The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
From the Publisher: Where do our things really come from? China is the most common answer, but Thomas Thwait es decided he wanted to know more. In The Toaster Project, Thwaites asks what lies behind the smooth buttons on a mobile phone or the cushioned soles of running sneakers. What is involved in extracting and processing materials? To answer these questions, Thwaites set out to construct, from scratch, one of the most commonplace appliances in our kitchens today: a toaster.
While a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, Thwaites undertook to build an electric toaster from raw materials. His account of extracting iron from rock, hand-carving a wooden mold for forming molten plastic, precipitating copper out of pools of acidic mine waste, and melting Canadian coins for their nickel manages to be both hilarious and sober. In the end, Thwaites’s toaster was a spectacular failure—a gloppy aesthetic and functional mess that cost £1187.54, or 300 times more than the £3.94 commercial model that inspired him—but it taught stinging lessons about environmental responsibility.
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Announcements
New Book Release (U.S.), June 30, 2014: BMW Art Cars
Traces the development of the BMW Art Cars, the so-called “rolling sculptures” designed by artists including Alexander Calder, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol over the last 40 years.
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Thomas Girst, editor
Texts by Carl Magnusson, Phil Patton, et al.
Published by Hatje Cantz
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New Book Release: Platform 6, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Platform 6 presents a sampling of the work produced at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) during the past academic year. This work is indicative of the School’s commitment, as a global leader in the field, to exploring and articulating transformative ideas through the power of design.
Rosetta S. Elkin, Editor
Published by Actar
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New Book Release, March 31, 2014: Manuals 1: Design & Identity Guidelines
The first comprehensive study of corporate identity design manuals, featuring examples from the 1960s to early 1980s—the golden era of identity design.
Texts by Adrian Shaughnessy, et al.
Published by Unit Editions
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New Book Release, April 21, 2014: Drawing and Reinventing Landscape, AD Primer
Explores notions of representation in the discipline of landscape architecture at large and across time.
Diana Balmori
Published by John Wiley & Sons
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New Book Release (U.S.), May 20, 2014: The Duchamp Dictionary
More than 200 alphabetical illustrated entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people, and ideas in influential artist Marcel Duchamp’s life, including chess puns, the fourth dimension, love, genius, ready-mades such as Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Arturo Schwarz.
Thomas Girst
Published by Thames & Hudson (distributed in the U.S., by W. W. Norton)
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New Book Release (U.S.), May 1, 2014: Shape of Sound
Architect Victoria Meyers analyzes the shape of sound; architecture and sound; form; materiality; windows; the urban soundscape, its politics, aesthetics and social character; reflection; virtuality; sound art; and silence.
Victoria Meyers
Published by Artifice Books on Architecture
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