From the first sparks over blazing flames to red-hot embers – cooking and baking outdoors in nature over the open fire creates a very particular fascination. Combined with a good pinch of adventure and originality, there is more to it than mere food preparation. Outdoor pro Carsten Bothe, together with the innovative but tradition-steeped Petromax company, presents more than 80 recipes for cooking outdoors, and conjures up splendid treats in a Dutch Oven, Skillet or Loaf Pan – from a German farmer’s breakfast of pork roast with crackling and vegetables on the Griddle and Fire Bowl, to bread, soups, stews, pastry and drinks. In this book you will find instructions and recipes together with field-tested tips and interesting facts on handling cast iron – all of which enrich the outdoor kitchen experience, but are, of course, also suitable for cooking at home. Contents: Breakfast; Meat, fish & poultry; Pan fried dishes; Savoury casseroles; Soups; Pizza; Side dishes; Bread & pastries; Cakes & desserts; Beverages

Dealing with distributors can be hard. They are constantly looking for better and exclusive deals, form a bad fit with your company’s strategy, do not spend enough time on your products and rely too heavily on your support. At least, that is the viewpoint of many managers. However, getting a better result from the cooperation with distributors starts at your own organisation. Distributors aren’t just clients, but an essential extension to your own organisation. That means they should be treated as such. Because why would your distributor want to work exclusively for your organisation? Once organisations start tweaking their attitude towards distributors in the right ways, they will undoubtedly only stand to gain from their cooperation with distributors.

Throughout the economic and social upheaval of the last decade, thinking about our future has proven to be a practice of vital importance. A thorough assessment of the future offers us a steady base from which to put in place sustainable policies. This domain of thinking futures relies on multidisciplinary research on leadership, strategy and decision-making amidst turbulent and uncertain circumstances. To this end, Thinking Futures offers insights into the development of proactive measures. Secondly, it suggests promising strategies for the introduction of future thinking into organisations and international policy. Thinking Futures provides an indispensable source of inspiration to managers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, politicians, or simply anyone willing to shape our societal future. “An essential book for anyone concerned for our future.” Herman Van Rompuy, former President of the European Council. “The strategic debate on future thinking should be the Alpha and Omega for current leadership. This important book could urge them to take action.” Herman H.F. Wijffels, professor, economist, banker, executive director of the World Bank (2006-2008).

In the last twenty-five years contemporary art in Scotland has grown from a tiny and tightly knit community to a globally recognised centre of artistic innovation and experiment. This book provides the first comprehensive and fully illustrated guide to the art of the period. Featuring the work of more than eighty contemporary artists who first made their careers in Scotland including Turner Prize winners Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling and Martin Boyce. An accessible introduction for new audiences and a handy reference guide to the art of this period.

Assembly of the Exalted presents some 50 pieces from the remarkable collection of Alice S. Kandell. The works, dating from the late 13th century to the early 20th, include great masterpieces and emblematic examples of Tibetan Buddhist art. They are all presented here as the constituents of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine. Shrines, both modest and grand, are the primary sites of Tibetan Buddhist practice, whether it be reciting scriptures, performing rituals, saying prayers, or engaging in meditation. The introductory essays thus focus on the Tibetan Buddhist shrine, describing its evolution over the history of Buddhism, its special role in Tibet, and how the pieces in the Kandell Collection came to be assembled and displayed in shrines at institutions across America. Illustrated with vivid photography, forty short essays, each centered on a single work or set of objects, describe the pieces in terms of their importance for the practice of Buddhism, highlighting the many essential functions of Tibetan Buddhist art within the space of a shrine.

Envisioning Better Cities: A Global Tour of Good Ideas takes readers on a world tour of useful, feasible, and novel ideas for making cities more liveable and sustainable. The book visits cities of all sizes, on all continents, to share what people are doing – now – to tackle the economic, social and environmental challenges their communities face. The book travels to Denmark, Australia, Cuba, China, Canada, Germany, Israel, Brazil, the United States, and more for good ideas that will engage and empower people to take part in the future of their city. Whether describing the benefits of yarn bombs in Madrid, the creation of pollinator pathways in Seattle, or the transformative power of garbage-for-food programs in Curitiba, Brazil this book brings together a compelling collection of examples to shift how we think about improving cities. To do this, the chapters are organised around the essential ingredients for improving our cities: Inviting People, Inspiring People, Connecting People, Communicating with People, Moving People and Supporting People. The hope is that by taking readers on a tour of diverse cities – large and small, wealthy and struggling – that their imaginations will be triggered about what they can do to improve their own cities.

