This is the first title in a new prestigious cultural tourism project by Lannoo Publishers. The Peter Paul Rubens Atlas illustrates the life of Rubens on a timeline: important dates and periods in the life of the Old Master are indicated and elaborated on in the main part of the book through text, images and maps. One of those maps could, for example, show Peter Paul Rubens’ stay in Italy or his diplomatic journeys, but it could also take the reader on a city walk through Antwerp, visiting places that are linked to Rubens and his work. The maps are designed to reflect the age in which the artist lived. More than striving for artistic comprehensiveness in terms of art history, these atlases are intended to reflect the context in which the artists lived, worked and flourished. Just think of the artistic exchange between Italy and Flanders, the influence of the Catholic Church and the religious strife of the time, the role of art promoters, etc. It goes without saying that the atlases are richly adorned with the work of the artists. The main goal of the three books that will make up the series is to encourage and help readers to further discover and interpret the Old Masters’ work and the locations in which they lived.

“The most important portraits to me are the ones of people who have enriched my own thinking or awareness. Areas of philosophy, religion, psychological perspectives, poetry, music, art history, women’s roles and the inner life are important issues for me – and all have been nurtured by these people whom I have met through portraiture.” – Victoria Crowe. Victoria Crowe is one of Britain’s most vital and original figurative painters. Here, Duncan Macmillan explores the exceptional skill of this remarkable artist’s portraits and Victoria Crowe, herself, contributes many insightful accounts of her own thoughts and perceptions as each work developed. This book also tells Crowe’s own story – both professional and personal – through her art. She has developed an approach to portraiture that seeks to do more than record the outward appearance of a person: she aims to represent something of the inner life. With 80 illustrations, the portraits include the artist’s family, composer Ronald Stevenson, pioneer medical scientist Dame Janet Vaughan, poet Kathleen Raine, actor Graham Crowden, psychiatrist Professor Sir Peter Higgs and many others.

Since 1972, the Drawings and Prints Department of the Louvre has published the reportoire of the Italian drawings held in its collections. This volume, the tenth in the series, is dedicated to the Bolognese and Emilian artists of the 17th century. Seicento is considered by all as the golden age of Bolognese painting, which not only enriched the city with many masterpieces but saw many of its main artists going to Rome, the capital of Baroque, to decorate its churches and palaces (from the Galleria Farnese by Annibale Carracci to the many domes frescoed by Lanfranco).

The volume includes close to 1000 drawings by artists such as Ludovico and Annibale Carracci, Bartolomeo Cesi, Bartolomeo Schedoni, Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco, Elisabetta Sirani, Giuseppe Maria Crespi e Donato Creti and it traces the evolution of draughtmanship in Bologna and Emilia, from the Accademia degli Incamminati to the spreading of classicism and baroque.

Text in French.

Contents: Preface by Henri Loyrette (President of the Louvre); Introduction; The Teaching of the Carraccis; Contemporary Artists of the Carraccis; The Influcence of Bologna; Baroque and Classiscism in Bologna and Emilia; Bibliography; Tables of Concordance; List of the Artists; Index of the Collectors

Also available:
Battista Franco ISBN 9788889854457
Baccio Bandinelli ISBN 9788889854631

“The mention of Mongiardino still elicits instant reverence. With his alchemic blurring of eras, the sheer scope and commitment of his massive projects and insistence on valuing ambience above so-called authenticity, he attained mythic stature.” – The New York Times Style Magazine Roomscapes is not only a beautiful testament to Mongiardino’s imaginative creations, the magnificent rooms he re-shaped and decorated in ancient Italian and Parisian palaces, English houses, New York apartments, but it is an important text that analyses space, function, decoration and lighting of rooms. It is meant as a guide to conceive spaces that are inhabited through time and by time. Sketches, drawings, and models by Mongiardino, next to the images of the finished rooms, make the creative process clear and showcase his extraordinary ability and taste. Roomscapes was originally published in 1993 and has long been out of print. Contents: Preface by Giovanni Agosti; Introduction; Part one: The genesis of a room; Sketches; Chapter one: Space, measure, and models; Chapter two: The function of a room and its appearance; Chapter three: Decoration: ways to invent it, transform it, correct it; Chapter four: Decoration and the appeal of the exotic; Part two: Illusion: the eye deceived; Chapter five: Materials and the simulation of materials; Chapter two: The birth and development of perspective; Conclusion; Appendix: 16 unpublished sketches by Renzo Mongiardino.

