Founded by Fredric Benesch and Katarina Lundeberg in 2009, Stockholm-based firm In Praise of Shadows Architecture engages in a wide range of projects of varied scales and typologies. This first monograph on their work features some 40 buildings and projects from the years 2009 to 2024. The selection includes small boathouses and garden pavilions, private homes, and housing developments, as well as retail spaces, schools, and library buildings.
The ideas and designs of In Praise of Shadows Architecture are remarkable, revealed in buildings which share an elegant signature that manifests itself in the choice of materials, the shaping of these, and a focus on spatial experience. Many of them are timber constructions, as sustainability is a core part of their philosophy. Unusually for a group of architects working from Stockholm, Benesch and Lundeberg and their collaborators take a special interest in the famous architectural culture of the Swiss canton of Grisons.
A ghostly story collection accompanied by hauntingly beautiful illustrations—reproductions of paintings on autumn leaves.
In October Shadows, artist John A. Rice brings to life classic ghost stories, using actual autumn leaves as his canvas. Each of the 13 tales—by authors including Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—explores the unexplained and the macabre, tapping into our worst fears and the darker side of human nature while exploring the supernatural mysteries that connect all our lives. This is the perfect book for curling up in front of a fire on a chilly night, when the moon is high, the wind whispers in the trees, and ominous shadows lurk around every corner.
Every story in October Shadows is illustrated with an original artwork executed on an autumn leaf. Each artwork is shown twice: once at the beginning of the story, and once at the end, transformed—like the face of a jack-o’-lantern—by backlighting, the light bleeding through the leaf and transforming the colours to an eerie and haunting effect. Like a relic from another era, October Shadows features a deluxe binding and gilt edges. By breathing new life into timeless stories and reimagining them with Rice’s unique approach, this anthology is poised to become an essential autumn classic—a book for Halloween and for cozy, spooky reading all year round.
One of the oldest storytelling traditions, shadow theatre combines puppetry with music, philosophy, history, storytelling, fashion, ritual, religion, and education.
While each nation in Southeast Asia has its own distinct culture, shadow theatre is a shared theme. Many of the masters make their own puppets, play all the musical instruments, learn long texts in ancient languages, sing, study movement, and perform for long period of time in what is one of the most difficult and challenging art forms. Most of the performers are farmers, fisherman, factory workers, or teachers by day and artists by night.
Through documentary photography, A Life in Shadows by Constantine Korsovitis, illustrates the sophistication and value of shadow theatre and its creators, and the author has been capturing the spirit and multiplicity of shadow theatre since 1999 in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia, the common thread being the use of the Hindu epics of the Ramayana and the Mara Mahabharata as a source stories.
Learning comes best through experience, even better if children can do it at home. With simple and easy-to-find ingredients, yet safe and highly educative, children will unravel the secrets of science through funny and real practice. Two characters will accompany children in this colourful series: the Professor will teach them the scientific explanation and the Little Robot will guide them in the practice. For each experiment there is also a “mess- o-meter” for parents to know how messy the experiment can be! Scientific explanations follow each experiment, to learn what goes on behind the spectacular effects. Disgusting chemistry, refraction of light, magnetism and optical illusions will have no more secrets! Slime, mould, germs, lights, foam… every child will feel the urge to start experimenting and… learning science! Ages: 8 plus
Being a hard working leader is hardwired into your personality. But is working hard working for you? Do you often hear that you work too hard? Do you rarely have an out of office message on your email? The author, a true hard worker herself and an experienced corporate coach, breaks down taboos about working hard and identifies four main achievement types. She offers tests, schemes and checklists which will enable you to discover which type you are and get an insight into your behaviour at work that will enable you to reach the top and stay there.
In her artistic practice, Mariechen Danz (b. 1980) explores methods and models of understanding, always with a focus on the human body. In expansive installations and performances, often in collaboration with other artists and musicians, she combines and confronts scientific systems of understanding and describing the world with subjective, alternative, and magical ways of thinking. The publication accompanying the exhibition edge out at the Berlinische Galerie showcases this year’s winner of the GASAG Art Prize and provides insights into the exhibition, a monumental walk-in installation that models new ways of exchanging and describing knowledge, truth, and history.
Text in English and German.
Sculptor Martin Kargruber (b. 1965), from South Tyrol, Italy, forms each of his distinctive sculptural objects from a single piece of solid wood. He consciously uses the wood’s natural properties and organic materiality in his architectural and landscape motifs, employing traditional techniques and interpreting them anew in extraordinary ways. He transforms the rigidity of the material into a seemingly gentle movement, incorporating the workmanship itself into an explicit part of the design. His representative motifs are characterised — above and beyond the formal concept — by intensive exploration into the reality of the living world and a high level of poetic abstraction.
Text in English, German and Italian.
