The Design Book List for September 2016 is filled with books on architecture, landscape, designers, parks, collages and more. Be sure to check out all of these brand new design books throughout the coming month. Enjoy!
“Organic Design: Products Inspired by Nature”
The natural world serves as an endless source of visual inspiration for designers. "Organic Design" features highly unique design products that have made use of the wealth of opportunities that naturally occurring forms present.
The book is divided into three sections - Form, Texture and Function. Designs range from hanging lights reminiscent of fireflies and flower bulbs, to honeycomb stools and birds beak tongs. Includes illustrations from the designer’s own sketchbooks as well as process photography documenting the act of creation.
BASIC FACTS: “Organic Design: Products Inspired by Nature” is written by SendPoints. Published by SendPoints. Release Date: September 1, 2016. Hardcover; 304 pages; $49.95.
“Brooklyn Bridge Park: A Dying Waterfront Transformed”
Brooklyn Bridge park is among the largest and most significant projects to be built in New York in a generation. The park has reinvigorated the industrial harbor waterfront and created a space for public use that reflects Brooklyn's own resurgence. "Brooklyn Bridge Park" explores the obstacles faced during the park's development and puts forth solutions to economic and planning issues faced around the world.
The book documents the success story of a grassroots movement and community planning that united around a common vision. Drawing on the authors' personal experiences—one as a reporter, the other as a park leader—“Brooklyn Bridge Park” weaves together reports of every twist and turn in the story. Interviews with more than sixty people reveal the human dynamics that unfolded in the course of development, including attitudes and opinions that arose about class, race, gentrification, commercialization, development, and government.
BASIC FACTS: “Brooklyn Bridge Park: A Dying Waterfront Transformed” is written by Joanne Witty (Author) and Henrik Krogius (Author). Published by Fordham University Press. Release Date: September 7, 2016. Hardcover; 272 pages; $35.00.
“Sidewalk Gardens of New York”
Photographer Betsy Pinover Schiff has been creating images of urban plantings and chronicling the “greening” of the city for more than two decades. Once limited to private spaces and elite neighborhoods, these plantings now have spread throughout the five boroughs. “Sidewalk Gardens of New York” reveals the transformation of the “city of concrete and glass” into one of the greenest and most richly planted urban centers in the country.
Featured are tree beds, planters, hanging baskets, and green medians that mitigate the frenzy of the street; plazas and pocket parks that offer respite to pedestrians, building plantings that create a welcoming transition between public and private; community gardens; and parks, both the iconic and the newly planted along the waterfront in Brooklyn, Queens, and Lower Manhattan.
BASIC FACTS: “Sidewalk Garden of New York (Pinover Schiff)” is written by Betsy Pinover Schiff (Author), Alicia Whitaker (Author) and Adrian Benepe (Foreword). Published by The Monacelli Press. Release Date: September 13, 2016. Hardcover; 192 pages; $40.00.
“Pierre Paulin: Life and Work”
Rejecting the orderly restraint of midcentury design, the French avant-garde designer and architect Pierre Paulin (1927–2009) imagined sleek departure lounges for the jet set, perfume bottles for Courrèges, and notable Pop-era pieces like the Orange Slice chair, the shell-shaped Oyster chair, and the Tongue, a wavy, low-slung chaise. Paulin’s signature innovation was to wrap his pieces in colorful stretch jersey, softening them and concealing their inner steel and wood. His unique designs took the temperature of Paris in the late 1960s.
Fascinated by the possibilities of new materials, Paulin was both a modernist and a traditionalist, a designer who took equal care designing ordinary objects such as fans, razors, and fondue pots as he did outfitting the private quarters of French presidents Pompidou and Mitterand. This illustrated book draws from previously unpublished archives, drawings, models, and photographs to reveal the energy of this midcentury icon, whose works are now finding new popularity today.
BASIC FACTS: “Pierre Paulin: Life and Work” is written by Nadine Descendre (Author) and Benjamin Chelly (Photographer). Published by Vendome Press. Release Date: September 13, 2016. Hardcover; 240 pages; $65.00.
“Experimenting Landscapes: Testing the Limits of the Garden”
Garden festivals are often a testing area for new ideas for landscape designers. On a small scale designers can experiment with innovative materials and explore emerging tendencies. The International Garden Festival in Metis, in northern Quebec is probably the best-known festival in North America. This publication will explain the role of garden festivals in landscape design and present a selection of 25 gardens from The International Garden Festival in Metis.
BASIC FACTS: “Experimenting Landscapes: Testing the Limits of the Garden” is written by Metis International Garden Festival (Editor) and Emily Waugh (Editor). Published by Birkhauser. Release Date: September 26, 2016. Paperback; 184 pages; $59.95.
“Cut That Out: Collage in Contemporary Design”
“Cut That Out” focuses on the most innovative uses of collage today, from 50 leading contemporary graphic designers across 15 different countries—including Hort, Mike Perry, Stefan Sagmeister, Matthew Cooper, and many others. Collage—a term coined by Picasso and Braque at the beginning of the twentieth century—is undergoing a vibrant resurgence.
Today, designers are combining traditional techniques and methods with digital technology to encompass assemblage, photomontage, mixed-media installation, digital manipulation, and even tapestry and video to create work for personal projects, clients, and commercial campaigns alike. Curated by Ryan Doyle and Mark Edwards, who work together as the studio DR.ME, “Cut That Out” focuses on the compositions of 50 leading designers and studios for whom collage has been the key to creating vibrant, effective work.
BASIC FACTS: “Cut That Out: Collage in Contemporary Design” is written by DR.ME (Author). Published by The Monacelli Press. Release Date: September 27, 2016. Paperback; 288 pages; $50.00.
“The New Pavilions”
The pavilion is the architectural form of the moment, enabling emerging architects to make their mark. Because they are often orientated to a specific function, they are less expensive than more permanent architectural forms, which allows for more experimentation or inventiveness than in larger structures. Tents, bandstands, displays, places for sitting, listening, seeing, and being seen, pavilions have myriad forms and as many functions. For architects and designers, they offer unique opportunities to experiment with form, construction, material, structure, surface, and texture, often as prototypes for larger buildings or as purely artistic pursuits.
“The New Pavilions” features a selection of the best examples produced in recent years, more than eighty projects, chosen by Philip Jodidio, a widely knowledgeable writer on global architecture. From the cutting-edge forms of Sou Fujimoto to Zaha Hadid’s Chanel pavilion, from small structures created entirely out of farm waste to a mirrored carapace conceived by Olafur Eliasson, each pavilion provides a lesson in the extreme possibilities of built form and demonstrates that many of the biggest ideas in architecture start small.
BASIC FACTS: “The New Pavilions” is written by Philip Jodidio (Author). Published by Thames & Hudson. Release Date: September 27, 2016. Hardcover; 288 pages; $45.00.
“Writingplace: Investigations in Architecture and Literature”
“Writingplace” marks an emerging discussion on the relationship between literature and architecture. This book, which grew out of an online platform of the same name, offers reflections on the role played by written language as a crucial element of architecture culture, and on the potential of using literary methods in architectural and urban research, education and design.
This book includes contributions by international experts approaching this developing field from both literary and architectural backgrounds, including Bart Keunen, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Wim van den Bergh, Klaske Havik, Katja Grillner and Wim Cuyvers.
BASIC FACTS: “Writingplace: Investigations in Architecture and Literature” is written by Klaske Havik (Editor), Susana Oliveira (Editor), Mark Proosten (Editor), Jorge Hernandez (Editor) and Mike Schafer (Editor). Published by NAi010. Release Date: September 27, 2016. Paperback; 288 pages; $45.00.
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