Return on Experience will be comfortable on the shelves of designers and artists and equally comfortable for business leaders and educators. It reflects the fundamental belief that design is integral to everything we do. That all human existence has been a result of a progression of successful design outcomes. It is not in the sense that what we have created is exclusively logical and rational but true success has been the result of sort of emotional intelligence and meaning being infused into a new form that has caused us to progress as a species. Inspiration and innovation are difficult to process from a pure logic as it requires a broader view into the way we think and feel things. It is deeply personal and at the same time shared at a social level. In this sense we naturally view design as possessing enormous value and is an essential part of culture with a broad value and application.
Design is a dialogue. This book is not a treatise on do’s and don’ts of design or business. It is a reflection on the nature of how to see design. Design is and always has been part of a conversation. As such, this book captures a dialogue that author, Tim Kobe has been engaged in for over 25 years at Eight Inc. This conversation is more than a single path but reflects the dialogue and practice of business leaders, designers, colleagues, and collaborators. This book would not exist without those on the other side of the conversation and is more than a lens of a single or individual point of view. Eight Inc. has been incredibly fortunate to design with some of the most successful people and companies that exist today and much of Eight Inc.’s success has been attributed to our time with Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs.
Timeless Resorts is the first major monograph of the multidisciplinary design practice Stapati, established by Ar.Tony Joseph. This book examines the evolution of 11 captivating hospitality projects, where Stapati’s philosophy of creating Timeless Architecture by reinterpreting the vernacular for contemporary living is expounded. The projects spread across India and the Seychelles demonstrate a sensitive understanding of the context and culture, with the site forming the major generator, to develop narratives and experiences which transcend time and place.
Like all mega-cities around the globe, São Paulo faces huge challenges. Yet despite these manifold and daunting tasks, the Brazilian metropolis has since the 1960s maintained a prudent policy of investing in communal infrastructure, thus providing inclusive places and spaces for all of its 20m-population. While many cities aim for a ‘Bilbao-effect’ by funding iconic, tourist-orientated projects such as museums or theatres, São Paulo persistently supports programs and usages that serve its permanent residents. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at A.M. Architekturmuseum der TU München, features a selection of these buildings and programs from five decades. Ranging from a simple canopy over a public park to vast multifunctional buildings, they provide spaces for sports and culture, education, healthcare, or gastronomy. Rather than merely serving a specific purpose, their key role is to be places for people spending time together. With contributions by Renato Anelli, José Tavares Correia de Lira, Fraya Frehse, Vanessa Grossman, Andres Lepik, Ana Luiza Nobre, Daniel Talesnik, and Guilherme Wisnik; and a conversation with Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Marta Moreira by Enrique Walker. Photographs by Ciro Miguel Also available: Wherever You Find People ISBN 9783038600268
At the moment of going to press, a publication irreversibly reaches its final form. Simultaneously, it also reaches an audience. Naturally, this audience very often is oblivious to the many, and sometimes complex, steps towards the construction and montage of (visual) meaning that precedes the actual publication of a book. The contributors to Before Publication consider such construction of meaning as montage and look at materials and processes involved before publication. Their focus is on concrete artistic and visual artifacts such as scrapbooks, book mock-ups, and press layouts by artists, authors, and graphic designers. In particular, they shed light on the relationship between the spheres of privacy and publicity. The new book features a programmatic introduction by the editors Nanni Baltzer and Martino Stierli and eight concisely illustrated topical essays.
Swedish-American architect Lars Lerup’s writings suggest a mindful collector as their author, rather than a scholar or a theoretician. Lerup sharply observes and analyses his urban environment and its properties, before adding his findings to his own theory of the modern city. Lerup wrote the fourteen essays in this new book as self-contained pieces, yet together they still form a coherent entity. The fourteen essays in The Continuous City offer a survey of Lerup’s thinking on identity and monumentality are the relationship between nature and culture. His interest and reflections focus, among other things, on Roberto Burle Marx, a founder of modern landscape design; the ‘dancing floors’ of Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library; Herzog & de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road project in Miami Beach; and the character of urban icons like Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Dalian International Conference Center. Lars Lerup invites his readers to join him on his journey and to be enriched, rather than instructed, en route.
