Louis I. Kahn is unarguably one of the most eminent and influential figures of 20th-century architecture. He is known as the poet and philosopher among the great modern architects. On 12 February 1969, Kahn gave a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), entitled Silence and Light. This fundamental text reveals Kahn’s spiritual understanding of architecture and his creative thinking. Kahn’s idea of architecture goes far beyond the mere building. He understands architecture as a concept comprising the entire environment of mankind. With this he anticipated more than forty years ago what is branded “sustainability in architecture” today. Louis I. Kahn – Silence and Light makes this text available again in its original version, for the first time ever also in Kahn’s own voice on audio-CD. The book includes a full-length transcript of the Zürich lecture in original English and translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Kahn’s sketches drawn while speaking and number of previously unpublished images of the architect lecturing complement the text.

Text in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Aldo Rossi (1931-97) is a key figure in 20th-century architecture. Discarding utopian pretences, his work claimed the autonomy of architecture with formal restraint, and remains highly influential both in theory and practice until the present day. In this new book, Diogo Seixas Lopes looks at Rossi’s work through the lens of a term often used to describe the great architect’s work: melancholy. While the influence of melancholy on literature and visual arts has been debated extensively, its presence in architecture has been largely overlooked. By exploring Rossi’s entire career, Lopes traces out the oscillation between enthusiasm and disenchantment that marks Rossi’s oeuvre. Through a close exploration of one of his landmark works, the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena, Lopes shows how this brilliant, innovative architect reinterpreted a typology of the past to help us come to terms with representations of death and the melancholy that inevitably accompanies it. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on rich archival sources, Melancholy and Architecture both illuminates the work of the 20th century’s most interesting architects and offers a new perspective on the long cultural history of melancholy.

Learning to construct is the objective of the architecture student, who seeks to bring sketches, sophisticated visualisations, material and component choices, and detailed plans and diagrams together in a single grand composition. Plans & Images offers insight into how architects are trained by examining the teaching and research approach of the Laboratory of Elementary Architecture and Studies of Types EAST (Laboratory EAST), a satellite studio of the EPFL School of Architecture in Lausanne. Going beyond the traditional notion of functionally determined typologies, Laboratory EAST is concerned more broadly with the principles of typology in architecture. Richly illustrated with drawings and plans by Laboratory EAST’s students, the book also includes essays by faculty and other experts, and an interview with the renowned Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, who discusses the research topics pursued at Laboratory EAST. Four photo essays by Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti round out the book.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of his death (August 27, 2015), one of Le Corbusier’s most significant books becomes available again in English. The “Precisions”, as the book is commonly known, emerged from a spontaneous and exuberant series of 10 lectures Le Corbusier gave in Buenos Aires in 1929, reflecting a new maturity in his thinking. They contain some of his most compelling aphorisms, covering technique as the basis of architecture, the human scale in design, furniture, the private house, apartments and office buildings, the city, the League of Nations competition, teaching architecture.

As he spoke, Le Corbusier improvised colour drawings on large sheets of paper. The drawings and lectures are unique in their eloquent and concise summary of his philosophy of architecture and urban design, stating the principles that informed his work from the 1920s on.

This new edition for the first time features all of Le Corbusier’s drawings in colour. A new essay by British scholar Tim Benton, written for this new edition, contextualises the “Precisions” within Le Corbusier’s oeuvre and comments on their lasting significance.

Water and Asphalt proposes a project of extended requalification for the territories of settlement dispersion and diffusion; a project on a territorial scale and imagined in a context of economic, social, and environmental crisis. To indicate its principal characteristics, the research study uses the term Project of Isotropy. The metropolitan area of Venice, criss-crossed by dense networks of roads and waterways, is the test case for imagining the concept.

The Project of Isotropy is the acknowledgement of a territorial specificity, a scenario to be investigated in its manifold consequences, and a design hypothesis that can be concretely devised in terms of intervention regarding the water system, roads and public transport, alternative mobility, forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture, and the decentralised production of energy. The hypothesis is that new conditions now exist for re-devising the isotropic space in the Metropolitan area of Venice.