Are you a researcher who struggles when it comes to creating scientific posters? Or do you simply want to get better at it? This book provides you with a step-by-step guide to making a poster that has real impact to ensure you stand out from the crowd at your next poster fair. A practical guide that gives you answers to questions like: what to put on a poster (and mainly: what not to)? How do you come up with a title that immediately grabs people’s attention? What are the best images to use? How many words can you include on your poster? And much, much more… Everything you need to get started step-by-step and quickly achieve the best result.
“Every kid’s dream is captured in the pages of this ACC Art Book depicting more than 60 years of space exploration, from the foundation of NASA in 1958 to the launch of the James Webb telescope in 2021.” — Calibre Magazine
“On almost 300 pages we can marvel at what are probably the greatest milestones in NASA history. This book really shows and honors this work! A great book about space exploration!” — Lovely Books
“The history of space exploration is best presented in this book of NASA photographs, whose images are universally inspirational.” – Commander James Lovell, Apollo 13
NASA has worked at the forefront of space exploration and research since 1958. Their devotion to furthering our understanding of what lies beyond our atmosphere has seen 12 humans walk on the surface of the moon, helped form the International Space Station, and placed numerous rovers on Mars. Voyager 1, launched by NASA on 5 September 1977, is the furthest manmade object from earth, having left our solar system entirely – and the agency’s plans for the future are equally inspiring.
This book celebrates NASA throughout the years, from its inception to its 60th anniversary in 2018, and beyond. A visual tour-de-force, the book collects high resolution NASA photos of historic significance; from rarely seen photos and the words of President John F. Kennedy commanding the space race, to the many triumphs and tragedies of the Apollo Missions, moon landings, the International Space Station, space shuttles, journeys to Mars and explorations of our galaxy’s outer reaches. These breathtaking images are complemented by heartfelt words of hope and imagination for the future, encouraging readers to admire their world from a different perspective. Out of This World: Historic Milestones in NASA’s Human Space Flight is a stunning 300 page book.
Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) created some of the most breathtaking artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their projects radically questioned traditional conceptions of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
This lavish photo book is the first comprehensive publication on the artists’ oeuvre to be released after Christo’s death in May 2020. It also serves as a curtain-raiser for Christo und Jeanne-Claude’s last major project – the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which will be carried out posthumously in the fall of 2021.
Presenting a wealth of photographs and studio snapshots from 1949 to 2020, some of which are private, this book allows an intimate peek behind the scenes of Christo und Jeanne-Claude’s monumental installations which fascinated the public for decades. In addition to pictures capturing the artists at work, it includes photos documenting all of their major projects.
Matthias Koddenberg (b.1984), art historian and close friend of the artists, spent many years compiling the more than 300 images featured in this volume. Among them are pictures taken by companions and friends and hitherto unpublished photographs from the artists’ estate. Together they tell the extraordinary story not only of the couple’s artistic collaboration, but also of their five-decade-long partnership.
A truly unique perspective on their own work: Swiss-American architectural studio agps, with offices in Zurich and Los Angeles, has delved deep into their archive and woven a visual thread of some 160 illustrations that guides readers through this new book. Literally Out of the Box, from archival box and model crates, models, model photos, small hand-drawn studies, visualisations, but also photographs of realised buildings have re-emerged, covering agps’ entire work of decades of practice.
The images are organised according to 13 keywords: spatial configurations that characterise agps’ core design concepts and summarise central elements of their ideas. At the same time, they are terms that define the formal presence of their designs. The result is a multifaceted and inspiring insight into the work of an international firm that proves just how important spatial constellations are for the formulation of good architecture. Essays by Sabine von Fischer as well as by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, along with an index of all featured buildings and projects, round off this unique volume.
Text in English and German.
Boxes are beguiling because they can have the double delight of an enticing exterior and the anticipation and satisfaction of a fully fitted interior. This comprehensive guide to the decoration, style, use and contents of all types of boxes from diverse cultures is the first book to cover both these aspects. The coverage of decoration and styles of boxes is remarkably complete and includes the traditional, the exotic and the eccentric. Folk art to Faberge, tea caddies to tinder boxes, medicine chests to music boxes, ditty to document, voting to vampire, painting, sewing and writing boxes are just some of the topics that are included. The result is a pictorial treat, the text lavishly illustrated with images of nearly 2,000 boxes. It is a most valuable reference book for the dealer and the collector alike.
