Considering the activity of the numerous foundations that contributed in spreading new expressive languages, today appears to be a fundamental operation in view of an interpretative widening of art history. Starting from this consideration, this publication – in two volumes – traces the path of the Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, established in New York in 1982 with the aim of promoting Italian art in the United States.

Water belongs to our most profound dreams: it evokes motherhood, cleanliness, purity, sensuality, and death. Naturally, this is true for every civilisation, but in Islam this series of ideas found its most profound meaning, turning water into one of the cornerstones of human existence: a cornerstone that is both spiritual as well as social and aesthetic. Statements in the Koran and subsequent literature illustrate the historic development of the many roles and meanings of water and the incarnation of its significance in Islamic art and craftsmanship. This volume tells a story through images, artefacts, books, and miniatures: technology, everyday life, and art, which for centuries mirrored one another in the many ways of enjoying and using water.

Despite some field research our knowledge of the sacred among the Mumuye is still embryonic. In all these acephalic groups of a binary and antinomic nature, the complex va constitutes an extremely varied semantic field in which certain aspects are accentuated depending on the circumstances. Religious power is linked to the strength contained in sacred objects, of which only the elders are the guardians. Moreover, this gerontocracy relies on a system of initiatory stages which one must pass to have access to the status of ‘religious leader’. Geographically isolated, the Mumuye were able to resist the attacks of the Muslim invaders, the British colonial authority and the activities of the different Christian missions for a long time. As a result the Mumuye practised woodcarving until the beginning of our century. In 1970 Philip Fry published his essay on the statuary of the Mumuye of which the analysis of the endogenous network has so far lost nothing of its value. Basing himself on in situ observations, Jan Strybol attempted to analyse the exogenous network of this woodcarving. Thus he was able to document about forty figures and some masks and additionally to identify more than twenty-five Mumuye artists as well as a specific type of sculpture as being confined to the Mumuye Kpugbong group. During and after the Biafran war, hundreds of Mumuye sculptures were collected. Based on information gathered between 1970 and 1993 the author has demonstrated that a certain number of these works are not Mumuye but must be attributed to relic groups scattered in Mumuye territory.

Architecture and automobiles have been intrinsically linked since the dawn of the internal combustion engine – from the assembly plant to the showroom and on to that ubiquitous fixture of the artificial landscape, the service station. The streamlined forms of automobiles have often inspired architects and some have even ventured into designing their own cars. Features Foster and Partners, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, ONL, Renzo Piano, Populous, Zaha Hadid, UNStudio and Massimiliano Fuksas. Projects presented include the BMW Museum in Munich, the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, the Audi museum in Ingolstadt by 24-H, Manuel Gautrand’s Citroen museum on the Champs Elyssee in Paris, and the Regio Emilia bridge by Santiago Calatrava in Italy.

How do our minds work when we design? How do we organise and assimilate information, create and evaluate options, and make decisions? These questions have fascinated and absorbed architect and sculptor Richard Bertman (FAIA) since his graduate school days. Now, after a 40-year career, Bertman has used the design of a vacation house as an experiment to explore these questions. The result, documented in The Design Process and the Art of the Single Family Home, is a fascinating and revealing insight into the creative process. With detailed notes and sketches, Bertman charts each stage of the design process, questioning and examining why certain decisions are made, how problems are solved, and generally exploring the processes involved in creative thinking.

Industrial heritage is an important part of our built environment and landscape. It provides tangible and intangible links to our past and has great potential to play a significant role in the futures of our cities, towns, and rural environments. The projection and redevelopment of industrial heritage can contribute to the building of social and cultural capital, environmental sustainability, and urban regeneration. This book showcases a selection of works completed since 2010 with a wide global distribution. It highlights an encouraging increase in the practice of the transformation, redevelopment, and adaptive reuse of industrial structures. From under-utilised, disused, or discarded reminders of times past, the latest metamorphoses of buildings and structures have imbued them with new purposes in what could be regarded as one more stage in a continuous process of industrial evolution. The four essays written by authors from a variety of backgrounds and locations offer a rich addition to the selection of case studies and could serve as opportunities for further research. This book provides direct, informational reference to architects, researchers, and decision-makers.

Includes projects located in France, Sweden, China, Spain, Chile, the Netherlands, USA, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, South Africa, Italy, Canada, Thailand, Latvia, Belgium, Estonia, and India.

Over nearly three decades, Paczowski & Fritsch Architects has established itself as an impressive studio that spectacularly fuses the complex mysteries of the art of building with technological rationality, contemporary culture, and the expressive requirements of the project’s image. It has been consolidating its experience in the sectors of public buildings, service buildings, as well as collective and individual housing; it also specialises in logistics and transport, supermarkets, and high-end retail. The office has played an important role in carrying out important urban planning studies, and excels in the fields of sustainable development and BIM (Building Information Modeling).