Experimental Zone documents a remarkable experiment in spatial research at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Every two months, for four years, researchers reconfigured a 350-square metre workspace for forty scientists. The design-based, collaborative experiment’s focus was on the interrelation of space and knowledge production: what spatial qualities are required by interdisciplinary teams for their research work? With some 300 striking and straightforward graphics, Experimental Zone presents the findings of the experiment. It highlights the spatial conditions under which individual and collaborative research unfold, overlap, or merge, and reveals the characteristics of an architecture that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration. The experiment’s innovative interdisciplinary approach is also reflected in the book’s design, with each of the five chapters and the comprehensive visual material reflecting publishing traditions in publishing design, architecture, and the humanities.
HEC Paris is a leading European school of advanced business studies with a global community of students from Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In 2012, HEC Paris’s campus near Versailles was redesigned by renowned architects Martin Duplantier and David Chipperfield to reflect the school’s global character and its focus on open communication and exchange. HEC Campus: Evolution of a Model documents the transformation in close detail and with one hundred illustrations, including twenty newly commissioned photographs by award-winning French photographer Cyrille Weiner. After a brief history of HEC Paris since its foundation in 1881, the book takes readers through the planning and construction of its modern buildings throughout the 1960s by René Coulons, and the careful restoration of many of these buildings by Duplantier and Chipperfield. The architects also conceived an entirely new building and a surrounding park, which has become a key element of campus social life. Through essays and an interview with Martin Duplantier, the book also explores the interplay of preservation and renovation and demonstrates how this exemplary contemporary redesign can be taken as a model for this sort of planning.
Text in English and French.
French architect Stéphane Fernandez creates a ‘silent architecture’ that invests the landscape as much as it takes shape. He is a minimalist in expression and maximalist in attention to detail. He models rough, thick and fragile monoliths by digging, by movement of bodies and the generation of tensions between masses. Fernandez articulates his work around a permanent search for materials, the accumulation of models, sketches, plans and words.
This first monograph on Stéphane Fernandez features five of his realised designs that are emblematic for his approach: a childrens’ pavillion (Saint-Raphaël, 2005), a media library (Carnoux, 2007), a students’ residence and laboratory building (Banyuls-sur-Mer, 2013), a cultural centre (Vertou, 2015) and a primary school (Cannes, 2018).
An essay and a conversation with Stéphane Fenrandez by architectural historian Éléonore Marantz as well as a manifesto by the architect himself complement plans of the buildings and photographs of the five buildings by Berlin-based photographers Schnepp Renou. Preface is by Jean-Christophe Quinton.
Text in English and French.
Founded in 2009, Paris-based PARC Architectes has risen to prominence, winning awards and accolades in its native France and beyond. Just as important as its design work is PARC Architectes’s research on contemporary architecture and urbanism, laid out in the theoretical essay Le parc planetarire (The Planetary Park), published in the firm’s own journal, PRAGMA, and on its blog, CRAPZINE. This first book to focus on PARC Architectes, Architecture as Environment features fifteen foundational designs by the firm, chosen to reflect the firm’s credo that the environment has to become a matter of architecture. At the interface of art and science, PARC Architectes’s designs are installations rather than mere structures, enabling adequate responses to contextual and conceptual issues in the construction of contemporary human environments. In addition to brief essays, the book also includes 150 illustrations, including many in full colour. Text in French.
