Seven years after his first book, Bart Lens and his team Lens°Ass show how the direction they have chosen can lead to fascinating projects. The formulation of a clear and precise concept forms the basis of every single design. A concious choice of materials and elaborated detailing bring forth creations that express tranquility and serenity. The clear line-work emphasises the pure emotions that originate in the union of design and light. The great care that goes into the elaboration of the interior in all its facets is a constant preoccupation for Les°Ass. The book presents a wide variety of projects: new constructions, remodelling assignments, interior designs, even objects such as furniture and lamps. The introduction of a basic idea, a theme, forms the foundation of every project, no matter what its scale might be. This same vision is also the starting point for the recent large-scale architectural projects.
Text in English and Dutch.
Marcel Vrignaud is the founder and permanent professor of the Ikebana Floral Art Centre, an association he set up in 1966 after spending three and a half years in Nagoya (Japan), devoted to the specific art of Ikebana. Being a genuine pioneer in the art of Ohara, Marcel Vrignaud trained teachers all over Europe. My Ikebana offers an overview of his fantastic output. Readers can discover many original combinations of plants, gathered during different seasons, and displayed in the most unusual containers, reflecting all the categories of bouquets of the Ohara School: moribana, heika, landscapes, rimpa, bunjin, morimono, free style, ikebana sculpture, micro ikebana, transparencies etc.
Christmas at the White House is the most beautiful and grand celebration of the year. As Chief of Floral Design during the Obama administration, Laura Dowling was responsible for the dazzling floral pieces that made the season so memorable. Here, she invites readers behind the scenes of this complex year-long planning process, where some of the most innovative and ambitious hand-made craft displays were created. From architectural details including intricate hydrangea-covered archways, illusionary cube-patterned column covers, and gilded maple leaf rosette panels, to sugar paste floral vases and robotic versions of the First Family’s dogs, the décor inspired and delighted visitors and guests from across the country and around the world.
In addition to her White House experiences, Laura shares advice and ideas, tips and techniques for planning holiday-themed displays at home, including step-by-step instructions for re-creating some of the most popular and original White House holiday designs.
Design on the High Seas is an autobiographical account of the architectural design work of Joseph Farcus, which charts his career as an architect who eventually found his way into the cruise-ship industry, in the early days of what is now a truly global business in more ways than one. His works reflects a hard-earned disciplined practice that has helped to foster sophisticated designs for the billion-dollar cruise-ship industry. Many of the projects featured in the pages of this book reflect the beautiful ships of Carnival Cruise Lines, the world’s leading cruise-ship company, as well as those of the celebrated Costa Cruises.
The volume combines spectacular full-colour photography, original sketches, and a compelling, first-person narrative to showcase Farcus’s spectacular journey. The author shares anecdotes from his childhood, his university days and his early career, giving an insight into what inspired the architect he was to become – and explaining how the astronomical success of the Carnival Cruise Lines is due in no small way to his product-defining designs. Indeed, millions of passengers have enjoyed memorable and meaningful experiences aboard his works. This is a fascinating and unique account of an architectural designer’s journey, and it will appeal to a broad readership: those who love to sail, those with a passion for boat design, as well as businesspeople of all backgrounds who wish to learn the story behind a leisure industry powerhouse.
The sales range of goods spans the globe. We can drink Russian vodka in New Zealand, or taste fruits from Brazil in Japan. Packaging enables this international exchange of merchandise, and has infiltrated our life on every level. It exists everywhere – on the supermarket shelves, in our fridges, cabinets, gifts, and cosmetics; whether you are recieving shipped items from overseas or buying produce from local farms, packaging will always be involved. However, as environmental issues become increasingly prominent, there is another side to packaging we must consider. Reducing waste, saving energy, improving sustainability of the overall products, and creating green packaging methods are hot topics in the packaging industry. So how do designers find ecological packaging strategies that protect the product without leaving a negative footprint on the environment?
Contemporary designers are finding unique and multi-functional ways to manipulate materials to make packaging recyclable, biodegradable, and reusable. More than 100 brilliant ideas from all over the world are showcased in this book, which are presented in insightful detail and complemented by glorious full-colour photography. This book will inspire design creativity, and reveal ways for businesses to help counter the environmental threats that endanger our world.
