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.
Way Beyond Bigness is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilises a three-part, integrative design-research methodology, structured as: Appreciate + Analyze, Speculate + Synthesize, and Collaborate + Catalyze. To do such, Way Beyond Bigness realigns watersheds and architecture across multiple: scales (site to river basin), disciplines (ecologists to economists), narratives (hyperbolic to pragmatic), and venues (academic to professional). The research critiques and recasts Oxford Dictionary’s two very different definitions for a ‘watershed’: 1) “An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas” and 2) “An event or period marking a turning point in a situation in a course of action or state of affairs” and its two very different definitions for ‘architecture’: 1) “The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings” and 2) “the complex or carefully designed structure of something.” The book highlights the author’s comprehensive work of over more than a decade, including in depth field research across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine, along with a diverse body of academic and professional collaborations, ranging from the speculative to the community-based.
Textile is a vector of identity – something more important than ever in times of war and crisis in particular. It is connected to the body it covers like a second skin. It both conceals and reveals, and contains a history and iconography whose roots often lie deep in a culture’s customs and traditions.
As part of its extramural programme, and in collaboration with award-winning photographer Mashid Mohadjerin and journalist Samira Bendadi, Antwerp Fashion Museum (MoMu) have created a new exhibition and accompanying publication on the importance of fabric and clothing to issues of public concern today, such as migration, resistance, tradition, spirituality and decolonisation.
The focus is on nine stories of people whom curators Bendadi and Mohadjerin – in whose own personal stories migration features prominently – met during their travels to Paris, Antwerp, Lebanon, Africa, Morocco and Iran. Sometimes the stories are warm and moving; at other times they are tough and heart-wrenching. In them, textile embodies the ideas and emotions coupled with forced or voluntary departure, the yearning for what has been lost, letting go and holding on.
This storytelling and photography exhibition will run from 15 November 2019 until 16 February 2020 at Texture Kortrijk, and will travel on to Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp in spring 2020.
Text in English and Dutch.
The Hinder/Reimers Collection – which has been owned by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate since 1993 – is one of the most important collections of modern ceramics in Germany. It was built up from the early 1950s through the combined efforts of Jakob Wilhelm Hinder (1901-1976) and Lotte Reimers (* 1932). The focus of this large collection is on West German ceramics from the 1950s to about 1990. Since the mid-1970s it has been enlarged by Lotte Reimers to include outstanding works from outside Germany. These 1,587 objects provide insights into the crucial trends and stylistic movements in art ceramics after the Second World War as represented by the most distinguished ceramicists of the day.
Featuring explanatory texts and colour illustrations, the present publication presents the entire collection and, therefore, goes beyond the scope of Ceramics in Germany 1955-1990. The Hinder/Reimers Collection, published in 1997, which dealt with only a selection of works from the collection. The new publication, on the other hand, draws on the Hinder/Reimers Collection to survey the broad field of developments in studio ceramics in the latter half of the 20th century in western Germany while looking well beyond the borders of Germany.
Text in English and German.
The work of Kohn Pedersen Fox is international in scope, collaborative in design, and a product of individual voices focused on a single objective – making an architecture, of our time, which creates strong bonds with the the specific place it occupies.
While William Pedersen founded the firm, with partners Gene Kohn and Shelley Fox, he never aspired to be a ‘director of design.’ They had the components with Gene’s entrepreneurial drive, Shelley’s management and Bill’s design leadership – to be a large firm. ‘Directing’ the work of a large firm was not Bill’s desire, instead he wanted to focus on a body of work which he could call his own. The example that work set would inspire others, and it did. Now there are several voices leading their design – all of them rose to their position within the office.
The purpose of this book is to define the work of one of the voices – Bill Pedersen’s. Pedersen has worked with many different designers, in close collaboration, throughout his career, though his work speaks with a singular voice. Here it is represented chronologically and concludes with the latest phase – furniture. Working from the largest scale to the smallest has always been a preoccupation of those who lead design in KPF. Many of Pedersen’s architectural heroes designed chairs, and he strives to follow in their footsteps.
Water is far too valuable of a resource to be disposed as a waste. Working Water presents the work of Denver landscape architecture firm Wenk Associates, highlighting their projects that treat stormwater, and the infrastructure that controls it, as a resource that supports functioning natural systems and enhanced urban open space. Built projects illustrate how stormwater runoff can be directed to support an intimate private garden, to the large-scale redevelopment of derelict industrial lands in Milwaukee organised around a stormwater park and open space system. Planning projects range from a plan for a surface stormwater system developed incrementally for a redeveloping urban district in central Denver, to a multi-generational plan for restoration of the Los Angeles River that will require profound changes in stormwater management policies and practice for full implementation. The final chapter describes the challenges, strategies, and lessons learned over the firm’s 37-year history as part of implementing new approaches to infrastructure design that can withstand the test of time.
