The Craft of It All: Jonathan Olivares’s Book List
By Steve Kroeter December 18, 2012![]() |
Jonathan Olivares |
Product/industrial designer Jonathan Olivares: Jonathan Olivares Design Research (New York)
Jonathan Olivares generated quite a bit of notice last year with the publication of A Taxonomy of Office Chairs (Phaidon Press), one of the more unusual design books of 2011. With this compilation of the results of an exhaustive research project begun in 2006 for Knoll, the author, according to Paul Makovsky, who named Taxonomy a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2011, “took a boring topic—office chairs—and after four years of research produced a monograph that will have you wanting to redesign the chair you’re sitting in. With an almost scientific rigor, he includes over 400 illustrations of details of chairs. A model for anyone looking for an approach to the history and taxonomy of a product.”
Approaching an industrial object through the lens of morphology, normally associated with the evolution of the structure of plants and other organic forms, is a technique Olivares also adopted for his Designers & Books book list. An award-winning furniture designer in his own right—with a recent aluminum stacking chair for Knoll and a Compasso d’Oro award to his name, among other achievements—he comments in detail on the form as well as the content of five design titles.
On his list is A Computer Perspective, produced for an exhibition on the history of the computer that the Eames Office designed for IBM in the 1970s. “I could speak for days about the significance and beauty of this book,” says Olivares. “Its format is made up of sequences of images that occupy the central portion of each spread, with captions above and below. This creates a dynamic reading experience, and prefigures the basic format of the scrolling blog, or twitter feed, where a stream of text and images are in constant referral to each other. . . . While the content is interesting to me, the real fascination for me lies in the format, which offers a finely conceived lens for viewing history, and could be applied to any number of subjects.”
![]() |
Jonathan Olivares, A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, 2011 (Phaidon Press) |
Olivares calls Enzo Mari—Sixty Paperweights: The Intellectual Work, a catalogue of a 2010 exhibition in Milan of furniture designer Enzo Mari’s paperweight collection, “a simple book on a simple theme, and like the exhibition offers a world of objects whose forms bear a clear, but always surprising relationship to their materials.” He cites Hans Richter, New Living, a book he discovered as a student and which has remained a favorite, noting, “The book explores the film Die neue Wohnung, which Richter did on commission from the Swiss Werkbund, and which functioned to promote modern furniture. The book features stills from the film that compare people living with antiquated furniture to people living with modern furniture. Seeing users in action, their movements guided by architecture and furniture, led me to see design as a kind of choreography.”
His admiration for a focused devotion to a subject continues with his selection of the classic Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975. Olivares marvels: “Though the ideas developed by Judd throughout this compilation of his gallery reviews, book reviews, articles, letters and statements are entirely interesting, what really intrigues me about this book is the fact that Judd actually went through with all of this writing, firmly developing his position on so many of the works of his contemporaries.”
The final title on Olivares's book list is Saarinen’s Quest: A Memoir, a book of photographs taken by designer and in-house photographer Richard Knight during his time in Eero Saarinen’s office in the 1950s until Saarinen’s death in 1961. “The photographs show Saarinen and his associates in deeply focused work, taping models, scrutinizing their designs, and discussing ideas. . . . An incredible sense of play, but serious play, comes across from seeing these grown men in suits crouching around scale buildings and mounting their drawings to the walls. The craft of it all is enviable.”
View Jonathan Olivares’s Profile
View Jonathan Olivares’s Book List
See more product/industrial designers’ book lists
Announcements
Designers & Books Tours
Designers & Books Tours:
Customized tours providing the opportunity to explore the places, meet the people, and see the books of the design book world in New York City.
For information:
PH: 212-777-9080
or
info@designersandbooks.com
Understanding Understanding: New from Richard Saul Wurman
Understanding Understanding
by Richard Saul Wurman
Publisher: Richard Saul Wurman and Jack Dangermond
Published July 30, 2017
From the author of Information Architecture, who says about his newest book: “This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. . . Before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand.”
The Hard Life by Jasper Morrison
The Hard Life
by Jasper Morrison
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published in US: May 22, 2017
Photographs taken by designer Jasper Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal. “The objects photographed and described may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest. The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy.”
Paula Scher: Works - Order from Unit Editions
Paula Scher: Works
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin
Publisher: Unit Editions
Published April 2017
New book covering the career of of master designer Paula Scher, called “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.” (Ellen Lupton), This definitive, chronological visual record spans Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.
Type Tells Tales: New from Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Type Tells Tales
by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published May 30, 2017
Reveals how type can become both content and illustration, as letters take the form of people, animals, cars, or planes. With numerous illustrations by F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Munari, and Francis Picabia, among others, as well as by contemporary designers such as Richard Eckersley, John Hendrix, Maira Kalman, and Corita Kent.
The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design: New from Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
The Moderns
by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
Publisher: Abrams
Published September 19, 2017
Featuring more than 60 designers whose magazine, book, and record covers; advertisements and package designs; posters; and other projects created the visual aesthetics of postwar modernity in America. Some were émigrés from Europe; others were homegrown; all were intoxicated by elemental typography, primary colors, photography, and geometric or biomorphic forms. Some are well-known, others are honored in this volume for the first time, and together they comprised a movement that changed our design world.
Recent Articles