Rembrandt van Rijn married Saskia van Uylenburgh, the love of his life, in Friesland (the Netherlands) in 1634. The famous painter came to know her when she visited her cousin in Amsterdam, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt’s art dealer. This book, the catalogue for a travelling exhibition, sketches a picture of marriage in the time of Rembrandt and Saskia. Their story is the tale of a high society marriage in seventeenth century Holland, from courtships to weddings to daily married life and funerals. The show follows Rembrandt and Saskia from their meeting to her untimely early death after 10 years of marriage. Paintings, drawings, and etchings by Rembrandt, as well as letters and poetry, are featured alongside wedding portraits, objects, and jewellery from the period, offering insight into what weddings and married life meant in the Golden Age of 17th century Holland.
AannenMayKantereit is one of the most popular bands in Germany. From the very beginning, Martin Lamberty has been their photographer. He has been travelling with his old friends from school around Europe ever since. His pictures tell the story of how the young musicians started their careers by performing on the streets of Cologne right up to the development of their current album “Schlagschatten”.
Lamberty has provided a chronicle of the concerts, of the band’s life on tour, and their studio recording sessions. But his shots are far more than just classic band photos. As their friend, he is always a part of what is happening and gets to capture private moments behind the scenes, ranging from the miserably long journeys on the tour bus and the lonely hours in anonymous hotels, to the band’s vacations together.
In a unique way, Lamberty combines these silent moments with intriguing, sometimes melancholy images of rooms or landscapes and weaves them into a rich account. The result is a coming-of-age book about winning and losing, about life and friendship.
Whether pizza is served as high-end cuisine or a poor man’s food, this global product transcends the boundaries of culture and social class. The circular piece of dough has long become an established superfood. It is so much more than just something we eat. Aside from culinary considerations, the preparation, consumption and ubiquity of pizza involves at least as many social aspects. These must be taken into account in order to understand the entirety of this phenomenon. For instance, in sociology the “pizza effect” refers to reciprocal processes of reception and exchange and thus to the constant transformation of cultures. Only recently did the UNESCO in Paris allow Italy to formally register the preparation of pizza as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. That’s iconic!
The collection “Pizza is God” accompanies the eponymous international group exhibition. Situating a cultural phenomenon in the world of contemporary art, the exhibition will be staged by NRW-Forum Düsseldorf in 2018. This feast for the eyes, which combines painting, photography, net art, as well as video and performance, is complemented in the book by texts and essays written by renowned experts from the fields of food history, culture and science.
Text in English and German.
Contemporary art production in Arab countries still remains largely unexplored. Often general and trite assumptions are made distinguishing between East and West, Arabic-Islamic and Western-Christian civilisation, without addressing each culture’s specific characteristics in appropriate ways. Aware of the fact that the reception of art from these countries calls for a new approach, the museum for contemporary art, Marta in Herford, Germany, has invited nine female artists from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran and Iraq to share their work.
They all came to the West as university students or exiles, and most of them never returned to their homes. This exhibition focuses on their works of art and devotes ample space to the particular biographical and national details in the lives of these women. The diversity of their artistic styles links many different aspects, reflecting on the concept of cultural boundaries, and the crossing of those boundaries, as well as the ongoing conflicts and upheaval in their home countries.
Text in English and German.
Experienced base jumpers and other extreme sports athletes have one unwritten rule: self-knowledge. The way you think and the choices you make determine who you are and who you will become. If you know yourself, you will dare to take risks, to go your own way and to change. This rule goes for professionals who aim for high performances too. If you want your performances to have a positive drive, you first have to get to know yourself. Dare to Jump helps you to overcome your fears and gives you three power skills with which you can become the best version of yourself. Someone with a boundless mind-set, a sharp focus and a great amount of trust. You learn why focus is the new IQ, how to train yourself to enter the right flow, and how you build the level of trust within your team.
Chicago. City of the Big Shoulders. What started off as a small fur-trading settlement is today a bustling metropolis. Once considered the “hog butcher of the world, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler”, Chicago’s colourful past remains hidden in the nooks and crannies of this wonderful windy city.