Marking the remarkable century of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, from humble beginnings in London’s East End in 1915 to a fully-fledged mainstream art museum, under its banner ‘Art, Identity and Migration’, this publication vividly illustrates rarely-seen masterworks from its collection by some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Soutine, Chagall, Auerbach, Bomberg, Kitaj and Kossoff. Further highlights include the ‘Whitechapel Boys’; Les Peintres Juifs de L’Ecole de Paris, Official War artists from both conflicts; mid-century émigrés influencing the direction of the arts, and contemporary artists making ground-breaking work across new media. This unique collection, primarily of artists born into the Jewish faith, many shaping modern British, European and American art history, represents a distinct visual survey of artistic and social life in Britain and the cultural heritage of British Jewry. A range of texts provides a fascinating context for a collection born ‘Out of Chaos’.
Is fashion that is out of order and doesn’t seem to follow any obvious rules truly accidental? Or has dissonance in fashion always been a guiding principle? Can coincidence therefore be predictable and controllable?
A publication which defies all boundaries of categorisation has been created out of the workings of fashion that almost inevitably has to be out of order, so as to increase its attractive power and generate attention with its interruptions of the ordinary. The contributions, on the border between art and fashion and residing within the realms of literary theory, design theory, cultural history and technology, demonstrate in manifold ways processes, images and ideas that are striving for innovation and transgressing established parameters. The publication is dedicated to the constructive side of the development of fashion, whereby the theme of Out of Order is combined with the concept of dissonance as a creative formula. If one starts from the premise that fashion is no longer fashion when it can be generalised, categorised, repeated and described, then the process of dissonance constitutes the significant impulse for everything new.
With contributions from: Pamela Church Gibson, Annette Geiger, Judith Gerdsen, Hanna Heilmann on Vibskov & Emenius, Iris Maria vom Hof in conversation with Oliver Sieber, Verena Kuni, Isabell Lizardi & Matt Johnson, Thomas Oláh, Andrea Sick, Bitten Stetter & Daniel Späi, Terre Thaemlitz, Barbara Vinken, Harry Walter and Gundula Wolter.
Silence Speaks: Masks, Shadows and Puppets from Asia is a travel through the many rituals and performances traditions in twelve regions and countries of Asia: Himalayas, (Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal), India, Sir Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia (Java, Bali), Vietnam and Japan. Masks, Shadows and Puppets are essential for the enactment of rituals and performances. These surprising, fragile objects of great beauty are not viewed or used as a disguising or as simple forms of entertainment. Often they signal the wearer’s willingness to be possessed and receive a spiritual visitation. Their performance is often a welcoming and pleasing ceremony for unseen audiences of unearthly spirits. These traditions are framed by ancient and sacred narratives that have been received since the first Millennium C.E., via land and sea from distant lands. Together with the dance movements and gestures they use, these ancient narratives were gradually adapted by the ancestors of the populations now living in the countries that this book visits. Silence Speaks: Masks, Shadows and Puppets from Asia illustrates 270 objects from the Francisco Capelo Collection, assembled in the past twenty years and now part of the permanent collection of the Museu da Marioneta in Lisbon.
This step-by-step Pocket Guide will teach you how to draw stunningly beautiful perspectives, complete with reflections and shadows.
The Pocket Guide to Perspective uses a simple, step-by-step method to help readers understand the basic concepts of perspective construction. Readers will learn to build one-point, two-point, and multi-point perspectives as well as reflections and shadows in perspective. This small pocket guide is compact and focused. Whether you’re at your desk or out and about, it is useful reference to bring along for both students and professionals alike.
Paris – a photographic book with the city as its theme – takes an abstract approach to depicting the city, while retaining a direct relationship with reality. It is part of the tradition of modernist photography, but it distinguishes itself by the perfect appearance of digitally retouched images.
Shadows play a key role in simplifying reality, dissociating locations from their classical visual representation. The economy of form thus created enables the depiction of Paris to be radically transformed, going beyond the customary descriptive task of photography.
At first glance, the viewer perceives the overall contrast of the image, with only the light lines standing out against the shadows. As the eye gradually adapts, the details in the shadows become apparent, introducing a second way of reading the photograph and enriching the way it is perceived. Paris is thus viewed anew, moving from shadow to abstraction.
Text in English and French.
Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio is one of the most revolutionary and celebrated artists of all time. His explosive manner exceeded the academic precepts that idealised nature, describing the world in its varied complexity and therefore also in its most humble and raw aspects. This volume traces the short, and unfortunately tragic existential parable of the great Lombard painter, an exceptional path strongly reflected in his work, still actual even after 410 years after his passing. The characters of his paintings, ordinary men and women capable of narrating the themes of myth and faith, are true universal icons still of great emotional impact today.
The Light’s Way is artist Judy Pelikan’s wonderful companion to The Heart’s Journey. In twelve original illustrations, Pelikan reveals the life-giving force of light by relating sunlight to color: without sunlight, our natural world is gray, consisting only of patterns, shapes, shadows, and at times, shadows. At the same time, The Light’s Way shows how the nurturing inner light of the spirit has the power to make our lives colourful and blessed with happiness. The Light’s Way is an inspirational lesson that urges us, or someone we care about, to choose light and bring colour, physically or emotionally, into the world.
