“It’s a great way to spark interesting conversations with friends and perfect entertainment if you’re coffee-ing solo.” — Real Homes

“Fascinating new book reveals homes in vertigo-inducing locations, from a house clinging to a cliff to a gravity-defying mountain hideout.”  — Daily Mail
In Living on the Edge, the author goes in search of the most amazing and seemingly unfeasible buildings which are situated at the edge of deep chasms and on steep cliffs. These houses are the work of architects who approach complexity and difficult conditions with imagination and a talent for thinking outside of the box. This book shows how, with the help of innovative techniques, fear of heights-inducing homes have been built at the most challenging locations all over the world. Living on the Edge is a book for architecture lovers without fear of heights!

“If you really want to get under the skin of a city, the 500 Hidden Secrets series, which covers a number of cities from Chicago to Ghent, all written by people who know the cities inside out, is ideal. It’s an innovative and refreshing take on the traditional travel guide.”- The Independent

What are the 5 restaurants for new Flemish cooking? Where would you find the 5 best antique shops? Where can you find the most unexpected view of Ghent? Where are the cool coffee bars that play the best music? And if you wanted to find the most mysterious places in the Citadelpark, where are they? The 500 Hidden Secrets of Ghent is a wonderfully eclectic guide to this multifaceted city. An insider’s view of Ghent featuring little known facts and snippets of useful information, presenting the quirky and the off-beat, and sharing the whereabouts of some of the city’s wonderful hidden gems like the Hotel d’Hane-Steenhuyse and the Gruut City Brewery.

The 500 Hidden Secrets of Ghent offers a practical guide to Ghent’s finest places, and Derek Blyth covers all bases to ensure no visitor to the city is ever anything short of captivated. Packed with accessible, easy-to-read information summarised in handy lists, maps, itineraries, sections on food & drink, accommodation, green spaces, museums, galleries and shops; this guide is an essential resource for the inquisitive traveller.

Also available: The 500 Hidden Secrets of London, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Dublin, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Paris, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Lisbon, and many more. Discover the series at the500hiddensecrets.com

“I had seen the photographs and the drawings of this great work. And yet, until about ten minutes ago I had no conception of its magnitude, its permanent beauty and its importance.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upon first viewing Mount Rushmore, August 30, 1936. Now in paperback, The Carving of Mount Rushmore tells the complete story of the largest and certainly the most spectacular sculpture in existence. More than 60 black-and-white photographs offer unique views of this gargantuan effort, and author Rex Alan Smith-a man born and raised within sight of Rushmore-recounts with the sensitivity of a native son the ongoing struggles of sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his workers.

“The quality of the reprint is nearly perfect, with a good selection of papers for the three sequential parts of the book: the texts, the drawings, and the black-and-white photographs. Text and drawings are on matte heavyweight pages, while the photos are on glossy paper. The inks make everything read well; in particular, the drawing reproductions are exquisite.” — Archidose
Edwin Lutyens, one of the most famous architectural names of the 20th century, died in 1944. As a memorial, three large volumes of his drawings and photographs were commissioned from the thousands found in his office, and were published by Country Life. 

All three volumes will be republished in 2023. The first volume contains his own plans, elevations and copious details of the finest examples of his domestic buildings, on which his huge reputation principally rests. The book embodies the quintessence of the man and his work; the variety of style and design seen in the houses brings together in one volume the many strands of Lutyen’s fertile mind. Two further volumes will include his corporate and public buildings.

The genius of Lutyens is now universally recognised. In the work featured in this book, we can now see not just the professionalism of a great architect, but also the loving care with which he set down the most minute detail, with the result that this is one of the few books in existence that can be used to provide working drawings.

Tracing human interactions with the world’s most famous tropical timber species, The Social Life of Teak maps worlds revolving around teak forests, trees and wood.

What gives Tectona grandis such a powerful aura, stoking desires and capturing imaginations? How has teak shaped people’s lives, driving fortunes and impacting futures? What has happened to the teak forests and what is their destiny?

In this illustrated anthology of oral histories, people connected personally or professionally to teak speak of survival, change and learning, creativity and destruction, growth and demise. Woven together, these experiences bring to light the ways that teak has been sought, crafted, cultivated, traded and prized over time.

Animist beliefs, creative expression, scientific invention, economic viability, imperialist expansion, peak luxury, violent repression, ecological disaster and the regenerative power of nature all find a home in this global intergenerational tale.

