Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and formerly part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, is a city built on and with oil. In fact, oil and urbanism in Baku have been completely intertwined, economically, politically, and physically in the spaces of the city. Its first oil boom in the late 19th century was driven by the Russian branch of the Nobel family modernising the exploitation of oil fields around Baku, and local oil barons pouring their new wealth into building a cosmopolitan city centre. During the Soviet period, Baku became the site of an urban experiment: the shaping an oil city of socialist man. This project included Neft Dashlari, a city built on trestles in the Caspian Sea, housing thousands of workers, schools, shops, gardens, clinics, cinemas and more. This first off-shore rig in the world became the emblem of Baku’s second oil boom. Today, Baku is experiencing its third oil boom. For Baku’s city planners and business elites, that future is based on a careful reading of Baku as a project in which urbanism and oil are inextricably linked. This new book investigates how oil stimulated urban development in Baku, and explores in detail the more complex and important question of how the disparate spatial logics, knowledge bases, and practices of oil production and urban production intersected, impacted and transformed one another. Based on a vast research project and drawing on rich and previously unpublished material, Baku – Oil and Urbanism is organised into three broadly conceived historical periods defined by the political, economic, technological conditions in which the interwoven evolution of oil and urban production unfolded. The book also features a new photo essay by celebrated photographer Iwan Baan.

The artist Humphrey Ocean RA has painted portraits of Sir Paul McCartney and Philip Larkin, among many others. But alongside these prestigious commissions, he has always returned to drawing the simpler things in life: our ‘alluringly unnatural world’, as he puts it. The result is this idiosyncratic and charming collection of birds, all rendered in with humour and a bold brush. With a species to discover on every page, this book is the perfect gift for any keen ornithologist, aspiring twitcher or dedicated listener to Tweet of the Day. As well as birdwatching around his home and studio in South London, Ocean regularly visits his sister, who is a nun in Nairobi and has loved birds all her life. There, he paints Kenyan birds such as the Eurasian bee-eater, the bulbul and the flycatcher that are ‘local, a bit like our garden birds so nothing overly exotic, but of course to me they are’. They join the familiar gulls, thrushes and tits of the gardens, parks and hedgerows of the UK in this beautifully produced collection.

Author and photographer John Lander takes the magnificent UNESCO World Heritage sites of Japan as a starting point for exploring the country’s architecture, history, customs and festivals. Lander, who has lived in Japan for 35 years, travelled to almost all the country’s UNESCO sites: from well-known places like Mount Fuji to hidden temple gardens and hard-to-reach wild islands. This book also includes cultural elements listed as intangible world heritage, providing intimate portraits of Japanese cuisine, crafts and performance arts. With a lyrical preface by Pico Iyer and illustrated with over 180 full-colour photographs, World Heritage Japan is Lander’s personal photographic tribute to a diverse and ancient culture – a stunning visual journey across Japan.

Upon setting foot in Dhaka, with its beautifully landscaped gardens adorning ancient mosques and monuments, it becomes clear that this is a city steeped in history. One of the oldest settlements in Bangladesh, it is today among the largest cities in the world, and rapid, often unplanned, urbanisation has vastly outpaced sustainability, threatening the historic buildings and communities that make up the city’s cultural soul. But, despite bursting at the seams, Dhaka’s six centuries of history are still visible if we look carefully in the shadows of the tall buildings, in the spaces between the speeding cars. Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury’s camera captures a record of the capital city of the local character that may soon be lost due to urban development. In Chowdhury’s photographs, a woman hangs sheets of polythene to dry and resell, a blind man sings mystic love songs. Other photographs reflect Dhaka’s state of social and cultural flux, like an image of weary night-shift workers returning from a wholesale market in the late morning or of the barely visible lights of a pick-up truck concealed to prevent theft. Chowdhury is one of South Asia’s most renowned architects, and Dhaka: Memories or Lost constitutes his deeply personal tribute to the city.

Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years. Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo: each metropolis is also a zone where mankind’s will to create is driving constant change. Aerni documents this change in a scrupulously prepared and carefully designed series of images. But also when he focuses on receding glaciers in the Alps, his studies of cages in zoological gardens and of mankind’s interventions in nature, the extraordinary carefulness and quality inherent to all of Aerni’s work is captivating. It sets his oeuvre in sharp contrast to the quickly done, impromptu photography that has become so widespread in recent years. Sites and Signs is the first comprehensive monograph on Aerni’s photographic work. The book presents his complete work with an emphasis on the most recent series. Essays on his work in the context of contemporary photography and on images of architecture and landscape, and a complete catalogue of Aerni’s oeuvre so far round out the book. Text in English & German.