Architectural Papers is a series of books published by the Chair of Josep Lluís Mateo, department of architecture (D-ARCH) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich). Established in 2005, the series covers a wide range of topics related to teaching architecture and architectural culture in general. It aims at expanding the theoretical boundaries of the discipline. Contributors include distinguished architects and thinkers of our time, while a strong focus remains set on the content produced as part of the educational curriculum at ETH Zürich. The series is being published by Park Books. The Middle East describes this region from a contemporary architectural perspective. The Middle East has been at the heart of the Old World since the beginning of time. Recent history has widened our idea about this region from that of a petrified place where nothing changes to a site of immense opportunities where everything is possible. The future of the architectural profession and its exciting possibilities are being tested there now. This new book comprises essays reflecting visits to countries in the region and describing manifold aspects, interviews with distinguished personalities, along with a selection of paradigmatic projects. It aims to describe the manifold facets of the Middle East. Contributors are practicing architects, renowned academics, artists and experts from the region. All material in the book has been produced exclusively for this program and is published here for the first time. Also available in the Architectural Papers series: Expression ISBN: 9783906027043
In architecture, nothing is ever truly new; everything has been tried before. And nowhere is this more evident than in the architecture of housing. Each proffered solution to a specific architectural problem is actually an amalgam of predecessors’ ideas and new approaches, which itself contributes in turn to a great global ‘pool’ for succeeding concepts. For twenty years, this philosophy has driven the activities of Zurich-based cooperative Pool Architekten, with a special focus on the research and design of residential buildings. Poolology of Housing is an up-close look at the collective’s body of work and a potential font of inspiration for others interested in letting this philosophy guide the creation of innovative architecture. At the core of the book are two hundred floor plans, designed by members of the collective and students during Pool Architects’ tenure from 2013 to 2016 at Technische Universität Berlin. Direct comparison of these floor plans demonstrates the incredible scope an architect has for residential buildings despite the many constraints imposed by external factors. Richly illustrated with both built and unrealised projects by Pool Architekten, as well as of model replicas of iconic historic interiors, Poolology of Housing reflects a novel social culture of housing design. Text in English and German.
Promenades is both a treatise on the relationship between architecture and photography and the first book to focus on the work of the Swiss architectural firm Bauart Architects and Planners. The firm commissioned a variety of photographers working in landscape or architecture to document nine of their projects throughout Switzerland, from houses, schools, and government and office buildings to entirely new neighbourhoods. Each of the photographs represents a personal, wide-angled view of a project, drawing on the rich legacy of nearly two centuries of architectural photography. An essay by Markus Jakob explores the relationship between photography and architecture in the context of the firm’s work over the course of three decades, which carefully accounts for ecology and urban and social context.
Text in English, French and German.
Contemporary architectural criticism tends to focus on the theories and concepts behind buildings. Yet there is much to be learned by venturing beyond the library walls to contemplate the real buildings – the things themselves. This urge for ‘real living contact’ is the impetus behind this new and exhilarating collection of essays by renowned British architectural critic and scholar Irénée Scalbert.
This new book selects nine essays written throughout Scalbert’s career from the early 1990s to the present. They comprise detailed studies of major buildings and pieces that represent broader studies of historical movements and ideas. All texts are based on direct experience, whether through quiet contemplation or candid interviews with architects, builders, or inhabitants. An architect by training, Scalbert writes with the purpose of illuminating the design efforts made and enriching the form of the architecture he describes, and his essays thus contribute to many key moments in the architectural history of the past three decades.
Scalbert’s incisive and boldly original criticism – together with a wealth of illustrations – make this a book an enlightening read for architects and architectural students or anyone with an appreciation of this important voice in architectural criticism.
Riegler Riewe Architects is among the most distinguished and internationally renowned Austrian architectural firms with branches in Berlin and Katowice, Poland. Since establishing the firm in Graz in 1987, Florian Riegler and Roger Riewe have been rejecting the mere pictorial with striking continuity and consistency. Riegler Riewe focus on use-orientated, yet still usage-neutral spatial structures and aim for an inquiring, “undesigned”, yet precise and subtle architecture. This position is evident in their buildings that embody both the “common” and the ambiguous and offer latitude rather than rigid form at all scales, in floor plan as well as in urban planning. The new monograph Riegler Riewe – 10 Years 20 Projects presents twenty built and unrealised projects between 2004 and 2014, most of them published here for the first time. Richly illustrated with images and plans, the book features essays by internationally renowned authors analysing Riegler Riewe’s work in the contexts of both architecture and urbanism.