In this new book, the publisher presents the top gardens of eleven master gardeners from the Netherlands. The members of the Association of Master Gardeners (Vereniging van Tophoveniers) have voluntarily submitted themselves to high quality demands and want to bring their profession to the highest possible level. Tophoveniers guarantee top quality for the complete package, not only as garden contractor, but also as designer, advisor, and person to talk to. Among the participants are Harry Esselinck, Groenpartners Tuinen, Hoveniersbedrijf Louis van der Meijden and Rien Van Mierio. In this beautiful publication the focus is on the architecture of the gardens. Because of the unique photographic material the book has become very attractive and insightful for every garden lover. In order to give the reader a complete image of the work of their participants, the author shows gardens of different sizes and from different parts of the Netherlands. Text in English and Dutch.
Collage is one of the most popular and pervasive of all art-forms, yet this is the first historical survey book ever published on the subject. Featuring over 200 works, ranging from the 1500s to the present day, it offers an entirely new approach. Hitherto, collage has been presented as a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked in particular to Pablo Picasso and Cubism in the years just before the First World War. In Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, we trace its origins back to books and prints of the 1500s, through to the boom in popularity of scrapbooks and do-it-yourself collage during the Victorian period, and then through Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. Collage became the technique of choice in the 1960s and 1970s for anti-establishment protest, and in the present day is used by millions of us through digital devices. The definition of collage employed here is a broad one, encompassing cut-and-pasted paper, photography, patchwork, film and digital technology and ranging from work by professionals to unknown makers, amateurs and children.
Contents:
Collage Over the Centuries, an introductory essay by Patrick Elliott; Collage Before Modernism by Freya Gowrley; On Edge: Exploring Collage Tactics and Terminology by Yuval Etgar; catalogue of exhibition works; a Chronology of Collage.
EUROPAN is an initiative that puts on competitions for young architects. Founded in 1989 and supported by 13 countries in the EU, it runs a competition every two years for innovative and experimental models in urban development. The 2017 and 2019 EUROPAN competitions focused on the topic Productive Cities. The 2019 edition involved more than 900 planning teams from all over Europe, who prepared proposals for 47 towns.
This book features the 12 winning submissions to the 2019 Productive Cities 2 competition for the Austrian cities Graz, Innsbruck, Villach, Weiz, and Vienna. They are presented in great detail through photos, drawings and visualisations, along with commenting texts. The projects focus on architectural and urban-planning interventions and processes. They offer innovative concepts for the use of public space as well as holistic solutions for sustainable construction and models for cross-functional use of space. The book is a rich source for trend-setting ideas about our future cities and the development of a new urban lifestyle.
When do painterly gestures become objects or spaces? When the colours and lines in a picture become the subject, do they then flirt with or repel one another? Fascinated by the gaudy banality of day-to-day life, Anna Nero (*1988) scratches on the surface of things with the help of quotes from advertising, fashion, and comics as well as samples of abstract and concrete painting. The question of the ‘thingness’ of a picture as a painterly image or real ceramic object, the question of its material characteristics, its use, its “essence” is central to her work and also the focus of her first monograph.
Text in English and German.
Shanghai-based Atelier Deshaus, founded in 2001 as one of the first private architectural firms in China, is one of the country’s most important and innovative design studios. The architects made their name worldwide in 2014 with the much-acclaimed West Bund site for Shanghai’s Long Museum, which has since been followed by a series of further museum and other art-related projects. Such cultural and community buildings of various scale are the main focus of Atelier Deshaus, who refuse the usual commercial construction tasks in China. Their formally strong buildings are developed from reading the site with special attention being paid to the preservation of Shanghai’s industrial heritage after decades of a tabula rasa policy in the city’s urban development.
At the core of this first monograph are Atelier Deshaus’s 20 most important designs from two decades. They are documented in rich detail through plans and images as well as concise explanatory texts by the architects. In an extensive conversation with Hubertus Adam, the firm’s principals Liu Yichun and Chen Yifeng offer insights into their way of thinking, their understanding of Chinese tradition, their relation to art, and the challenges of working as a non-governmental office in China. Additional essays place Atelier Deshaus in the context of contemporary international architecture and discuss their key projects with regard to constructive qualities and atmosphere.
