yongquan, Liu Jianping, Liu Zhangbolong, who deliver their own unique angles on the topic of portrait photography. The Chinese Portrait: 1860 to the Present also features the curator’s interviews with Qia Sijie, Chen Shilin and Zhang Zuo – respectively the personal photographer, standard portrait re-toucher and darkroom technician of Chairman Mao.
“A stunning collection of photographs by Alex Saberi, which illustrate the rich diversity of wildlife in Richmond Park throughout the seasons.” – Discover Wildlife.com
“Alex’s ethereal, fairy-tale-like images are a real wonder. His grasp of light, location and atmosphere make these photographs ones that border on the unique.” – Amateur Photographer
Sir David Attenborough has described Richmond Park as “A very special place” – and with good reason. This vast oasis of green, just eight miles from the centre of London, is an ecological pearl in the midst of sprawling urbanisation.
The park, most famous for its herd of 630 Fallow and Red Deer, is not only Europe’s largest park, but is as big as the seven other royal parks combined. Since King Charles I enclosed the park in 1637, it has provided a haven of tranquillity and diversion for all its visitors. Today, some 77 million people pass through its gates each year.
In this beautiful book, Alex Saberi captures Richmond Park’s unique blend of rare and diverse wildlife, plant life and rolling landscapes. From a crow perching on a bench in the morning haze to a foolhardy Labrador, breaking impatiently away from its owner, the photographs capture its inherent beauty as well as those rare moments of wildlife action and majesty that only yield themselves to the most patient and knowledgeable of observers.
How does one envision architecture? Forays
gathers the work of Joe Day and Deegan-Day Design into six diptychs, unified by this question. Working in a wide range of media and scales, Day’s work mines the differentials between perspective and projection.
Forays
is organised in six diptychs, the first two paired projects are books in their own right; the second pair, a clothing line and a first building; the third, two houses; the fourth, two plays on brand identity and design methodology; the fifth, permanent and transient cinema proposals; and the sixth, two series of speculative work in local and global registers. Modelled on a comparison of two classic cameras – the Leica M3 and Polaroid SX-70 – each diptych includes a project with more ‘Leica’ to it – a more bounded, Cartesian clarity or distilled focus – and another closer to an SX-70 in its moving or folding parts, its shape-shifting adaptability.