This beautifully presented book serves to highlight the incredible output of this world-leader in architecture and design. Internationally renowned architectural writer Philip Jodidio writes an insightful essay on the variety and intelligence that these architects bring to their work. Jodidio engages with the directorship directly, illuminating on their visionary practice, their unique ethos, and the plans for the future under the new generation at the helm. While remaining true to its original philosophy, the office has been successful in numerous competitions and has won significant prizes and international acclaim.

Walking and cycling are becoming a fashionable lifestyle choice – both as a low-impact exercise and a healthy means of travel. There is ever-growing demand for the construction of pedestrian and cyclist paths internationally, and it’s the rate of growth that highlights new challenges as well as opportunities for landscape designers. This book showcases several exciting design projects of pedestrian and cyclist paths across a range of environments, from cities to local communities, urban to larger national parks. The book includes an informative design guide and a set of criteria that should provide strong reference materials for professionals and students in related design fields.

The term “smart” in reference to homes and communities describes places whose function is related to or affected by information technology. In the wake of the ongoing digital revolutions of the 21st century, designers and planners are paying significant attention to the design of dwellings and neighbourhoods and are considering new economic realities, by integrating innovative digital appliances, which are also helping to foster economic sustainability for future generations. In this important book, Avi Friedman, Professor of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, examines these concepts and their applications through several revealing essays, which are illustrated with lavish full-colour photography, detailed diagrams, and technological insight through a selection of case studies from around the globe. The text comprehensively investigates several key topics, namely the correlations between the built and the natural environments and their ecological attributes; issues of mobility and transportation; the mixing of amenities and residences; district heating and other energy efficiencies; planning for green open space while considering the residents’ lifestyle; edible landscapes and novel urban agriculture practices and their implementation; reducing a community footprint with regards to the evolution of high-density living; the principles of heritage conservation within communities, where social, economic, and environmental issues are all present, where old is mixed with new; how sustainability is achieved when dwellings are designed for and equipped with advanced “green” technologies, for adaptable homes, multi-generational dwellings, add-in and add-on units, and plug and play, among others.

Despite its trademark transparency, the Corum Golden Bridge is a wristwatch full of mystery. This new book describes the iconic linear timepiece’s fascinating history including the innovative mechanical invention conceived by a nonconformist autodidact and the difficult technical breakthroughs by two like-minded personalities needed to achieve the dream wristwatch. This story, chock-full of narrative substance, begins in Switzerland of the late 1970s, at a time when electronic timekeeping was threatening to overtake the magical mastery of mechanical ticks and tocks. The Golden Bridge, spanning the gap between mechanics and art, is an integral part of this era as luxury watchmaking teetered on the brink of extinction. The Golden Bridge additionally helped usher in the era of the independent watchmaker, as its very creation was rooted in shedding light on the work of the watchmaker in a way that no other timepiece before or after it ever would.

“It’s very easy to please others, but very hard to please yourself.” Such is the byword of Vincent Calabrese, one of the best-known creative watchmakers in the world today.  Throughout his life he has never stopped trying to surpass himself.  His famous creations (including those relating to the tourbillon and the karussel) have made a decisive contribution to the revitalisation of the Swiss watch industry, and his watches demonstrate his unparalleled boldness as well as his aesthetic sensitivity. But in these pages the reader will above all meet with a rare personality.  Born into a poor family in Naples, Vincent has earned a prominent place in the watchmaking world.  It is not just to his innovations, whose secrets he reveals in this book, that he owes his position. Vincent’s legacy comes every bit as much from his fierce determination, his philosophical and ethical standards, and his legendary broadsides, directed as much at the profession itself as at the industry as a whole.

A great American novelist, illustrated by a great American artist – now available in a collectable two-volume set.

In 1936, the Heritage Press, a publisher of fine editions, commissioned Norman Rockwell to illustrate Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer; four years later, they asked him to illustrate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well. For each book, Rockwell created eight full-colour paintings and numerous pen-and-ink drawings, the product of extensive on-the-ground research in Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Famously, Rockwell even tried to buy some Hannibal residents’ old clothes, to dress his models in.

For years, the Rockwell editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have been unavailable in stores. Now, Abbeville Press is proud to reissue them as a handsome new clothbound set. The colour plates are reproduced from new photography of Rockwell’s original paintings, the typesetting has been done anew to a high standard, and new introductions – illustrated with Rockwell’s rarely seen preliminary sketches – examine this unique encounter between two legendary chroniclers of America.

Also available: Treasure Island and Kidnapped boxed set ISBN 9780789214089

A head-to-head comparison of the two greatest soccer stars of their generation – and perhaps of all time.