This book challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics – the missing urbanism – in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids. Broad in scope, the book explores the nature of the fundamental relationship between architecture and urbanism as one of spatial formation. As an independently designed entity, the city forms the ordering framework in which architecture is partially subordinated to the mutual sustainability of the overall urban fabric. If a new urban architecture is to be an integral constituent of public place making, it must be composed using a radically different paradigm of positive, figurally constructed ‘space’ rather than the indefinite background of ‘anti-space’ as exemplified in the chapter on Mies van der Rohe’s architectural quest for the ineffable modern void. These two different spatial models are explored in depth in the eponymous article, ‘Space and Anti Space,’ first published in the Harvard Architectural Review in 1980, which forms the core of the book and postulates that the underlying attitudes toward spatial formation, at both domestic and urban scales, determine our ability to shape place and human experience. In a series of essays, articles and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanise the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in ‘Roma Interrotta,’ 1979; Paris, the ‘Consultation Internationale pour L’Aménagement du Quartier des Halles,’ 1980; and New York in the ‘World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,’ 2002.

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask: how do we characterise our post-digital design labour? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products. From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

New Essentialism: Material Architecture examines how architecture engages material to create effect. It approaches this complex topic through five critical historical thresholds, represented by analytical precedents and coupled with projective experimental design projects. Unpacking the fundamental methodologies of their geometric, material, spatial, and effectual sensibilities, each threshold builds an examination that reveals the essential methods and processes of design. In turn, this illustrates the basis of the argument for a New Essentialism: its characteristics, methods and the sensibilities that mark its definition.

Return on Experience will be comfortable on the shelves of designers and artists and equally comfortable for business leaders and educators. It reflects the fundamental belief that design is integral to everything we do. That all human existence has been a result of a progression of successful design outcomes. It is not in the sense that what we have created is exclusively logical and rational but true success has been the result of sort of emotional intelligence and meaning being infused into a new form that has caused us to progress as a species. Inspiration and innovation are difficult to process from a pure logic as it requires a broader view into the way we think and feel things. It is deeply personal and at the same time shared at a social level. In this sense we naturally view design as possessing enormous value and is an essential part of culture with a broad value and application.

Design is a dialogue. This book is not a treatise on do’s and don’ts of design or business. It is a reflection on the nature of how to see design. Design is and always has been part of a conversation. As such, this book captures a dialogue that author, Tim Kobe has been engaged in for over 25 years at Eight Inc. This conversation is more than a single path but reflects the dialogue and practice of business leaders, designers, colleagues, and collaborators. This book would not exist without those on the other side of the conversation and is more than a lens of a single or individual point of view. Eight Inc. has been incredibly fortunate to design with some of the most successful people and companies that exist today and much of Eight Inc.’s success has been attributed to our time with Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs.

ALICE (Atelier de la conception de l’espace) is an educational laboratory affiliated to the Ecole Polytéchnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) School of Architecture. Its objective is to provide students with the first essential tools for the trade of architecture. With the new series All About Space, faculty and students aim to share their work with the public. The four books, published annually between 2015 and 2018, combine fact, fiction and speculation with ALICE’s approach to work, focusing on the creative understanding of space as a human condition. The initial volume The Invention of Space explores how space is invented in terms of the various cultural practices involved with spatial design. It captures individual experience and investigates common invention and comprehension of space, embracing topics such as the history, metaphysics, or politics of environmental, virtual or simulative space. The book concludes with also exploring the spatial conditions of thought, emotion, fantasy, and imagination.

