In this artist book, celebrated American Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon traces the representation of Black people on book covers in the United States, highlighting the deliberate use of typography, photography and graphics.
Best known for appropriating imagery and text from popular culture, Ligon has selected over 50 book covers – by both lesser-known and seminal authors, such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison – to explore a rich and complex set of histories and representations.
To introduce the book, an essay by Ligon identifies one of the foundation stones of his life and work: the act of reading. Spanning the twentieth century and grouped thematically, the covers reveal correspondences between the past and the present, as well as links between the social and visual constructs of race, beauty and the body.
Published to coincide with the exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, both co-curated and featuring works by the artist, held at Nottingham Contemporary (4 April–14 June 2015) and Tate Liverpool (30 June–18 October 2015).
Brighton has transformed itself several times since the Middle Ages: once a small fishing village, it became the most fashionable seaside resort in the 18th century, a thriving tourist destination in the railway age and a liberal, multicultural university city in the 20th century. 200 years ago the party-loving King George IV built himself the playground of all royal playgrounds here: an oriental fantasy of a palace with onion-shaped domes and an exotic faux-Chinese interior, the Royal Pavilion.
Today Brighton, together with its surroundings, is culturally one of the most exciting places in Britain, boasting an impressive coast, lined with chalk cliffs and the rolling South Downs as a backdrop. Just 10 kilometres east of Brighton is the picturesque county town of Lewes, with a stunning array of historic buildings, including an 11th-century Norman castle. The people of Lewes are known for their revolutionary spirit, and host the biggest bonfire celebration in the country every year on 5 November.
Through the connectivity of different cultures, technologies and living environments, the retail sector is increasingly varied and experimental. At the same time, the uncertainties of the last two years have shown that free international trade between nations and continents is a fragile asset. Retail chains have been severed and the availability of energy and raw materials is limited. Creative stopgaps, as well as analogue and digital elements that appeal to all our senses, give new impulses for urban retailing. On the way to a retail metaverse, high-touch meets high-tech.
Text in English and German.
“The changing climate is no longer debatable here, it is this land’s unfeigned, monstrous reality,” says Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury. His firm URBANA, established in 1995, has produced an astonishingly diverse collection of works of divergent scales, typologies, and contexts and located in one of the meteorologically most complex and challenging regions in the world. A hospital introduced into an economy decimated by rising oceans, a shelter against cyclones in Bangladesh’s southern coastal region, projects for locations in the country’s north near the Himalaya mountains facing devouring waves of floods, and architectural interventions in one of the world’s densest metropolitan areas: URBANA’s designs are incisive critical responses to dissimilar issues and urgencies. They are all rooted in the belief that architecture can no longer be optical or sensational, but be built of philosophy and empathy for our increasingly fragile and shared ecological and human condition.
Meditations in Entropy is the first-ever comprehensive monograph on the work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA. It features 16 of the firm’s designs in detail through photographs by acclaimed architectural photographer Hélène Binet and numerous plans, drawings, sketches, and further images. Perceptive essays are contributed by eminent critics and historians Kenneth Frampton, Robert McCarter, and William J R Curtis. The book is rounded-off with conversations between Chowdhury, Swiss architect Niklaus Graber, and the distinguished architectural historian Philip Ursprung that further explicate URBANA’s unique approach.
Robert Ernest was an architect of rare promise and remarkable early success, whose award-winning career was cut short by cancer at age 28 in 1962. Despite the brevity of Ernest’s life, his education and practice were intertwined with some of the most important figures in architecture, including his interactions with Louis I. Kahn and Paul Rudolph. Ernest’s exceptional architectural designs, though honoured during his lifetime with three Progressive Architecture Awards and one Record Houses Award, have never been documented in a comprehensive manner, and are now almost completely lost to disciplinary history. Yet the materials in the architect’s personal and professional archives — upon which this book is almost entirely based — clearly indicate that Ernest was a remarkably talented and unusually gifted architectural designer, whose future promise and potential were inestimable. Ernest’s two built works, both realised before he had turned 28, his one work built after his death, as well as the remarkably innovative unrealised projects documented in his archives, indicate that had Ernest lived to a normal lifespan, he would have without question been one of the most important architects of his generation, with the potential to design precedent-setting buildings equal to those realised by the most recognised architects in the 60 years after his death.