Eleanor Moty (b. 1945) from the US is a seminal figure in the field of contemporary international studio jewellery. In a career that has spanned more than 50 years, she has been both a dedicated practitioner and a devoted teacher who has inspired succeeding generations of artists, collectors, and fellow professionals. She began to attract national attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s for her experiments with photoetching and electroforming metal. Later, mid-career, Moty made what seems like an abrupt shift in style and focus, with more abstract works whose designs were inspired by the natural inclusions within the non-precious gems used in their fabrication. While her works have been published in prominent books, catalogues, and journals internationally, this monograph is the first comprehensive in-depth examination of her career from its inception in 1967 through the present day.
The completion of David Chipperfield’s distinctive new building for Kunsthaus Zürich in December 2020 has nearly doubled the museum’s overall space. In combination with the preceding refurbishments of the earlier buildings, this has made it fit to meet the demands of an art museum in the 21st century.
A sequel to The Architectural History of the Kunsthaus Zürich 1910-2020, this book comprehensively introduces the new Kunsthaus Zürich, demonstrating how the task of building an art museum in the 21st century can be fulfilled. Concise texts, statements by protagonists and by future users and visitors as well as numerous illustrations trace the project’s evolution and the construction process and look at the completed building from various perspectives. The book also highlights what features contemporary museum infrastructure has to offer and the architectural and urban design qualities it requires, and what financial and organisational challenges the entire undertaking implied. A conversation between experts exploring the expanded museum’s impact on its immediate neighbourhood and Zurich’s urban fabric as a whole rounds out the volume.
Text in French.
The fifth volume of the Laboratorium
series spans the space between topics and positions at the institute. The texts deal with various aspects and questions on the subject of the built and perceived space. Energy issues, dealing with urban rural areas or working with models are featured. In addition to content-related topics, the focus is on methods and approaches. Edited by Dieter Geissbühler.
Text in German.
The completion of David Chipperfield’s distinctive new building for Kunsthaus Zürich in December 2020 has nearly doubled the museum’s overall space. In combination with the preceding refurbishments of the earlier buildings, this has made it fit to meet the demands of an art museum in the 21st century.
A sequel to The Architectural History of the Kunsthaus Zürich 1910-2020, this book comprehensively introduces the new Kunsthaus Zürich, demonstrating how the task of building an art museum in the 21st century can be fulfilled. Concise texts, statements by protagonists and by future users and visitors as well as numerous illustrations trace the project’s evolution and the construction process and look at the completed building from various perspectives. The book also highlights what features contemporary museum infrastructure has to offer and the architectural and urban design qualities it requires, and what financial and organisational challenges the entire undertaking implied. A conversation between experts exploring the expanded museum’s impact on its immediate neighbourhood and Zurich’s urban fabric as a whole rounds out the volume.
Blackburn Architects leads the world in the design of equestrian facilities that are beautiful and innovative. The firm’s common-sense approach delivers impressive facilities for horses, while at the same time designing a structure that fits into the regional vernacular architecture with pleasing results. This is an exciting journey through a body of work spanning nearly four decades, with reviews of a plethora of designs that highlight discoveries and innovations made along the way. The firm also looks forward to a more sustainable future, as it continues to push for the inclusion of ever-more innovative systems and environmental protections. This lavishly illustrated monograph is a celebration of the history of this specialist architecture firm, a beautiful showcase of some of the most jaw-dropping designs of horse stables and barns.
Source Books in Architecture No.14: Rem Koolhaas / OMA + AMO Spaces for Prada is the most recent volume in the Source Books in Architecture series. Among the topics discussed in the book are the longstanding relationship with Prada and how the early objectives in that relationship have both maintained and shifted. An underlying theme to the conversations held with students and faculty of the Knowlton School community is the topic of architect client relationships, their history, their problems, and how they have contributed to the discipline over time. Explicitly, a focus of the conversation is on a number of projects that OMA has developed or completed with Prada, a large number of which are installation scale environments that manifest in the form of runway shows and exhibitions. The challenge of such projects is to retain a commitment to the political and cultural agenda that OMA embeds in the larger and permanent buildings. Given the ephemerality and role of these environments as literal backgrounds to highlighted events, the projects are ideal scenarios in which to develop an architecture that lacks the permanence of buildings while still carrying potency and contributing to larger cultural discussions involving, for example, event, place, concept, product, staging, the crowd, lighting, and materiality.
Source Books in Architecture No.14 contains project documentation from the OMA and Prada archives, transcripts from Koolhaas’ conversations with students at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University, and commentary and critique from architects, critics, and theorists.