From the Palazzo Vecchio to the Forte Belvedere, through the Uffizi, the Vasari Corridor, the Pitti Palace, and the Boboli Gardens, Florence is honeycombed with a series of public art collections that is unparalleled in Europe for its size and for the variety and value of its holdings. Taken all together, the museums of Florence are one of the wonders of the world, for the spiritual values that they embody as much as for the works they contain.

The painting collections in the state museums of Florence are unequalled for their quality, historical significance, and for the sheer number of works; never before have they been presented in a publication of such splendid technical quality. Thus the reader can trace the various phases and great moments of Florentine painting, including lesser known works of the seventeenth century; can appreciate the presence of masterpieces from other, perhaps unknown, schools; and can examine details different from the standard ones consecrated by tradition.

Text in English and Italian.

Alongside the classical reading of the garden as a secluded and circumscribed place of yearning full of meditative, spiritual, and philosophical possibilities, it is viewed in the exhibition as a place of duality and contradiction: a threshold between reality and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, harmony and chaos, between being shut out and being included. In today’s world, defined by radical climate change and migratory flows, the garden can be seen as a place of paradise and exile, reflecting within its borders themes as pressing as the anthropocene, seed politics, the legacies of colonialism and historical segregation. In addition to deliberate political positions, the Garden of Earthly Delights features works that also bring to life the sensual dimensions of gardens: immersive installations and video works show an intensive abundance of nature, but also the fragility of the paradise-like state. Artists: Maria Thereza Alves, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Hicham Berrada, John Cage, Tacita Dean, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Futurefarmers, Lungiswa Gqunta, Rashid Johnson, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Lawler, Renato Leotta, Isabel Lewis and LABOUR, Libby Harward, Jumana Manna, Uriel Orlow, Heather Phillipson, Pipilotti Rist, Maaike Schoorel, Taro Shinoda, Zheng Bo. Text in English and German.

The impressive Château de Chenonceau is the jewel of the French Loire Valley. The fairytale type castle has had a particularly rich history and has always been inhabited and curated by intelligent, strong-willed women such as Catherine Briçonnet, Diane de Potiers, Catherine de Medici and Louise de Lorraine – hence its nickname ‘Ladies’ Castle’. Through the ages the spaces have been imprinted with the souls of those who built, inhabited and loved the castle. Every part of Chenonceau’s interior and exterior – not in the least the castle’s impressive gardens – exudes peace, harmony and elegance. Since 2015 Jean-Francois Boucher has been appointed floral scenographer of the estate. Together with his small team he creates new floral compositions for the castle’s rooms every week. These ‘staged’ flowers emphasise the history of the estate just like any other piece of art or furniture does. Their designs blend in perfectly with the interiors and are in beautiful harmony with the room’s colour codes, perfumes and functions. Sometimes they even wink at poetry, art or the historical events that took place in these spaces. The Bouquets of Chenonceau is a magnificent coffee table book that will please both lovers of history and fans of floral design. Text in English and French.

Furniture by Architects features an eclectic range of extraordinary and eye-catching furniture designs by leading contemporary architects. Following the tradition of great masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, these top architects and designers have extended their talents to create beautiful and unusual furniture pieces and collections for the rapidly growing and increasingly global market for designer furniture. The furniture pieces showcased in this book include tables, chairs, sofas, benches, cabinets, shelving and lighting fixtures as well as some unique one-off pieces. The featured styles range from futuristic to classical, and geometric to organic, covering the full spectrum of contemporary furniture design. Materials used range from state-of-the-art plastics and the best quality timber to found objects and recycled metals. The book explores why, historically, so many iconic furniture pieces have been designed by architects. Think of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair and the now ubiquitous Eames Lounge and Ottoman. Essentially, the same fundamental principles used for designing extraordinary buildings can be applied at a much smaller scale to create outstanding pieces of furniture, which embrace form and function to become highly collectable objects of art. Furniture by Architects will appeal to collectors and creators of designer and custom furniture, as well as architects, interior designers and everyone with an interest in high-quality design.

In the 21st century the architects and designers of urban spaces face great challenges to integrate nature in order to transform ‘cement forests’ into ‘forest cities’. Perhaps the best solution is to go green with vertical landscapes. More than just a decorative trend, this is a means of bringing life and greenery into metropolitan areas by using different framing systems to create compositions of plant life and adapt them to diverse settings, including offices, factories, parking lots, hotels, and installations within larger parks. Enriched by the reflections of the inventive protagonists of this fertile new aesthetic, Going Green with Vertical Landscapes is organised by theme and canvases early experiments conducted by famous design companies such as Vo Trong Nghia Architects (VTN), Fytogreen Australia and RYUICHI ASHIZAWA ARCHITECTS & associates. All of these projects combine man-made materials, recent technologies, and diverse types of vegetation to conquer the vertical dimension.