Life’s game is measured in episodes of awareness, i.e. self-awareness, an awareness of the way things work, or that things are not always what they seem. Systems dynamics are full of shocks to the system. Whether we are witnessing the physics of a rational system or the profundity of an irrational system, the shocks come with a sense of, ‘You mean you can do that?’ This book examines systems dynamics from the perspective of the author’s own triangulated model comprised of common environments (those shared environments at risk of over-use or degradation), the institutions we design to manage those commons, and the human behavior associated with our investment in the triad. The Feedbacks between the three comprise the Policy Arena for collective decision-making and form a backdrop for shaping personal actions. Beautifully illustrated with student case study research covering a range of topics from the past twelve years, the work is written for a wide audience including academics, researchers, designers, and the concerned citizen.

Shim-Sutcliffe’s masterful work at Point William intertwines landscape and architecture with ancient rock and water reshaping and reimagining a site on the Canadian Shield over two decades. Found conditions and new buildings are interwoven and choreographed to create a rich spatial experience moving between inside and out. Kenneth Frampton provides an insightful introduction with selected images and his own sketches framing a way of seeing Point William for the reader. Michael Webb’s provocative interview with Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe describes their evolving vision for Point William and their two-decade journey towards its realisation. Acclaimed photographers Ed Burtynsky, James Dow and Scott Norsworthy contribute through their powerful images capturing the spirit of Point William through the seasons and over time.

More than half of America’s waterbodies are unsafe for swimming, fishing, and as sources of drinking. Why? Because of unsustainable city building and poor farming practice. Beyond water quality problems, dysfunctional streams cause flooding and erosion of property, leading to neighbourhood blights. Not only can this be reversed, but repair of degraded urban streams can be a powerful agent for reinventing the physical environments of post-industrial cities. This requires transdisciplinary collaboration between the fields of ecological engineering and urban design. The American city was uniquely premised on fusions of landscape and urbanism: a tradition with plenty of room for innovation. However, watershed plans remain data-and-policy-driven documents with a singular interest in repairing waterbodies. They have little to say about the city and urban design. Conversely, urban planning has not codified the value of healthy ecosystems within which cities are built. In this age of the Anthropocene, when most ecosystems are human-dominated, resilient urban design must account for biological processes. This book introduces watershed management into urban design with one simple demand: that every new development contribute to watershed stewardship, where infrastructure and building deliver ecological services in addition to urban services. The Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan formulates a planning vocabulary for use among professionals and decision makers to engage this new design market.

Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpieces is a book that explores the history of art through the insights of students and critics. It engages with challenging, thought-provoking themes such as the origins of creativity in prehistoric art, the meaning and significance of the classical paradigm in art history since antiquity, the actual application of Renaissance art theory to an examination of famous masterpieces, and the tradition of individual subjectivity and expression in modern art reaching back to Van Gogh. In addition, one of its special features is an exploration of a new area of philosophical inquiry, which re-examines the 18th century as both a period of rationalism and anti-rationalism (rather than the “Age of Reason”, as it is commonly referred to). With its focus on well-known and often-discussed masterpieces, this work is adept at including both the mandatory framework of current critical thought and introducing fresh ideas and perspectives.

In its considered response to the globalisation of culture, HCMA has consistently achieved an architecture that is expressive of time and place, and uniquely interprets Canadian values of openness and inclusivity. The firm’s concentration on civic buildings denotes a deeply-rooted concern for community, and recognition that in contemporary pluralistic society’s schools, libraries and community centres are both symbolically and literally, the meeting places for all sectors of our communities regardless of demography, faith or ethnicity. What distinguishes HCMA’s design approach is its conceptual shift from the traditional departure points of form or function, to a more organic and humanist approach by which inhabitation of the building and its surroundings mediate the interface between these two opposing forces. While function implies an empirical definition of purpose, and form a pre-occupation with sculptural abstraction, inhabitation connotes an understanding that buildings should embrace the richness and diversity with which our lives unfold. Places: Public Architecture explores a selection of key projects by HCMA which offer insight into the firm’s specific approach to community building through public architecture. Featured projects many of which have been challenged by contemporary advancements in technology, include schools, libraries, fire halls, childcare centres, and more. Through the practice of architecture HCMA asks what is the future of the library, of education, and of public space in an increasingly online age? The book features critical text by accomplished writer Jim Taggart, professional photography, lucid architectural drawings, and details, as well as a look at the firm’s design process of iterative modelling/diagramming and research on contemporary topics.

