Weekly Wrap-Up & Preview: March 28
March 28, 2014
Our Wrap-Up & Preview is back, now appearing at the end of each month with highlights from the previous weeks and a foretaste of what’s to come. Over the past several weeks we featured a book list from Anthony Dunne of Dunne & Raby and an essay on “digital flattening” by logo designer Mark Fox, who also sent some new additions to his book list. We celebrated our three-year anniversary with a look back at some book lists from our archive and and we also posted themed book lists honoring the birthdays of architects Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe and in collaboration with CreativeMornings and its March theme of “Hidden.” We continue to highlight new books in our homepage announcements weekly. April will bring book lists from Fiona Raby and Dan Formosa, an interview with Dan Saffer—a Creative Director at Smart Design—and more.
Weekly Wrap-Up
Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interactions at London’s Royal College of Art and partner, with Fiona Raby in the design studio Dunne & Raby, offers a list of books that “celebrate parallel worlds, the imagination, and unreality in some way.” Dunne is a co-author of the recently published Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.
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Logo designer Mark Fox reflects on digital and analog culture through the lens of two selections from his book list.
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Our fifth book list developed in collaboration with CreativeMornings, a breakfast lecture series for the creative community, each with a monthly theme, is based on March’s theme: “Hidden.”
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Ten books from our contributors on American architect Louis I. Kahn (February 20, 1901– March 17, 1974). Updated June 14, 2019.
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To celebrate the three-year anniversary of Designers & Books, launched in February 2011, we’ve brought together five book lists from our archive of more than 300 lists of books that have inspired designers and design commentators.
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Linda Fallon, Head Buyer at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, sent a along a few design titles being published in Spring 2014 is especially looking forward to seeing on the store’s shelves.
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A follow-up to “50 Books on Type on Typography,” here are a dozen additional books from our contributors that explore lettering.
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Happy Birthday, Mies van der Rohe! These 12 books on architect Mies van der Rohe (b. March 27, 1886, d. August 19, 1969) were chosen or written by our contributors, including Massimo Vignelli, Stanley Tigerman, and Phyllis Lambert, or come from our featured publishers. Building Seagram was the winner of the 2013 Designers & Books Design Book of the Year Award, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies was a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2012, and Detlef Mertins’s Mies was just published this month.
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“My book list is like album tracks that take me back to a moment in time,” says Fiona Raby, a partner (with Anthony Dunne) in the industrial design research studio Dunne & Raby. The partners’ work encompasses “speculative everything,” to use the title of Dunne and Raby’s latest book, which sees design as a tool for speculating on how things might be and to imagine possible futures.
Designers & Books talks with Dan Saffer, a Creative Director at Smart Design and author of four books on design, including, most recently, Microinteractions: Designing with Details, on importance of designing the “small stuff” from phone settings to smoke detector alarms.
Announcements
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy by John Lobell
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy
By John Lobell
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: June 2020
Noted Louis I.Kahn expert John Lobell explores how Kahn’s focus on structure, respect for materials, clarity of program, and reverence for details come together to manifest an overall philosophy.
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Forthcoming: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
Five Oceans in a Teaspoon by Dennis Bernstein and Warren Lehrer
Five Oceans in a Teaspoon
Poems by Dennis Bernstein
Visualizations by Warren Lehrer
Introduction by Steven Heller
Publisher: Paper Crown Press
Published: September 19, 2019
“From a kidnap note for a world held hostage by an A-bomb, to a Holocaust survivor’s tattooed arms where the numbers just don’t add up, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope... Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” — Bob Holman, poet, poetry activist and chronicler, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
By Paul Goldberger
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: May 2019
An illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball: told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.
Charleston Fancy by Witold Rybczynski
Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City
By Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: May 2019
Charleston, South Carolina, which boasts America’s first historic district, is known for its palmetto-lined streets and picturesque houses. The Holy City, named for its profusion of churches, exudes an irresistible charm. Award-winning author and cultural critic Witold Rybczynski unfolds a series of stories about a group of youthful architects, builders, and developers based in Charleston: a self-taught home builder, an Air Force pilot, a fledgling architect, and a bluegrass mandolin player.
Teaching Graphic Design History by Steven Heller
Teaching Graphic Design History
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: June 2019
An examination of the concerted efforts, happy accidents, and key influences of the practice throughout the years, Teaching Graphic Design History is an illuminating resource for students, practitioners, and future teachers of the subject.
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