Following Papers and Papers 2, the third volume in the series contains papers written by Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates between 2008 and 2014. Illustrated with photographs and drawings, the papers focus on some of the themes that are at the heart of the work of Sergison Bates architects and their approach to architectural practice, such as domesticity, typology and density.
Text in German.
A residential building with exceptional spatial qualities in the Basel Jura region made Jakob Steib renowned in 1995. The thematic focus of his designs lies in apartment buildings and their typology. Well conceived spatial constellations, coherent materials and careful placement within settlement structures characterise his buildings.
Text in English and German.
In their office Bassi Carella Marello, the two Geneva architects focus on a few fundamental themes of architectural research: material, presence, construction, prefabrication and the interior figure. The architects reflect on those themes in a sequence of volumes within the Bibliotheca series. This second volume analyses the appearance and expression of their high-quality buildings in the Geneva region.
Also available: Andrea Bassi, Roberto Carella: Materialität, Materiality, Matérialité ISBN 9783037611159.
Text in English, French, and German.
100 years ago Siam declared war on Germany. In the early morning hours of 22 July 1917, army units and gendarmerie called the roughly 200 completely unsuspecting German and Austro-Hungarian men in Bangkok out of their beds, presented them with the declaration of war and went on to arrest them. At the same time, marine units boarded the nine ocean going German ships anchored on the river, capturing what was considered by all to be the greatest prize. With these events began Siam’s 17 months at war with two European powers.
The story of how these 17 months unfolded in Siam and in Europe is at the heart of this book. It is a complex tale interweaving political, diplomatic, military, cultural and social history. The book introduces adventurous and scared Thai soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front, arrogant European politicians and diplomats convinced of their racial and cultural superiority, shrewd Thai officials beating the West at its own game of imperialism, princes rivalling over influence and power, German businessmen imprisoned by “Orientals”, Thai students caught up in world events and submarine attacks, and the King of Siam himself.
Siam’s participation in World War I was the single most important international event for contemporaries in the kingdom, its symbolism unmatched by any other occurrence of the times. The book is the first-ever extensively researched study of Siam and World War I in all its facets. By combining primary sources from Thailand, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria, the study describes local events in a global context and explains how world events manifested themselves in the royal palaces and on the streets of Bangkok. The legacy of the events a century ago is remarkably tangible even today, and the book connects the reader with this legacy.
The book is easily accessible to the non-specialist reader interested in history and political affairs, as it describes numerous colourful episodes and vignettes, and includes over 300 rare photographs and illustrations, reproduced in high-quality print.
Perched atop a five-hundred-meter cliff in the far north of Cambodia, Preah Vihear ranks among the world’s holiest sites. It was built a millennium ago as a shrine to Hindu god Shiva by the same civilization that gave the world Angkor Wat. Sadly, it has been transformed recently into a battlefield prize, first with Cambodian factions during the Cambodian civil war, and later (to present) it has been the focus of sometimes violent border disputes with Thailand. In Temple in the Clouds former Washington Post foreign correspondent John Burgess and author of two previous books on Cambodia, draws on extensive research in Cambodia, Thailand, France and the United States to recount the cliff top monument’s full history, ancient and modern. He reveals previously unknown legal strategies and diplomatic manoeuvring behind a contentious World Court case of 1959-62 that awarded the temple to Cambodia. Written in a lively, accessible style, Temple in the Clouds brings new insight to one of Southeast Asia’s greatest temples and most intractable border conflicts. With 50 photographs, plans and maps.
Also by John Burgess: Stories in Stone: ISBN: 9786167339016; A Woman of Angkor ISBN: 9786167339252
Thread and Fire is a fascinating journey through the centuries-old trade networks that developed across a group of archipelagos along the equator. Of the 18,000 islands, more than 900 are permanently settled by over 360 ethnic groups, speaking 700 languages and dialects. For centuries this vast and rich environment favoured local and regional exchanges, and it was only later that people visited from afar. New connections integrated these archipelagos with the distant civilisations of continental Asia: first India, later China and from the 13th century onwards, the Islamic world. Finally, with the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century, global trade and connections grew rapidly. Spices and forest & sea products were the focus of foreign interests, and textiles were the currency for their acquisition. These imported textiles, complemented with ornaments and jewellery, soon became part of the region’s social fabric, indispensable items of gift and exchange, essential markers for the indictment of ceremonies, rights of passage and signifiers of rank and prestige.