Over the past years, Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury has become renowned for a body of work that responds with great sensitivity to places, local circumstances, and the demands of a building’s users. At the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Chowdhury presented four recent projects his firm URBANA has realised in Bangladesh in a fascinating exhibition which he has designed with equal sensitivity and care.

The labyrinth is an age-old space of intrigue, discovery and accident, which has fascinated architects throughout history. For his installation in Venice, Chowdhury challenged spatial perceptions by a simple turn: the labyrinth – which hides and blocks – is suddenly made transparent. Notwithstanding the obvious reference to Venetian glass, the labyrinth retains, or even accentuates, a sense of spatial disorientation.

The installation was conceived not merely as a hyper-maze but rather as an expression of the anxiety that the artist experiences in his work due to a myriad of uncertainties. From design to construction, funding to maintenance, the part of the world where URBANA chiefly works presents itself with challenges at every turn, and it is in this milieu that an architect must operate with firm resolve. Chowdhury’s Glass Labyrinth in Venice seems to explicate the notion that, although an architect has a clear vision of what he wants to do, the path to achieving that in the environment in which he operates, is laden with perplexing barriers.

This new book explores and documents Kashef Chowdhury’s intriguing installation in Venice with beautiful photographs by Eric Chenal and an illuminating text by Robert McCarter.

Swiss architecture is commonly conotated with the names of celebrated architects such as Marion Botta, Peter Zumthor, or Herzog & de Meuron, and with their iconic buildings. Yet there is much more to the topic than, for example, beautiful private houses or spectacular public projects such as museums. This new book looks at the Swiss variety of co-operative housing developments with a special focus on the city of Zurich.

Over the past two decades, such developments have changed significantly. Support by public funding and open competitions have helped to design and realise a vast number of highly innovative co-operative projects in Zurich over that period. Many of them can serve as well as models for how to meet the constantly increasing demand for urban housing.

New Housing in Zurich is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary co-operative estates in Switzerland’s largest city. It features some 50 projects by type, lavishly illustrated with images and plans, thus also providing a typology of multi-unit residential architecture. Essays on the history of co-operative housing in Switzerland, the interplay between co-operatives and the city and their impact on urban development on the larger scale, on new urban and architectural concepts, on co-operatives in the post-industrial age, and on their social dynamics round out the volume.

What does an architectural guide look like in an age when the world’s knowledge is carried around in small devices in your pocket? The second edition of the Guide to Buildings in Zug, documenting a century of planning and construction in the canton, provides an answer: It is a large, 300-page illustrated volume that is dedicated not only to the architecture, but also to questions of spatial and landscape planning. Packed with images, the architectural guide is intended for the coffee tables of a wider audience, rather than the library.

Text in German.

U Thong, 100 or so km north of Bangkok, has been an important site for over 2,000 years, as witnessed by the discovery of a 3rd century Roman coin. The moated city was connected to the Chin river, thereby gaining access to international trade routes.

The inhabitants of the early centres of Classic Southeast Asian civilisation were already wealthy enough to own large quantities of ornate jewellery such as imported beads from India and carved stone from Taiwan. They had so much gold that central and western mainland Southeast Asia including the U Thong area was known in Sanskrit as Suvarnabhumi, the Golden Land.

This publication brings a new perspective to the study of ancient gold from U Thong. The author is a trained research metallurgy scientist, and these skills have been brought to bear on the highly significant corpus of early gold artefacts found in and around the moated city, the largest accumulation of such artefacts from any of the ancient muang of Thailand.

The goldsmiths were as highly skilled as those anywhere else in the world, but almost all previous studies have been written by people who can only study the outer appearance to draw conclusions regarding its age and place of origin.

Mishmash is a narrative poem about a funny mix up that happens amongst a group of animals. These animals refuse to stick to their own conventional sounds and take on the sounds of other animals instead. Here you will find kittens that ‘oink’ like pigs and ducklings that ‘ribbit’ like frogs! A truly delightful tale of animal mischief. The author Korney Chukovsky was a renowned Russian writer and poet. This book is illustrated by an award-winning artist Francesca Yarbusova, the wife and collaborator of Yuri Norstein. She was the co-creator of the animated films Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales – the films that were declared to be the Best Animated Film of All Time. Also available in the Norstein & Yarbusova Collection – a beautiful series of children’s picture books based on the art of famous Russian artists and animators Yuri Norstein and Francesca Yarbusova are: The Fox and the Hare ISBN: 9780984586714 and The Hedgehog in the Fog ISBN: 9780984586707.