The Bayeux Tapestry is impressive in its initial richness and, almost a thousand years after it was made, miraculously preserved. Entirely needle-embroidered in coloured woolen threads, it recounts the conquest of the Kingdom of England by Duke William of Normandy. The universal significance of this secular masterpiece from the eleventh century has earned it a place on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” register. This beautiful book unfolds the whole work with accompanying detailed commentaries. It provides an update on current research, bringing together two erudite points of view from both sides of the Channel.
What does Swansea and Gower mean to you? Is it a place of learning? A hub of industry? A city of sporting excellence? Or perhaps, a gateway to exploration and adventure? Do you picture endless days on pristine beaches, leisurely walks along rugged clifftops or a vibrant cultural tapestry? Swansea and Gower in Wales weave all these facets together, offering a captivating mosaic of experiences.
Meet sporting legends and trailblazing women who defied societal norms in an era dominated by men. Venture into the world of Ancient Egyptians, unravelling their lives – and deaths. Marvel at the grandeur of Norman lords’ ambitious creations and the fripperies of Victorian industrialists. Indulge your palate with the savoury allure of lamb raised on Atlantic salt meadows. Feel the adrenaline rush as you hurtle downhill on a mountain board, crocodiles snap food from your grip, or you ride a wave.
Stroll around the coast and lakes, and meander through fields of fragrant lavender or golden sunflowers. Immerse yourself in nature’s symphony, from pounding waterfalls to the serene serenades of insects. Unearth a world brimming with wonder, right on your doorstep, here in Swansea and Gower.
A photograph of Marcel Duchamp, taken in Munich in 1912, serves more than a hundred years later as the starting point for seventeen drawings. Commissioned by the conceptual artist Rudolf Herz, Parisian street painters appropriated Duchamp’s radically expressionless photographic portrait, each adding their own unique artistic signature. Duchamp’s time in Munich in particular led to his decision to free himself from any form of artistic signature, the “patte” or “paw.” Herz’s thesis: Duchamp’s photograph anticipates the development revealed through his revolutionary idea of ready mades.
Marcel Duchamp: La Patte is an ironic response to Duchamp’s decision and reflects in a playful and associative way the fundamental turning point in his work. Texts by Antje von Graevenitz and others outline the art-historical context.
Text in English and German.
Archigram comprised Warren Chalk (1927-88), Peter Cook (1936-), Dennis Crompton (1935-), David Greene (1937-), Ron Herron (1930-94), and Michael Webb (1937-). Together they envisioned the future of architecture in ways that enthralled a generation. In an era defined by the space race, they developed a ‘high-tech’, lightweight, infra-structural approach that stretched far beyond known technologies or contemporary realities. They devised autonomous dwellings and focused on survival technology; they experimented with megastructures and modular construction systems; they explored mobility through the environment, and the use of portable living capsules: all through the medium of an incredible series of drawings and models. Archigram’s influence has been profound and enduring. They gave the high-tech movement its impetus; they inspired architects such as Renzo Piano and Norman Foster; and they laid the ground for the design of buildings such as the Pompidou Centre. Edited and designed by Archigram member Dennis Crompton, this book catalogues Archigram’s activities over fourteen years, together with commentaries by the architects and critics writing then and now.
Drawing Proper/Drawing Improper is a meditation on contemporary architectural drawing practice framed through 56 artifacts created by 28 architectural firms from around the globe. Each drawing replies to a simple prompt: How can architectural drawing be dutiful? How can it be mischievous? This open-ended question invited diverse responses, spanning the spectrum from practical to whimsical.