Christopher Alexander is a Vienna-born, British-American architect and theorist and the father of the pattern language movement, popularised in his pivotal 1968 book, A Pattern Language, with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, as well as the 1979 follow-up, The Timeless Way of Building. Lesser known but as essential to understanding Alexander’s work is his theory of ‘systems generating systems’ which explains that systems as a whole are created by ‘generating systems’, and, if we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’, we shall have to invent generating systems to create them. Taking the Eishin Campus outside Tokyo, built between 1983 and 1989, as its example, Shifting Patterns is the first book to examine Alexander’s theory of ‘systems generating systems’ and its application to a building design. It brings together essays from an interdisciplinary, international cast of experts, including Eva Guttmann, Gabriele Kaiser, Ernst Beneder, Walter Ruprechter, Hisae Hosoi, Christian Kuhn, Ida Pristinger, and Norihito Nakatani, as well as conversations with Hajo Neis and Takaharu Tezuka to investigate the application of this theory to the school and university complex, the largest project Alexander has realised based on pattern language. Among the issues discussed are topicality, interdisciplinary and internationality, and culture transfer. The essays also look at the design-build movement as an antithesis to today’s standardised and commerce-driven architectural production.

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.

“Rosalind Russell has written an extraordinarily beautiful, comprehensive and compelling story of Burma in a remarkably human way – essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Burma today.” Benedict Rogers, author of Burma: A Nation At the Crossroads.

“Burma’s Spring is like nothing else written about Burma – compelling, charming and unique. No other book I know of has got under the skin of such a wide variety of Burmese, bringing them to life on the page.” Peter Popham, author of The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Burma’s Spring documents the struggles of ordinary people made extraordinary by circumstance. Rosalind Russell, a British journalist who came to live in Burma with her family, witnessed a time of unprecedented change in a secretive country that had been locked under military dictatorship for half a century. Through her remarkable encounters as an undercover reporter, she unearthed the real-life stories of a rich array of characters and followed their fortunes over a tumultuous era of uprising, disaster and political reform. From the world-famous democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the broken-hearted domestic worker Mu Mu, a Buddhist monk to a punk, a palm reader to a girl band, these are stories of tragedy, resilience and hope-woven together in a vivid portrait of a land for so long hidden from view.

Thai silver and Nielloware display exquisite craftmanship and design that rivals better-known genres of silver from Asia. However, there has to date been little written about this fascinating subject. Examining the history and scope of specified Thai silver and Nielloware production dating from the early 19th century to the present, as well as the various forms and designs utilised, long-term collector Paul Bromberg provides a single reference source for both newcomers and seasoned collectors alike.

Thread and Fire is a fascinating journey through the centuries-old trade networks that developed across a group of archipelagos along the equator. Of the 18,000 islands, more than 900 are permanently settled by over 360 ethnic groups, speaking 700 languages and dialects. For centuries this vast and rich environment favoured local and regional exchanges, and it was only later that people visited from afar. New connections integrated these archipelagos with the distant civilisations of continental Asia: first India, later China and from the 13th century onwards, the Islamic world. Finally, with the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century, global trade and connections grew rapidly. Spices and forest & sea products were the focus of foreign interests, and textiles were the currency for their acquisition. These imported textiles, complemented with ornaments and jewellery, soon became part of the region’s social fabric, indispensable items of gift and exchange, essential markers for the indictment of ceremonies, rights of passage and signifiers of rank and prestige.

Thread and Fire explores and illustrates those ancient connections and traditions through Indonesian and Timorese textiles, regalia and jewellery from the Francisco Capelo collection, assembled over a 20-year period and now part of the permanent collection of Casa Asia-Colecao Francisco Capelo in Lisbon.

Despite being at the forefront of high-tech innovation in architecture, Chris Wilkinson OBE RA is an architect who believes passionately in the importance of drawing by hand. Where many practices are now dominated by computer-aided design, Wilkinson still uses drawing as a way to think through ideas, to grapple with design problems and as a tool of communication. This volume brings together images selected from twenty years of Wilkinson’s sketchbooks, presenting a fascinating record not just of draughtsmanship but of the creation of architectural narrative. Covering every stage of the design process, this unique insight into the working drawings of a hugely influential architect includes sketches for many of his practice’s most groundbreaking works, from structures for the London Olympics to the restoration and reconstruction of the three Grade II listed gas holders in Kings Cross, London. A gazetteer also features, containing photographs of the final projects. The Sketchbooks of Chris Wilkinson is both an essential purchase for anyone interested in the development of architectural draughtsmanship and a powerful demonstration of its importance.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and ’90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist’s entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro’s oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and ’90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist’s entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro’s oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist. Text in French.