One, diminutive and reserved; the other, tall and theatrical. One with six Ballons d’Or, and the other with five. There’s no doubt about it – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are the best. But which one is better? This lively book compares every aspect of the legendary rivals’ careers, to let the reader decide. It compares their stats, including their ten years of matchups in El Clásico, their club trophies, and their individual awards and milestones. It analyses their style of play, and how it has evolved throughout their careers. And, it looks at how their rivalry continues off the field, in terms of endorsement deals, social media followings, and philanthropic endeavors. Packed with colour photos of the champions in action, Messi and Ronaldo will spark discussion among both players’ partisans.

“Erudite, while still being fun to read.” — Professor Tim Neild, physiologist and medical educator

“A triumph of Social History in the Georgian period.” — Dr Nigel Cooke FRCP, physician and ceramic historian

This is the first biography and reference book dedicated to Samuel Percy, a modeller who produced an impressive oeuvre of wax portraits and tableaux in the mid-to-late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Based in part on the author’s own substantial collection of Percy waxes, this book follows Percy from his beginnings in Dublin, at the Dublin Society Drawing Schools, working with the famed statuary John Van Nost; to England, where he journeyed from town to town, putting advertisements in regional newspapers. These revealing advertisements have been gathered here for the first time, in order to track his travels. Whether taking the likeness of Princess Charlotte of Wales, or falling victim to a highway robber in Birmingham, these fragments of Percy’s history paint a fascinating picture of his life as a wandering artisan. As well as a chronological narrative of Percy’s life, this book commits an entire chapter to an area of his work that has never been studied before: his miniature tableaux. These portray various subjects, both religious and secular, from Christ on the Cross to playing children. They are catalogued in an appendix, and almost thirty are illustrated. Based entirely on original research, Mr. Percy: Portrait Modeller in Coloured Wax features over a hundred illustrations, celebrating both Percy’s accomplishments and the works of other modellers for comparison.

Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and remained there until his death in 1520, working as painter and architect for popes Julius II and Leo X and for the most prestigious patrons. Here the artist changed his painting style several times, looking at the works of Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the vast repertoire of ancient painting and sculpture. In the Eternal City Raphael practised architecture for the first time, designing buildings that reflected the models of Antiquity such as the Pantheon, the descriptions deriving from written sources such as Vitruvius’ treaty on architecture, and the examples of modern architects like Donato Bramante.

This guide supplies essential and up to date information on all the civil or religious buildings designed or built by Raphael in Rome, and the frescoes and paintings, housed in churches or museums, whether executed in the city or arrived there at a later stage.

November 19, 1479: a dynastic alliance, two noble scions, a regal wedding, short-lived and with an unhappy ending. These pages reconstruct the story of the magnificent bas relief in the Acton Collection (Villa La Pietra, Florence), commissioned to celebrate the marriage between Antonio Basso Della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and Caterina Marzano d’Aragona, the niece of King Ferdinand I of Naples. The heraldic symbols of the three coats of arms leave no doubt about the identities of the characters and events surrounding its creation, and lead us to the original location of the work, born as the overdoor to the main portal of the Basso Della Rovere Palace in piazza della Maddalena in Savona. Through close examination of the Della Rovere in Rome, this study highlights some previously unknown facts about the family’s origins and returns to Savona and its role as a political, cultural, and artistic protagonist in late 15th-century Italy.

Yoga and the City photographically documents a variety of people who are committed to yoga philosophy and yoga lifestyles in big cities – people, who live in the middle of hustle and bustle, but manage to maintain their harmony and happiness. It doesn’t matter what is surrounding them, what really matters is how they look at everything around them. Possibly, when people see this photography, they will decide to try yoga or meditation. Yoga and the City combines art, spirituality, and sport. It is a reflection of strength and power – strength to overcome adversities and to find balance while living in a fast paced environment. Yoga is a way to find alignment, to become closer to your spiritual core.

The career of architect Sergei Tchoban, born 1962 and educated in St. Petersburg, follows multiple yet closely linked trajectories in his native Russia and in Germany. He is a founding partner with the Moscow-based firm SPEECH as well as with Tchoban Voss Architekten, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. His designs reflect a deep interest in local and historical contexts of a project rather than an aim to create singular iconic structures. His design process is deeply rooted in sketching and drawing by hand. In 2009 he established the Tchoban Foundation and in 2013 opened the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin as a home to his vast collection comprising ancient and modern masterpieces from around the world.

In four conversations with Kristin Feireiss, Tchoban offers very personal insights into his design process, his understanding of architecture, and his engagement as a collector and museum founder. An essay by the British writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic as well as some 130 illustrations round out this beautiful volume.