Julie Iovine
An Architecture Critic Commits
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I think of this book together with Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son as it was through Imagined Cities that I came to consider Dickens anew. For once, in describing the wrenching toll of industrialization—specifically constructing the new railroad slashing through neighborhoods—Dickens’s melodramatic writing seems just the thing. Alter goes on to brilliantly explicate carriage traffic in Flaubert as well.
This five-volume set out of Harvard traces the cultural threads spun in pagan and ancient times leading to our contemporary obsession with private space. Plus, it’s a great resource for illustrations.
The landscape in China is changing so fast that this 2008 report from the front lines is already past tense. But as a record of attitudes held by a just-exploding economy, it couldn’t be more riveting.
I’m fairly obsessed with tracking the modern mindset to its earliest sources and most warping traumas. World War I was the ultimate defining wrench in our mental works. Fussell considers not the battles fought but the culture that resonated around battle and transformed subsequent thinking about the modern experience.
There was a moment in history when any thinking person in the known world headed for Alexandria and there invented geography, mathematics, astronomy, religious tolerance and, convincingly, the modern mind. The book is especially fascinating on detailing revelations achieved simply through time and observation.
One of Stephenson’s first books, published in 1995, it anticipates iPads, 3-D printing, the dangers of mass customization, and enslavement through craft.
About dictator moths drawn to lightbulb architects. The chapter on American presidential libraries is scathing and hilariously depressing. It does not say whether or not architects have a moral responsibility when working for power mongers, but it eloquently poses all the right probing questions.
Tufte has written a handful of eye-popping books with ahead-of-the-curve titles (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information had to be self-published in 1986). Beautiful Evidence, published in 2006, is his most accessible, with tipped-in sheets for the famous graphic on Napoleon’s March on Moscow, how-to-dance-the-gavotte charts, and an 1823 map showing how many slaves fit into a ship named Vigilante. Data visualizers may prefer the earlier, wonkier tomes, but this one provides the pure pleasure of browse and learn.
Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman
Love Letter to a Garden
By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025
From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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