Charting the domestication of wilderness and exposing the era of extinction of a feted natural resource, this book seeks to stimulate conversations about our role as nature’s most troublesome offspring.

The Swiss artist Otto Künzli has revolutionised modern art jewellery. In the 45-odd years in which he has been addressing the topic of jewellery, Künzli has carved out for himself a unique position of far-reaching international influence, not only as an artist and a pioneer but also as an author and mentor. Otto Künzli’s works are based on complex reflection, conceptual and visual imagination. The result: objects with a clear, minimalist appearance, captivatingly crafted to perfection and highly visible – jewellery that adorns and at the same time possesses an autonomous aesthetic status of its own. The publication presents for the first time Otto Künzli’s highly diverse oeuvre. It includes hundreds of jewellery objects as well as interdisciplinary conceptual works from the artist’s various creative phases. An extraordinary artist’s book designed in close collaboration with Otto Künzli and Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich.

Otto Künzli was born in 1948 in Zurich, Switzerland. Since 1991 Künzli has held the Chair of Art Jewellery at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich – as the successor of Prof. Hermann Jünger. Otto Künzli’s work is represented in numerous international museums and collections. Alongside numerous awards, in 2010 Otto Künzli was awarded the Swiss Grand Prix Design, and in 2011 the Goldener Ehrenring der Gesellschaft für Goldschmiedekunst, the golden ring of honour conferred by the German Association for Goldsmiths’ Art.

The Padua School originated from the Istituto Pietro Selvatico in Padua. The distinctive features of this jewelry are the use of gold reminiscent of the goldsmith’s art in antiquity and a modern and abstract formal expression within the group. Mario Pinton, who brought the goldsmith movement international recognition and acclaim in the 1950s and ’60s, is credited with founding the experimental goldsmith movement in Padua. Francesco Pavan has enlarged the scope of the Padua School with his kinetic and geometric formal idiom.

The breakthrough on the international jewelry scene took place in the late 1960s with Giampaolo Babetto, under whose support the geometric and Minimalist tendency was most pronounced. Other distinguished artists in jewelry such as Graziano Visintin, Renzo Pasquale, Annamaria Zanella, Stefano Marchetti and Giovanni Corvaya continued along these lines or went their own highly individual ways by experimenting with the use of new materials including plastic. The work of these creative artists is beautifully displayed through color photographs, which serve to highlight their great talent.

This catalogue presents masterpieces of calligraphy, painting, sculpture, ceramics, lacquers, and textiles from two of America’s greatest Japanese art collections, which are featured in a landmark exhibition at the Asia Society in New York, from February to April, 2020. Impermanence is a pervasive subject in Japanese philosophy and art, and recognising the role of ephemerality is key to appreciating much of Japan’s artistic production. The dazzling range of art and objects in this beautifully photographed exhibition catalogue show the broad, yet nuanced, ways that the notion of the ephemeral manifests itself in the arts of Japan throughout history. Insightful contributions from noted scholars explore the aesthetics of impermanence in religion, literature, artefacts, the tea ceremony, and popular culture in objects dating from the late Jomon period (ca. 1000-300 B.C.E.) to the 20th century.

Contents:
The Art of the Ephemeral;
Works in the Exhibition:
I. Retrieving Lost Worlds; II. Buddhism: Perpetual Impermanence; III. Tea: Choreographed Ephemerality; IV. Transforming Impermanence into Art.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Asia Society Museum, New York, between 11 February and 26 April 2020.

Part of the successful 5 minute series, this enchanting collection of bedtime stories is full of tales of fairies, gnomes, magical creatures, and multiple worlds. Let your children choose their favourite story or stay up ‘late’ reading them all. Only 5-minutes each, these stories evoke imaginative thinking and sweet dreams as your little ones drift off into a fairytale land for a sound night’s sleep.

Other titles in the series:

9788854419162 5 Minute Bedtime Stories From the Wild

9788854417922 5 Minutes Bedtime Stories

Ages 5 plus.

With the exhibition catalogue Back into the Light: Four Women Artists – Their Works, Their Paths, the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt has dedicated itself to four rediscovered women artists. Erna Pinner (1890–1987), Rosy Lilienfeld (1896–1942), Amalie Seckbach (1870–1944), and Ruth Cahn (1875–1966) shaped the artistic life of the 1920s in Frankfurt am Main and were also noticed supra-regionally. National Socialist rule brought an end not only to the cosmopolitan way of life that they cultivated, but also threatened their work and their lives. Renowned art historians examine the works of the four artists in essays for the catalogue. Numerous illustrations and hitherto unpublished documents and letters accompany these texts. The various historical contexts of their individual lives and fate are also presented in cultural studies essays by international experts.