Adventures await, from the glamourous to the gritty. Sip dirty martinis in an elegant, underground, 1920’s bank vault. Paddle a kayak down the infamous Bubbly Creek of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. While away an afternoon in a salt cave, or smoke a classic cigar in the oldest family-run tobacco shop in the U.S. Snorkel a 32-acre, limestone sheet shoal, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Midwest. Dine outdoors in a 23rd floor Beaux-Arts cupola overlooking the Chicago River. Whether you’re an out-of-towner or a diehard Chicago dweller who thinks you’ve seen it all, these 111 hidden places are waiting for you to discover them.
Egyptian Places: An Illustrated Travelogue, presents an architect’s account of visits to 12 of Ancient Egypt’s most spectacular sites, a journey that transports the reader from the urban metropolis of Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Giza to the remote desert setting of the rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel; with visits to other monumental temples and towering pyramids which line the Nile River.
The book recreates that journey, describing important architectural features of these sacred monuments, their mystic foundations, and religious significance. Over 200 colour hand drawings and graphic studies capture and interpret the character of each site from the architect’s unique perspective.
Bike London
is the definitive guide to cycling in the UK’s capital. The cycling culture in London is constantly evolving and this book offers an indispensable resource for the city’s bike users – whether they’re weather-hardened commuters who ride in all conditions or summer daytrippers looking to explore. This book covers all things two-wheeled, from local cycle shops and essential cafe stops, to ideas for routes and events that will appeal to all breeds of bike lover.
More than a mere directory, Bike London
speaks to important players in the city’s cycling community, while also looking back and offering interesting facts and snippets of information from London’s 100-year-plus love affair with the bicycle.
As London embraces a greener future, this book is a timely resource that will help you put words into action.
Each chapter is categorised by theme: Local Bike Shops, Cycling Clubs, Cycling Events, Cycling Locations, Cycling Routes, Cycling Equipment, Cycling Apparel, Cycling Cafes, Cycle Hire and Iconic London Cyclists. Throughout, Bike London will also feature profiles of some of the great and the good of London cycling, from Bradley Wiggins and Paul Smith to Tahnée Seagrave, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Maurice Burton and Jeremy Vine.
Also in the series:
Vinyl London ISBN 9781788840156
London Peculiars ISBN 9781851499182
Art London ISBN 9781788840385
Rock ‘n’ Roll London ISBN 9781788840163
A survey by Nicklaus Pevsner in the 1930s estimated that some 80-90% of manufactured goods in England were shoddy and poorly designed. When it came to furniture only a handful of manufacturers would have escaped such condemnation. Prime among these was Heals of Tottenham Court Road – manufacturer, retailer, and, with its top floor Mansard Gallery, the Mecca for Home Counties cognoscenti of ‘modernism’. Most furniture manufacturers advertised their wares in the press but Heal’s was a rare exception in the industry in its use of posters.
Heal’s posters not only relay the saga of a pioneering enterprise but provide a shorthand history of what was happening in the design and retailing of furniture and furnishings in Britain in the 20th century.
Tat* is a bit of a graphic designer’s curse. Walk into any design studio and you will see tat pinned to the walls or placed with loving care on top of a computer screen. Even the purist will have a secret cache hidden away somewhere.
Andy Altmann began collecting tat while he was on his Foundation course, getting ready for an interview at St Martins School of Art. He’d been asked to present a sketchbook, but worried that he couldn’t draw very well, he decided to start a scrapbook: “I rummaged through the drawers at home and found some football cards from the late 1960s and early ’70s (plenty of Georgie Best), an instruction leaflet from an old Hoover, Christmas cracker jokes, and so on. Then I started on the magazines, cutting out images of anything that interested me. And finally I took myself off to the college library, where I photocopied things from books before reaching for the scissors and glue.” It was the beginning of a significant collecting habit.
So what it is that makes a piece of graphic tat interesting? Is it the ‘retro’ thing – a fascination with a bygone age, the primitive printing techniques, the naivety of the design, or the use of colour? All of the above, of course, but it’s not quite that simple. “Occasionally people offer me something they’ve found that they think I might like”, says Andy. “But usually they’re wrong – it doesn’t excite me at all. The magic is missing.”