By presenting this dichotomy—dutiful or mischievous—the book’s drawings expose the diverse and often conflicting values embedded in the practice of representing architecture. Some adhere strictly to functional rigor, while others embody open-ended explorations with no fixed outcome.
In this way, Drawing Proper/Drawing Improper expands the scope of architectural drawing, revealing the diverse motivations and approaches within the field. The collection is a testament to the diversity of thought and method that characterises architectural practice today.
Accompanied by descriptions of the works and a series of reflective essays and interludes by Anca Matyiku and Marc Swackhamer, editor Kevin Hirth brings varied drawing practices into conversation, offering a dynamic cross-section of contemporary architecture.
Contributors include: Current Interests, Perry Kulper, Frank Fantauzzi & Charie O’Green, CJ Lim, Lanza Atelier, NEME Studio, Norman Kelley, Office CA, William O’Brien Jr., The Open Workshop, Outpost Office, T8 Projects, Nada Subotincic, SORT // Studio, Variable Projects, Mark West, Design Earth, Alam Profeta, Studio Ames, Studio Sean Canty, Now Here, Bair Balliet, JaJa Co, CJ Lim, Medium Office, HouMinn, EXTENTS, and Hume Coover Studio.
A beautifully illustrated and extensively researched collection of 100 of the most famous houses of Britain’s Arts and Crafts Movement.
The Arts and Crafts Movement, founded in the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, produced some of the world’s most enduring architectural masterpieces. Author and architect David Cole presents the 100 great Arts and Crafts houses, each individually described and analysed with insightful detail and floor plans, and illustrated with stunning photography.
Beginning with Morris’s own iconic Red House, the book traces the fifty-year span of the movement, with a short chapter dedicated to each of these extraordinary houses: from the works of the pioneer Arts and Crafts architects, to the great reformer architects of the next generation, to the craftsman architects who took their lives and their work to the countryside, to the movement’s Scottish architects, and finally to the houses of the Garden Cities and suburbs built through the movement’s last decade before the First World War. The book features the great houses of some forty of the movement’s most renowned architects, including Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw, E.S. Prior, William Lethaby, C.F.A. Voysey, Edgar Wood, Ernest Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, C.R. Ashbee, M.H. Baillie Scott, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer, Parker and Unwin, and many others.
As Morris famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Architects have designed some of the most iconic items of furniture. This Architectural Design Journal features ingenious architect-protagonists of this genre, and explores the recent history and chronology of architectural involvement in the discipline.
Furniture augments architect-designed environments, contributing to the holistic ambience of a space and displaying in microcosm architects’ preoccupations with material palettes, haptic sensitivities and structural invention. It can take the form of props for commercial purposes including business meetings and offices, for spaces susceptible to the weather, or for convivial, domestic settings. Whatever the programmatic imperative, architects have contributed in the most aesthetic ways. This issue honours some of the best.
Totems and Other Essays brings together 14 texts by architect, historian, and critic Irénée Scalbert. Written between 1998 and 2025, they reflect nearly three decades of critical engagement with architecture and its cultural contexts. Ranging in length and register—from concise meditations to extended analytical essays—the collection captures the evolution of Scalbert’s thinking as a critic, teacher, and participant in architectural discourse.
Organised thematically into sections on buildings, cities, lectures, and theory, Totems and Other Essays traces a loosely autobiographical arc.
Earlier pieces echo Scalbert’s formative years in London during a period of architectural ferment marked by the work of James Stirling, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers, as well as his close association with a generation of contemporaries including Tony Fretton, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, and Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald (6a architects). Later texts expand outward, both geographically and conceptually, as Scalbert brings a speculative and at times personal lens to questions of urbanism, nature, and meaning in contemporary architecture. The book culminates in Lives of a Critic, a postscript that offers candid thoughts on the vocation of architectural criticism in the 21st century.