David Hockney’s interpretation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales are like no other version you will have read before. Although inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac, Hockney’s extraordinary etchings re-imagine these strange and supernatural stories for a modern audience, capturing their distinctive atmosphere in a style that is recognisably the artist’s own. Reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1969, Hockney’s book brings together some well-known tales – Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin – with others that are less familiar. Informed by great art of the past, attuned to idiosyncrasies of character and incident, and fresh in execution and content, his illustrations invite us to read each one as if for the first time.

Charlotte Perriand (1903-99) is undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in 20th-century interior design. She was one of the pioneers in introducing the metal tube as building material for furniture, paving the way for machine age aesthetic in interiors in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret she created a number of iconic classics, such as the chaise-longue LC4, the armchair LC2, or the sling chair LC1.

This second part of the new three-volume monograph on Perriand covers the period 1940-55 with her extensive stays in Japan 1942-42 and 1953-55, and with her designs for the reconstruction in France after WW II. It also investigates extensively her collaboration with Jean Prouvé 1952-55. Moreover, the new volume looks at her work together with with Jeanneret and again also Le Corbusier during the 1950s, and it documents Perriand’s involvement and role in founding the Useful Forms movement in 1949. The book features again an abundance of images and documents, mostly in colour and many of them previously unpublished.

Charlotte Perriand: Complete Works is the authoritative source on this key figure of 20th-century interior design for scholars, dealers, and collectors. Each of the three lavishly illustrated volumes is completed by annotations, index, and bibliography.

Also available: Charlotte Perriand – Complete Works Vol. 1: 1930-1940

This is an artist’s book on illness and dying. Elisabeth Zahnd, artist and photographer, had to experience and bear the fatal illness and death of her child, who was diagnosed of an incurable brain tumour at the age of five. Zahnd soon started not only to accompany as a caring mother the child’s long ordeal, but also to document as an artist the transition and transfiguration of this young human being. She never exploits the child’s suffering for her artistic project, though. Even in close-up she keeps a distance and the child’s privacy. Two essays accompany the images. One is on the artistic and art historical context of Elisabeth Zahnd’s portraits of Chiara. The second, philosophical-ethical text is about illness, dying and death and the our related fears and emotions. Created out of personal affection, this photographic essay reaches beyond an individual destiny. Its images touch on the question of how we deal with suffering and death. But they are also about life, warmth and security, and love. The book also aims at helping to take away the taboo from these important issues concerning everyone. Text in English and German.

Guadalupe Ruiz has undertaken an artistic research of the social and demographic discrepancies between the various parts of the Colombian capital Bogotá. The population of each of the city’s six taxation classes ranges from extremely affluent to impoverished. Ruiz looks at their houses and apartments, whole interiors and single pieces of furniture, decorative elements and other of the inhabitants’ personal items, family photographs and depictions of saints. This panorama of private rooms and traces of their inhabitants’ tastes and ways of life shows economical discrepancies but also makes traceable remarkable cultural parallels between the classes. Guadalupe Ruiz – Bogotá D.C. is a subtle, yet provoking examination of the artist’s native city. It presents Ruiz’s work for the first time in print and complete. The series’ 120 images are arranged by neighbourhood, and an included map locates each individual image within the neighborhoods and the entire city. Text in English, French, Spanish and German.

The mythic figure of Prometheus has inspired many poets, painters and musicians since the age of romanticism. For Goethe and Henry Fuseli, the titan who stole the fire from the gods of ancient Greece became the embodiment of mankind struggling for autonomy and self-determination.

Yet the fire has come not only to our benefit. Along with it came also menace upon mankind. This is the subject of a major work by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. In his film installation ½ Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) of 2011, two sculptures slowly rotate before a camera: Arno Breker’s (1900-91) Prometheus and Zwitter (hermaphrodite) by the German art-brut sculptor Karl Genzel (1871-1925). Both works were on display in the Nazi propaganda art shows of 1937 in Munich, Breker’s in the Great German Art Exhibition and Genzel’s in the coinciding defaming show Degenerate Art.

This new book juxtaposes paintings and drawings reflecting the Prometheus myth by Henry Fuseli with Javier Téllez’s capital work of contemporary art. It is published to coincide with an exhibit at Kunsthaus Zürich in summer 2014.

Text in English and German.

The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland s legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 – 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek’s Image Archive is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 – 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 – 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 – 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the ‘Golden Age’ of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and of the era when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection’s main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 – 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships. Text in English and German.