To a graphic designer, most the content of this book can safely be regarded as ‘bad’ design. But there is some magic in each and every piece that has made Andy either pick it up off the street, trail through online links, or enter some dodgy looking shop on the other side of the world just to snap it up. Here you’ll find everything from sweet wrappers to flash cards, from soap powder boxes to speedway flyers, from wrestling programmes to bus tickets. More tat than you can shake a stick at. Taken together, it represents a lifetime of gleeful hunting and gathering.
* tat (noun) – anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition; junk, rubbish, debris, detritus, crap, shite
Young people around the world have been following the example of Greta Thunberg and demonstrating for climate protection as part of ‘Fridays for Future’. Week after week since 2018, they have called emphatically for political ramifications in order to finally stop the dangerous effects of global climate change. The photographer Andrea Baumgartl (*1965) has accompanied these demonstrations from the very beginning. At close proximity and with great empathy, she shows the determination with which young people are fighting self-confidently for their future. Her new book is a highly topical, moving, and rousing contemporary document.
Text in English and German.
The Jewish Museum Frankfurt presents The Female Side of God, based on numerous objects from cultural history and contemporary works of art. In a close reading of these works, the exhibition catalogue introduces this hardly known and oftentimes even ‘suppressed tradition’. Comprehensible descriptions of these visual representations of a female deity, which can be found throughout the centuries, alternate with five essays, resulting from an interdisciplinary symposium of the research association ‘Religious Positionings’. A highly topical publication, comprising faith, science, and art.
Text in English and German.
Jamy Yang, an award-winning designer with major partnerships to his credit, began his career in the industrial design department of the German manufacturer Siemans. Returning to China permanently in 2004, he founded his own company, Yang Design, which is now considered the most influential product strategy and design consultancy in China.
This book explores Yang’s creative ideology in 15 thematic chapters, beginning with ‘minimalism’ and ending with ‘kindness’. It expands on his theories about the purpose of design, the dislocations that exist today in Chinese culture and aesthetics, as well as the differences between Chinese and Western design.
Contents:
Minimalism; Archaeology; The Disconnect; DNA; Craftmanship; Virtuality; Easy to use; Visuality; Touched; The Anomalies; Semantics; Modulation; Sustainability; Fragmentation; Kindness.
Bentu is an award-winning, cutting-edge Chinese design company founded in 2011. It is known for innovative and engaged product and lighting design and manufacturing, with an emphasis on day-to-day functionality and attention to raw materials. The design teams have experimented extensively with the detritus of industry, including concrete, ceramic, metal and plastic pipes, and terrazzo.
In this beautifully photographed book, the evolution of a product is shown, more than told. A stunning series of photos of raw materials and work sites follows the process from beginning to end, creating a visual storyline of environmental impact, innovative design, sustainability, reusability, local sourcing, and usage.
This beautifully designed book is a celebration of one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities: Tokyo. It spans 400 years, with highlights including Kano school paintings; the iconic woodblock prints of Hiroshige; Tokyo Pop Art posters; the photography of Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika; manga; film; and contemporary art by Murakami Takashi and Aida Makoto. Visually bold and richly detailed, this publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal and it tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their insatiable appetite for the new and innovative – from the samurai to avantgarde artists today. Co-edited by Japanese art specialists and curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard from Oxford University, this accessible volume features 28 texts by international experts of Japanese culture, as well as original statements by influential artists.
It is interdisciplinary teams with complex compositions that develop and realise exhibitions. Groenlandbasel directs a network of specialists and with Spaces and Stories enables an insight into the cooperation and the dedicated efforts of a wide range of involved parties. Exhibition thinkers and exhibition makers express themselves alongside each other in essays, shorter highlights and interviews.
The texts are accompanied by a diverse selection of projects by Groenlandbasel: museum developments, special and permanent exhibitions, architecture, as well as indoor and outdoor installations.
With text contributions from: Dominic Huber, Director Rimini Protokoll, Zurich; Nina Gorgus, Curator Historical Museum Frankfurt; Ramon De Marco, Sound Designer Idee und Klang, Basel; Daniel Tyradellis, freelance curator, Berlin; Beat Hächler, Director Alpine Museum of Switzerland, Bern; Sibylle Lichtensteiger, Director Stapferhaus Lenzburg.
Text in English and German.