Book List of the Week

The Confluence of Conflicting Views and Constructs: Shashi Caan’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter January 31, 2012

Shashi Caan

Architect, interior designer, and product designer Shashi Caan: Shashi Caan Collective (New York and Edinburgh)

Born in India, educated in Europe, and with wide experience as a design practitioner and teacher in the U.S., Shashi Caan is the consummate global citizen. “I am an embodiment of my interpretation of the confluence of sometimes conflicting cultural views and constructs,” is how she describes herself in the introduction to the book list that she sent along to Designers & Books. With this as her cultural and professional DNA, we immediately see why she would say about herself, “Intrigued with interactions, phenomena, and life’s pervasive yet seemingly intangible aspects, I love pondering experience and language.”

Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment, 2011 (Laurence King Publishing)

Caan calls the ten books on her list “some of my favorites, which continue to stimulate and provide insight and satisfaction.” They “have helped me to gain cultural liberation, providing a personal sense of freedom toward the shaping of a thoughtful and necessary 21st-century world society.” Although these perspectives are clearly tied to Caan’s unique personal experiences, we might see them as a graceful and elegant testament to the universal value of books and reading.

The embrace of a variety of experiences can also be found in her recent book Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment, named as a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2011, and in which Caan writes, ”the interior is not, as widely thought, the simple outfitting of a room, but, rather, the manifestation of all qualities concerning the human occupation of space.”

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