Vincent Mangeat became internationally renowned in1988 following the construction of his building for the Cantonal High School in Nyon. Influenced by his work experience in Paris, training under Jean Prouvé and a spell as Assistant to Hans Brechbühler and Pierre Foretay at the EPF Lausanne, Mangeat s work bridges the gap between two architectural eras, namely the Tessin Tendenza of the ’70s and ’90s architectural styles with their exponents in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. But his work has always remained independent and rooted in western Switzerland. From his first residential building in Evolène (1969) to his current projects, including a house for writers at the foot of the Jura mountains, his wealth of architectural achievements form a important a part of his life and work as his permanent, valuable teaching activity.

Text in English, French and German.

Pablo Picasso’s artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. This handsome new publication examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper.

He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-collé experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional ‘constructions’, made of cardboard, paper and string. Sometimes, his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were hard to come by, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And, of course, his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings, among them Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937).

With reproductions of more than 300 works of art and additional texts by Violette Andres, Stephen Coppel, Emmanuelle Hincelin, Christopher Lloyd, Johan Popelard and Claustre Rafart Planas, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso’s genius seized the potential of paper at different stages throughout his career.

Rabbit Cloud and the Rainmakers is an endearing folktale brought to life in the 21st century. An engaging quest on one level, it introduces themes of social responsibility and environmental issues.

The fight against human trafficking, improvements in public health, or combating the international drugs trade- these are some of the most pressing problems Thailand and the world are facing today. Remarkably, these topics were already high on the international political agenda over 80 years ago during colonial times, when the League of Nations, the United Nations’ predecessor, was created. This first in-depth study of Thai foreign relations in well over a decade traces how these and other policy areas brought Siam in contact with the League of Nations, after the kingdom had signed the Treaty of Versailles and became an original member of this first global body. Based on never before consulted primary sources in Thailand and Europe, this study unfolds the story of a unique relationship between the only independent country in Southeast Asia and the League during the inter-war period of 1920-1940. The book highlights both the importance of the League for the modernisation of Siam and the shaping of its foreign policies, as well as the intriguing role Siam played on the world stage in the early development of the multilateral political system we live in today.

100 years ago Siam declared war on Germany. In the early morning hours of 22 July 1917, army units and gendarmerie called the roughly 200 completely unsuspecting German and Austro-Hungarian men in Bangkok out of their beds, presented them with the declaration of war and went on to arrest them. At the same time, marine units boarded the nine ocean going German ships anchored on the river, capturing what was considered by all to be the greatest prize. With these events began Siam’s 17 months at war with two European powers.

The story of how these 17 months unfolded in Siam and in Europe is at the heart of this book. It is a complex tale interweaving political, diplomatic, military, cultural and social history. The book introduces adventurous and scared Thai soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front, arrogant European politicians and diplomats convinced of their racial and cultural superiority, shrewd Thai officials beating the West at its own game of imperialism, princes rivalling over influence and power, German businessmen imprisoned by “Orientals”, Thai students caught up in world events and submarine attacks, and the King of Siam himself.

Siam’s participation in World War I was the single most important international event for contemporaries in the kingdom, its symbolism unmatched by any other occurrence of the times. The book is the first-ever extensively researched study of Siam and World War I in all its facets. By combining primary sources from Thailand, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria, the study describes local events in a global context and explains how world events manifested themselves in the royal palaces and on the streets of Bangkok. The legacy of the events a century ago is remarkably tangible even today, and the book connects the reader with this legacy.

The book is easily accessible to the non-specialist reader interested in history and political affairs, as it describes numerous colourful episodes and vignettes, and includes over 300 rare photographs and illustrations, reproduced in high-quality print.

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.