Modern Urban Landscapes is a significant contribution to the conversation on sustainable landscape design, providing energy efficient models and water saving landscape ideas. There are many factors that would help realise energy efficient landscapes, including (but not limited to) the use of energy saving lamps, such as LED; the integration and adoption of renewable energy, including solar-powered and wind-powered landscape lighting; energy-efficient landscape design, particularly through the correct placement and selection of shade trees, and the creation of wind breaks. This book shows techniques for creating landscapes that also save water, for example by choosing correct planting materials; reducing stormwater run-off through the use of bio-swales, rain gardens and green roofs and walls; reducing water usage in landscapes through best-practice water-wise garden techniques, including irrigation using gray water. Permeable paving materials can also help to reduce stormwater runoff and allow rainwater to infiltrate into the ground and replenish groundwater rather than run into surface water systems.

Mixing aesthetics, architecture, arrondissements and elegance in a very Parisian way, this richly illustrated new volume on the world’s most bewitching city shows Paris in all its light, shade, glamour and grandeur. From magnificent squares to exquisite side streets, tucked-away gardens to quiet neighbourhood bistros, Paris Secrets: Architecture, Interiors, Quartiers, Corners shows the sophistication and grace that underline this, the City of Light. Wind your way through Paris via pages shimmering with seductive stairwells, irresistible bistros and patisseries, beguiling back streets, beautiful boulevards, enticing courtyards and must-see interiors. A modern guide for the urban aesthete – and perfect for either those who have already fallen in love with Paris, or those planning a memorable first visit – it is both an insightful travel resource and an architectural study capturing Paris’s elegance and atmosphere in spectacular detail.

Sir Edwin Lutyens is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest architects. In a career of over 50 years, spanning the Victorian, Edwardian and modern eras of architecture, Lutyens was prolific. His work ranged from great country houses, city commercial office buildings, his famous World War I memorials across Europe and Britain, and his magnum opus designs for New Delhi built during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite such diversity of building types across his long career, Lutyens’s most celebrated works remain his country houses, which first established his reputation during the 1890s. As Lutyens’s practice flourished his work became widely promoted in publications such as Country Life magazine, and his houses, particularly those designed in the vernacular manner, would subsequently give rise to an entire genre of the English country house that became known, as it is to this day, as a ‘Lutyens-style’ house. Sir Edwin Lutyens: The Arts and Crafts Houses brings together in new, wide-format, full-colour photography a definitive collection of 45 of Lutyens’s great Arts and Crafts houses, in which he ingeniously blended the style of the Arts and Crafts movement with his own inventive interpretation of the Classical language of architecture. The book features 575 all-new current photographs of the houses, inside and outside, together with a selection of floor plans of the houses, and a fresh interpretation of Lutyens’s enduring architectural genius.

Since they first travelled to Japan together in 2005, this country has been the key focus of the joint work of Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber. The two photographers have been tracing the excesses in the country’s subculture and pop scene and the pressures in Japanese society, while also seeking to explore urban structures and the interrelation between architectural and social barriers.

Their photography is not about capturing a single image. Stuke and Sieber work in series and sequences. They create layers and mix materials, they take pictures of computer screens and posters, they construct a whole set of images and constellations, depicting various motifs with different media and equipment.

The result has little to do with the traditional iconography of Japanese tea ceremonies and rock gardens. Stuke and Sieber are not interested in noble or nostalgic settings. In their photo series and compositions, Japan emerges as a country of tarmac roads and sidewalks, of power lines and garage doors, a country of flickering TV screens and virtual realities.

This publication provides insights into the current oeuvre of the photographers and – in keeping with the spirit of their work method – is a mixture between monograph, artist book, and fanzine.

Text in English and German.

Looking for 5 classic places to eat a Francesinha?

What are the 5 coolest spots to grab a coffee? 

Where in Porto can you find 5 projects by Eduardo Souto de Moura?

What are the 5 quirkiest sights in the city?

Which are the 5 best museums for curious visitors?

Visit Portugal’s second city in the footsteps of the sisters Joana and Sofia de Lacerda. They were born and raised in Porto. Through their website they share their pick of places to stay, and places to visit in their hometown, and the rest of Portugal.

In this guide, they have compiled their local expertise for visitors who want to discover the lesser-known spots of Porto, and for locals who want to get to know their city even better. 500 addresses and facts in total, presented in original lists of 5.

Includes maps and an index.