Homelessness is one of the most pressing social challenges of our time, and is closely linked to issues of urban design and architecture. Homeless people are part of urban society and depend on accessible public spaces and urban infrastructure. Yet, in cities around the world, local governments use policies and urban planning to ward off street people, aiming at making them invisible in the cityscape and deliberately impeding certain forms of stay. Urban design always reflects power structures—it can exclude or open up avenues for participation.

The Roofless Truth brings together contributions by international researchers and practitioners from the fields of architecture, urban development and design, sociology, ethnology, social work, and education. It offers academic analyses and essays, field reports, and student proposals for interventions in public space, and features award-winning projects and initiatives in Canada, Germany, Iran, Switzerland, and the US.

The book highlights how public spaces should be designed to offer protection, dignity, and opportunities for homeless people, and to facilitate encounters and interaction. The featured examples impressively demonstrate that even the smallest spatial decision can determine inclusion or exclusion. The Roofless Truth paints a multifaceted picture of planning and design as a social practice beyond representation and prestige.

This series of board books will help children to make the right choice when coming to recycling and saving the planet! On each page, after a short explanatory introduction, children will find a turning wheel. If they place it on the right recycling action, the following page will result in a happy ending. If they make the wrong decision, something bad for the environment will happen… but they can learn from that experience and start all over again thinking about their choices! A simple yet effective idea to make children understand that their actions have an impact on the planet. They can learn from it and make the right choice also in real life. Ages: 5 plus

About the Weather accompanied Canan Tolon’s second solo exhibition at Dirimart (23 November–24 December 2023) with the same title. The bilingual publication gathers Tolon’s large-scale works in rust and acrylic on canvas, created in 2023, alongside earlier pieces in the same technique. Her abstract compositions emerge through a process that embraces chance: metal fragments placed on canvas interact with water, air, and weather, generating unpredictable rust forms shaped by conditions beyond the artist’s control—humidity, pollution, temperature shifts, or wind. These works register environmental processes, functioning as both material traces and invitations to free association, constantly renewed in dialogue with the viewer. The volume also includes essays by art historian Berin Gölönü and curator Kevser Güler, who reflect on Tolon’s practice and the exhibition’s ironic title, which alludes to our tendency to avoid urgent concerns—such as the climate crisis—by resorting to “small talk” about the weather.

Text in English and Turkish.

In 1980, German artist Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) and Britta Zoellner, a close friend of Polke and an artist herself, set off for Southeast Asia from the vibrant art scene in Germany’s Rhineland region. A planned period of quiet work on Bali evolved into a 13-month journey from Indonesia via Singapore to Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, and back to Malaysia and Thailand. Fascinated by the ancient high cultures, the gamelan music and wayang puppet theatre, they increasingly turned their attention to Indigenous societies and their ways of life, but above all to nature, the tropical fauna and flora.

Based on Zoellner’s diary entries, films and photographs taken during their extensive tour, as well as other unpublished sources, distinguished art historian Katharina Schmidt traces this little-known journey in chronological detail for the first time. She examines how the intense experience of other cultures and grandiose landscapes, including the discovery of cosmic events through meteorites, moved Polke. She explores how rich nuances of colour impressions and a wealth of observations and experiences shaped his future art, his concept of nature, and his ideas of space and time. Empathy for the Indigenous peoples’ fate under colonial rule, and for a nature endangered by exploitation of natural resources such as uranium or gold, reveals the attentive and far-sighted qualities of this quiet, concentrated journey undertaken by Polke and his companion.

This generously illustrated survey of 80 halls from the past three centuries is a personal selection by the authors, enriched by recommendations from leading musical authorities. These auditoria combine consistently high standards of performance with architectural and acoustical excellence.

The survey focuses on three periods. Earliest, the court theatres that served rulers and the aristocracy in the 18th century, jewel boxes that now draw music lovers to summer festivals. Secondly, the explosive growth in size of theatres, orchestras, and audiences in the 19th century. Finally, the dramatic advances in design and technology over the past 30 years, as leading architects have worked with musicians and expert acousticians to create versatile and innovative auditoria that address civic and economic demands, while attracting new audiences.