Born as the youngest of a poor Swiss farming family’s seven children, Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957) supplemented arduous farm work and various jobs in a textile mill, as a woodcutter, and railway worker, with art. Gaining increasing recognition in Germany and Switzerland, his participation in the exhibition Les maîtres populaires de la réalité in Paris, Zürich, and New York in 1937-38 marked his breakthrough internationally. Until today, Dietrich’s work is regarded by some as a prime example of 20th-century naïve painting, while other scholars place him closer to the post-expressionist movement of New Objectivity.

For the first time in nearly sixty years, Dietrich’s work has been shown in a vast retrospective at Kunstmuseum Olten in Switzerland, in summer 2015 in which his pictures were accompanied by paintings of artists such as Cuno Amiet, Otto Dix, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Rousseau, or Félix Vallotton. This coinciding new monograph is richly illustrated in colour throughout, featuring some 160 works by Dietrich and the other artists. The essays contextualise his art and highlight Dietrichs’ lasting significance.

Text in English and German.

In 1911, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and his friend August Klipstein (1885-1951), a scholar of art history and later renowned art dealer, undertook a grand tour of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and Italy. While Klipstein’s interests were more focused on research for his doctoral thesis, Le Corbusier’s impressions were more immediate, his mindset more romantic. They both kept a diary of their journey and produced many sketches, drawings, watercolours, and photographs en route, sometimes capturing the same motif and even copying each other’s work. While Le Corbusier’s record was published in 1966 as Journey to the East and has become a classic, Klipstein’s testimony of the expedition remained largely unknown until today. In this new book, Ivan Zaknic explores the creative symbiosis of this friendship and what the two ambitious young men brought back from their trip. Richly illustrated, including reproductions from both of their diaries, and featuring the complete text of Klipstein’s diary as well as that of the little known correspondence between Le Corbusier and Klipstein, the book offers an entirely new perspective of this seemingly well-known undertaking. It introduces the personality of Klipstein as well as lesser-known facets of the very young Le Corbusier.

Few figures tower over twentieth-century art like Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. Their works were groundbreaking and incalculably influential, yet at the same time both artists were wildly popular in their lifetime and have only become more so in the decades since their deaths. Despite the striking differences in their art and personalities, the two men nonetheless had a lot in common the most obvious being a strong sense of the power of publicity and an affinity for eccentricity and extravagance. They also shared a love of New York, which both men made the heart of their social lives; it was there, in the 1960s, that they met for the first time.

This book offers the first-ever direct juxtaposition of Dalí and Warhol as personalities and artists. Torsten Otte builds his account through perceptive analyses of similarities in their lives and work, and reconstructs their many encounters based on first-hand accounts by some 120 people who knew and worked with the men. Around sixty images, many of them published here for the first time, by eminent photographers such as Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Philippe Halsman, Christopher Makos, Man Ray, or Robert Whitaker, round out the book.

Marco Graber and Thomas Pulver founded their architectural studio in 1992 after graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and working with Cruz Ortiz Architects in Seville and Torres & Martinez-Lapeña in Barcelona respectively in 1990-91. Since then Graber Pulver Architects, located in Zurich and Berne, have realised many projects for private and public clients in Switzerland and gained recognition nationally and internationally. Their work has been published in numerous books and magazines in Switzerland and abroad. Marco Graber and Thomas Pulver have been lecturing as visiting professors in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich’s M.A.-program in architecture in 2006-08, maintaining a close interaction between their method of teaching and design research and the practical work in the studio. Spatial Sequences and Urban Infrastructure gives an insight into Graber Pulver’s working methods, focusing on their search for the contextual roots and for the specific space and form. The leading idea is that, besides of its natural properties, the infrastructural reservations and links of a territory are crucial for the physical development of our urban landscape. At the same time the form, which has to meet a multitude of demands, is determined by the fact that the quality of a space can be judged and developed only by moving within that space. A second, lavishly illustrated part of the book presents work by students of Graber Pulver’s course at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. The topics for the four terms determined concrete architectural tasks and resulted in a vast variety of inspiring and radical solutions. Accompanying essays further investigate the topics of the course and provide additional background information on the student’s tasks. Text in English & German.