Hidden Malta gives visitors an opportunity to explore the hidden gems of the Maltese archipelago. Beyond the thriving main streets that attract the tourist crowds, there are so many other places waiting to be discovered, including churches, small museums, and places to eat, where you can meet and connect with locals. The guide also covers Malta’s many annual festivals and traditions, with historical re-enactments, wine, beer and music festivals, as well as food fairs held in various parts of the islands throughout the year.
In this alternative guide to Malta, licensed tourist guide Vincent Zammit pays tribute to the islands that he knows intimately, choosing to highlight places that are not well-known or frequented by visitors to Malta, giving them the opportunity to discover these well-kept secrets and the Malta that he loves.
Also available: Hidden Belgium, Hidden Scotland, Hidden Holland, Hidden Brooklyn, Hidden Tenerife. Discover the series: the500hiddensecrets.com

Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal.

Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist’s career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia’s sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.

Residences occupy a pivotal position in Japanese architecture. As an extension of the residential space, the Japanese courtyard garden is unique, featuring symbolic garden elements and designs that date back to centuries. This book is a collection of more than 30 residential courtyard design works interpreted for the modern-day home, sometimes extending beyond the traditional defines of a Japanese courtyard. It not only selects a wealth of pictures, which shows their visual beauty, but also provides technical drawings to reflect the design in better detail. The Japanese courtyard pursues the ultimate in being an area of calm, held in nature’s embrace, where one may reflect and rest in quietude to contemplate the deeper meaning of life. And every rock arrangement, tree placement, element/nature symbolised, and even scenery framed is meticulously thought out to achieve this. This book seeks to inspire residential and landscape designers to behold nature within a home with fresh eyes and to let rest old methods as new connections and perceptions are sought, in order to build a different kind of residential space that draws on the essence of a Japanese courtyard.

The Detailed Notes are luxury notecards that feature a striking close-up of a great artwork on the front, and the entire artwork on the back. Each set is housed in a presentation-quality box and each card measures 133 x 110 mm.

This set, The Trees of North America, reproduces details of four exquisite hand-coloured plates from François-André Michaux’s classic North American Sylva, by such masters of botanical art as Pierre-Joseph Redouté and Pancrace Bessa.

In a fast-paced world with mega upheaval, including climate crises and a global pandemic, the allure of growing your own food, being self-sufficient, and living green is immense. This yearning for not being wholly reliant on the supermarket, and the growing concerns over pesticides and food miles has led to the resurgence in seeking old-world skills. As showcased in Urban Homesteads, the benefits of a productive garden on your doorstep or within arm’s reach, tending to chickens, harvesting your own honey, and using eco-friendly water-harvesting techniques are clear: fresh herbs, vegetables, and fruit on tap, fresh eggs, delicious honey; plus living at a slower pace, better value for money, and a more soothing and mindful existence. Of course, a healthy garden and environment also attracts beneficial insects and birds.

Get inspired with this book’s range of eco-friendly possibilities from around the globe. With beautiful full-colour photos, gathered here are stories of people who have set up their own productive and abundant back yard or patio, as well as examples of great vertical planters, indoor gardens, and those who have reached into the urban community allotment. Use this book to start your own journey with an urban homestead lifestyle, with lots of generous tips, modern green concepts as well as a twist of modern, technically savvy know-how. All the practical guidance you need on how to be the change you want to see.

Giada Ripa’s photos form an itinerary of landscapes traversing Italy, North to South, focusing on five regions: Friuli, Lombardy, Tuscany, Abruzzo, and Sicily. This account is not limited to a photographic album; rather, it calls upon champions from each area who, through engaging interviews, describe the positive impact on its territory of the commitment of an important local business. Concrete examples of this cooperation are the environmental revival carried out in the Prealpi Giulie Nature Reserve in Friuli, the conservation of local species of flowers carried out with the cooperation of the Botanical Gardens in Palermo, and stretches of land made available and leased free of charge.

Thus, The Thin Line represents a hope, but also an awareness of the territory and of those who not only inhabit it now, but will come to inhabit it in the future.

Text in English and Italian

This major work, first published in 1950, is still considered the classic book on the subject. It provides a comprehensive, critical and well-illustrated survey of the portrayal of plants across over three thousand years, at a more compact size.

Of the first edition, the poet and gardening writer, Vita Sackville-West said: “Let no one think this is a book only for the specialist. It is essential for the specialist, certainly, but it is also for all the flower-lovers and all those who enjoy the by-ways of biography and the added attraction of good writing”.

This edition contains 123 colour plates (more than twice as many as the first edition), alongside 148 black-and-white illustrations. It invites the reader to appreciate the works of the greatest botanical illustrators both past and present.