The goal is to create a readable, visually alluring compendium that will appeal to lovers of music and architecture as well as cultural tourists in search of new experiences. It will satisfy a broad range of tastes, from the intimacy of chamber music and baroque opera in period settings, to the grandeur of Verdi in La Scala and Wagner in Bayreuth, and the latest advances in composition and presentation.

Traditional thought fused with modern science when Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation on August 6, 1945, proved the interdependence of space and time. Since the war, Japanese architects have probed the relativity of spacetime through critical debates, pivotal theories, and consequential buildings. The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture pushes past clichés of an exotic Japan to confront the modernity of an island nation whose habit of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenisation than one of cultural invention. The realisation that buildings are dynamic events — phenomena of space-in-time, not inert objects outside time — continues to inform Japanese architecture and suggests how we can rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.

This delightful new series of colour filled pages with easy, short and fun text makes exploring bugs in the garden an exciting adventure for little ones with soft felt flaps to flip and uncover! This interactive board book with durable felt flaps plays on children’s innate attraction to peekaboo and hide-and-seek.

Ages 3+

Discover the magic of beloved the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood with The Storyteller sound books. This innovative collection offers young children a new way to experience these timeless tales: designed for those who are not yet able to read independently, each book allows children to explore the stories by turning the pages while listening to the corresponding text read aloud at the touch of a button. The book becomes a modern storyteller, presenting the fairy tales with beautiful illustrations and engaging narration that brings the stories to life.

Other titles in the collection include:

9788854421707   The Storyteller: Peter Pan
9788854421714   The Storyteller: Pinocchio
9788854421721   The Storyteller: Snow White

Ages 4 plus.

“Expand your mind and look good doing it with these new boundary-bending works of theoretical exploration by some of the field’s premier thinkers.” — The Architect’s Newspaper
“This jog through the history of physical culture vis-à-vis modern architecture features a series of drawings (beautifully rendered in metallic ink over black paper) and an impressive assortment of archival imagery. Taking the book over the finish line: a collection of somersaulting, weightlifting, and jeté-ing silhouettes that are bound to elicit more than a few smiles.” — Architectural Record
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling explores the advent of radical new conceptions of the body—a phenomenon known in the 1920s and ’30s as “physical culture”—and their impact on the thinking of some of modern architecture’s most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and plans, the book reconstructs a constellation of provocative domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, and others. This obscure chapter in the modern movement gestures towards a remarkable synthesis of the individual and the collective, a perspective that holds enormous potential for articulating an architecture of today.

In this book, Joseph Masheck re-examines the spiritual in Mondrian’s art and proposes a parallel between the equilibrium found in his paintings and his writings on theological justification. The artist’s Calvinist Christianity is considered in respect to the balanced, asymmetrical works of his ‘classic’ phase of the 1920s and 1930s, and potential parallels with the writings of an important Dutch theologian of the Neo-Calvinist movement are explored. Finally, the author follows Mondrian’s classic phase into the 1930s and beyond, in this extraordinary and inspiring reassessment of one of the fathers of abstract art.

This new book explores the work of Mahendra Raj, arguably India’s most significant structural engineer. Born in 1924, Raj studied in Lahore and gained first working practice at the Punjab Public Works Department. He completed his education by working with engineering firms in the US and degrees he took from University of Minnesota and Columbia University, New York in 1955-59. He established his independent practice in New Delhi in 1960. Many of Raj’s structures are recognised as monuments narrating the history of energetic nation building in post-independence India. Some of them are unique, such as the Hall of Nations and Industries (New Delhi, 1972) with its large-span concrete space frame, the Hindon River Mill (Ghaziabad, 1973) with a series of bowstring concrete arches. Especially during the 1980s, Raj designed further innovative, groundbreaking structures, most notably the NCDC Office (New Delhi, 1980) and the State Trading Corporation building (New Delhi, 1988). The Structure features twenty-eight of Mahendra Raj’s buildings from all periods of his career in detail and richly illustrated with photographs and colour reproductions of archival plans as well as selected sections and plans. Essays by expert authors, interviews with Mahindra Raj, and an illustrated complete list of works round out this first comprehensive monograph on a pioneer of structural engineering.

This volume contains nearly 1600 coins of the 9th-16th centuries from North Africa to Great Syria. The collections included in the catalogue are those of the Heberden Coin Room and the Shamma Collection. Unlike previous SICA volumes, the coins are arranged by dynasty and ruler because of the large number of distinctive types belonging to each dynasty’s coinage.