For some forty years, Susi and Ueli Berger’s work has been guided by the credo that ‘only a new idea justifies a new piece of furniture’. Contrasts between product design and object art, and suitability for everyday use characterise their designs. A playful provocativeness and the combination of rationality and sensuality are additional hallmarks of the Bergers. In 2010, they were awarded Switzerland’s most prestigious national design prize, the Grand Prix Design for their joint lifetime achievements at the interface of art, architecture, and design.

Susi Berger-Wyss, born 1938 in Lucerne, trained as a graphic designer and worked with an advertising agency in Berne before she met and married Ueli Berger in 1962. Apart from their close collaboration in furniture and interior design, Susi continued to work as a freelance graphic designer and also collaborated with architects, developing colour and material concepts for interiors.

Ueli Berger, born 1937 in Berne, trained as a painter and decorator and also attended classes at the city’s school of art and design. 1959-61, he completed his artistic education during extended stays in Paris and Copenhagen and worked with renowned Swiss interior designer Hans Eichenberger. Until his passing in 2008, Ueli worked as an artist – creating a much recognised oeuvre in painting, drawing, and sculpture – and designer, and also held a number of teaching appointments at universities and art schools in Switzerland.

Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished original drawings, plans, photographs, and promotion materials, as well as a catalogue raisonné of Susi and Ueli Berger’s collaborative work and an illustrated biography, this groundbreaking book offers the first-ever survey of their life and oeuvre. It is published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition at Zurich’s Museum für Gestaltung in summer 2018.

Text in English and German.

This catalogue includes Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s realised and unrealised large-scale projects from 1961 to 2016. Besides the famous wrapped monuments, from the Kunsthalle in Bern (1967-1968) to the Reichstag in Berlin (1971-1995), the publication also includes the barriers made with barrels or with fabric, from Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain in Paris (1961-62) to Valley Curtain in Rifle, Colorado (1960-62), the great inflatable objects, from 42,390 Cubic Feet Package of Minneapolis (1966) to 5600 Cubicmeter Package, Project for documenta IV in Kassel (1967-1968), and the fabric pathways, such as Wrapped Walk Ways in Kansas City (1977-1978), or doors, such as The Gates in New York (1979-2005). The seven Water Projects – Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installations sharing a connection with water – are considered in further depth. In these projects, from Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California (1972-1976) to Over the River, a project for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado (1992), the artists worked on establishing a close connection with natural, suburban and urban landscapes that all share a relation with water, be it an ocean, a sea, a lake or a river. The Floating Piers, an installation that allowed visitors to walk across Lake Iseo, is also included here. Among the Water Projects we must mention The Floating Piers, an installation open from June 18 to July 3 2016, which allowed visitors to walk across Lake Iseo and along its shores on a 3-kilometre route. By means of modular floating piers covered in shimmering yellow fabric, the installation linked the town of Sulzano on the lake’s shores, to Monte Isola, also reaching the Island of San Paolo.

The stories told in the great masterpieces of European opera are, frequently, based on facts relevant for criminal law. Murders, abductions, extortions, kidnappings, massacres, and other types of crimes have filled the stories of opera since its origin. In much of musical theatre, including the masterpieces by Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Wagner, and many others, there are, also issues addressed that touch upon the less obvious areas of private law: librettos often talk about contracts, donations, wills, weddings, family relationships, debts and money issues in general. In Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Nemorino – in love with the beautiful but indifferent Adina – is the victim of a real contract scam perpetrated by Dulcamara. In La sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini, Elvino snatches the engagement ring given to Amina thinking she was unfaithful: he revokes a donation made in view of marriage, and maybe breaks a rule of law. In Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, one witnesses a sensational case of breach of contract, to be read in the light of the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a new sensibility for market economy and the increasingly central value of contracts in social relations. In Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart, there is a strange marriage vow, executed in order to guarantee the repayment of a debt.

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.

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.