Thread and Fire explores and illustrates those ancient connections and traditions through Indonesian and Timorese textiles, regalia and jewellery from the Francisco Capelo collection, assembled over a 20-year period and now part of the permanent collection of Casa Asia-Colecao Francisco Capelo in Lisbon.
With an eclectic practice embracing urban planning, public sculpture and industrial design, Ian Ritchie CBE RA is one of Britains most visionary architects. Published here for the first time, his poems, aphorisms and etchings witness a profound engagement with the built environment. Ritchie writes poetry in order to better understand a project, using words to investigate the particularities or challenges of a site, and the process of composition to bring ideas into focus. His calligraphic etchings imagine the shape or spirit of commissions in simple but powerful strokes. Variably pragmatic and philosophical, often witty, his aphorisms on work and life from the importance of light to the nature and possibility of progress reveal a modernists belief in the potential of architecture to improve society. These are lines of thought, committed to paper before any designing begins. They demonstrate that, for Ritchie, being an architect is many more things besides. Ian Ritchie CBE RA is an internationally acclaimed architect. His built designs include the Leipzig Glass Hall, the Spire of Dublin, the elevator shafts for the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, winner of the RIBA National Award in 2007.
Swiss painter Robert Zünd (1827-1909), also known in Switzerland as ‘Master of the Beech Leaf’, is revered for his light-flooded paintings of bucolic landscapes. Swiss photographer Tobias Madörin, born 1965, has gained international recognition for his tableau-like images that document the interaction between the inhabitants and their surrounding environment. This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern in summer 2017, features work by both artists. Rather than merely enjoying the beauty of the sun-lit paradise Zünd depicts in his precise manner, the book invites us to look more closely. For this purpose, Zünd’s paintings are juxtaposed with Madörin’s photographs of the same views, captured today with an analogue large format camera. Thanks to the slowness of the procedure and the wealth of detail achieved in working with such an apparatus, Madörin’s photographs boast an intensity comparable to that of Zünd’s paintings in terms of precision of the gaze. Observation, the gaze, and the aptitude to see is the real topic of this exhibition and accompanying book. Bellevue: Robert Zünd (1827 1909) – Tobias Madörin (*1965), Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1 July to 17 October 2017. Text in English and German.
In 2006, the book Historic Houses in the Engadin: Architectural Interventions by Hans-Jörg Ruch brought the name and work of this Swiss architect to international attention. His new book, with equally opulent design and again lavishly illustrated, now documents the entire range of his achievements over nearly twenty-five years. His oeuvre comprises private houses and multi-unit residential buildings, public buildings such as museums or libraries, as well as infrastructure designs. A focus of the firm’s work is the rebuilding and restoration of existing and in particular of historic buildings. Close-up – Ruch & Partner Architects 1994-2016 features all of the firm’s realised buildings and projects to date, including the restored historic houses in the Engadine with the careful and sensitive contemporary interventions that made his name internationally known. Each is presented with atmospheric photographs and selected plans that demonstrate the firm’s approach and concepts and with a concise text. A topical essay on Ruch’s architecture in context with his biography and the surrounding Swiss mountain landscape.
Lee Mullican (1919-98) was best known for his inimitable West Coast-inspired explorations in abstraction, infused with mysticism and the transcendent. First exhibited as part of the pivotal exhibition of the Dynaton Group, which Mullican co-founded with fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, his works are today widely collected and held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others. The first book in more than a decade to focus on this important figure in twentieth-century American art, Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican surveys a key theme running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridisation of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond. The book explores the development of the Mullican’s work in the context of his time and his biography, looking also at the implications of Jungian philosophy in relation to his admiration of pre-Columbian and Native American cultures. Michael Auping’s essay is complemented by fifty full-colour illustrations, featuring major rare paintings and drawings by Mullican from the 1940s to the 1970s.