The ‘Therme Vals’, the exceptional building for a thermal bath in the Swiss mountain spa of Vals by the celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, became an icon of contemporary Swiss and international architecture within a very short time after its opening in 1996. Reduction to the essential is the leading principle behind the design. Visitors should experience the elemental nature of water, of different temperatures and various dimensions of basins and rooms. This book, the only available monograph on the Therme Vals, contains an essay by Sigrid Hauser, on subjects such as ‘Artemis/Diana’, ‘Baptism’, ‘Entrance’, ‘Mikvah’, ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Resources’, ‘Spring’, etc., and comments by Peter Zumthor on his design concept and the construction, the building materials and process, and the realised project. It is illustrated with Zumthor’s own sketches and plans and with photographs by Hélène Binet, taken especially for this publication.

This book was born from the need to understand Italian drawing as a fundamental starting point for the knowledge of 20th century art history. The drawing was an essential first step, an expressive means of choice for every artist, painter or sculptor.

Considering a wide range of techniques on paper (from watercolour, to collage, to crayon, to felt-tip pen), the drawing could be considered the skeleton of 20th-century art because it represents the first visualisation of an idea.

The drawing expresses creative immediacy and, in the most authentic way possible, offers a key to understanding the genesis and evolution of a style. It is the only expressive form that tells the way of an artist’s work and its birth.

The works collected here belong to the Ramo Collection, the only collection in the world exclusively dedicated to the Italian drawings of the twentieth century, conceived to represent not only the great masters, but also hastily labelled artists who deserve to be reviewed in the light of the art of drawing.

A novel and exciting journey that will allow the reader to grasp the essential difference between a tin sign and an advert on paper: what varies is not only the support, in reality, but also its function as an advertising instrument and its various fields of application. Alongside an army of anonymous designers and illustrators and other sometimes better-known painters, we find the names of the great poster artists of the era – Cappiello, Dudovich, Mauzan, Sepo – who sign off these little big masterpieces in tin, using vivacious and brilliant colours. Text in English and Italian.

Who other than Henri Matisse’s daughter Marguerite could describe his engraving in this way? Responsible for validating her father’s press-proofs, she is, along with her son Claude Duthuit, the author of this catalogue raisonné of his engravings. She has devoted a large part of her life to allowing this ‘unknown continent’ to be discovered and which is nevertheless essential in understanding the progression of an artist known above all for his mastery of colour. The Matisse Departmental Museum, with the help of the Matisse family, Barbara Duthuit, and some most prestigious institutions, explores in this catalogue all of the engraving techniques used by Matisse from 1900 up to the end of his life. For him, engraving, drawing, painting, and sculpture all had the same importance, and in this work all the key themes that led him to build his research around the human figure, are represented. For the very first time the matrices (woodcut, lithograph, drypoint, etching, linocut…) accompany the works and help us to understand that high standards and hard work, along with an economy of means, led Matisse to transform black into a colour that he used to serve the purity of line.

Text in English and French.

Who other than Henri Matisse’s daughter Marguerite could describe his engraving in this way? Responsible for validating her father’s press-proofs, she is, along with her son Claude Duthuit, the author of this catalogue raisonné of his engravings. She has devoted a large part of her life to allowing this ‘unknown continent’ to be discovered which is nevertheless essential in understanding the progression of an artist known above all for his mastery of colour.

The Matisse Departmental Museum, with the help of the Matisse family, Barbara Duthuit, and some most prestigious institutions, explores in this catalogue all of the engraving techniques used by Matisse from 1900 up to the end of his life. For him, engraving, drawing, painting, and sculpture all had the same importance, and in this work all the key themes that led him to build his research around the human figure, are represented.

For the very first time the matrices (woodcut, lithograph, drypoint, etching, linocut…) accompany the works and help us to understand that high standards and hard work, along with an economy of means, led Matisse to transform black into a colour that he used to serve the purity of line.

Text in English and French.