Maria Lai always had a special relationship with fairy tales. She considered them a metaphor for art and a way of communicating with the public in a simple, straightforward way. Starting in the 1980s, fairy tales became central to her art. Tenendo per mano il sole, Tenendo per mano l’ombra, Curiosape and Maria Pietra, are her most famous “sewn fairy tales” – books created by the artist using castoff textiles.
Maria Lai’s fairy tales are not merely children’s stories, but profound reflections on life and what it means to be a human being. They are often inspired by Sardinian myths and legends, to which the artist gives a personal twist, adding autobiographical details and philosophical reflections.
This edition of Tenendo per mano l’ombra is a printed version of Maria Lai’s 1987 tale. The original consists of fabric pages sewn together and collages of dyed textiles, on which the artist has embroidered geometric figures, yarn and other materials. The fairy tale tells the story of a human being (and his double) who must learn to accept shadows, the dark part of the world and of himself. The figure’s shadow, in Maria Lai’s fairy tale, is not a negative element to be rejected, but an integral part of his personality. To live an untroubled and complete life, one must learn to accept and live with it.
Elena Pontiggia’s concluding essay accompanies the reader in a fascinating page by page interpretation of the fable, and discusses Lai’s artistic and stylistic approach in the context of an extensive network of philosophical, literary and artistic references: from Kant and Manzoni to Klee and Malevič.
Text in English and Italian.
More than any other civilisation, China is renowned for its long tradition of ceramic production, from its terracotta and stoneware works in ancient times to the imperial porcelain manufactured at Jingdezhen from the end of the fourteenth century. These works have been admired and collected over centuries for their outstanding quality and refinement. Now two hundred masterpieces from prominent private collections around the world have been brought together for the first time in a new book. The Baur Collections in Geneva, formed between 1928 and 1951, and the Zhuyuetang Collection (the Bamboo and Moon Pavilion in Hong Kong), which has been building since the late 1980s, reveal the elegance and variety of imperial monochrome porcelain wares produced during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, which followed on from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) periods. These restrained pieces – both profane and sacred – exemplify the values of simplicity and modesty espoused by classical Chinese texts. With chapters devoted to the historical, cultural and technical contexts in which these pieces were made, this book will be a key reference on Chinese monochrome ceramics for all lovers of the subject, as well as students, researchers and connoisseurs.
Text in English and French with Chinese summaries.
Using the formalist conventions of an ironic heritage, William Ludwig Lutgens attains the expression of something sincere. Like the philosophical idiot who did his utmost best to unlearn all the fallacies he was acquitted with since birth and now only knows he knows nothing, the artist made the world into his own theatre wherein he can stomp around like a bull in a china shop with the grace of a prima ballerina. Forcing a pathway to possible exits by presenting us with the alloy of his observations, imagination and scattershot references. Not merely asking questions, which seems to be the hype in contemporary art nowadays, he is unraveling the framework wherein these questions originate. The image deconstructed by the story of its creation, alternating between the power and impotence of the theatrical madness at the end of the world as we know it. William Ludwig Lutgens presents with his Comedy of Humours the dysfunctional family of man.
Text in English and Dutch.
Stucco decorations have traditionally been studied considering their formal and artistic qualities. Although much research and numerous publications have explored the works of stucco artists and their cultural context, little attention has been paid to their professional role in relation to the other actors involved in the decorative process (architects, painters, sculptors, patrons), the technical skills of these artists, and how their know-how contributed to the great professional success they enjoyed. From the 16th to the 18th century, many of the stucco decorations in churches and palaces throughout Europe were made by masters from the border area between what is now Canton Ticino and Lombardy. This collection of essays aims to examine how these artists worked from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy, via the Netherlands, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Austria, adapting to the realities of the different contexts. The authors examine these issues with an interdisciplinary approach, considering art history and social history, the history of artistic techniques, and the science of materials.
Text in English and Italian.
John Ruskin wrote this fable for a teenage family friend, Effie, and later he married her. The marriage was famously disastrous, but before it fell apart the Ruskins allowed The King of the Golden River to be published. It became one of the most popular works for children of its time. Richard Doyle contributed over 25 full-page illustrations and vignettes.
The King of the Golden River is the first literary fairy tale in English (as opposed to collected folk tales). Ruskin himself said it was ‘a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with some true Alpine feeling of my own’. Later he spoke of the capacity of the traditional tales ‘to fortify children against the glacial cold of selfish science’.
It remains a powerful fable about humanity’s dual capacity for destructiveness and redeeming love, with as strange fairy-tale creatures as one could hope to meet.
An essay by Simon Cooke explains the book’s importance.