Stanley Abercrombie
Books Every Interior Designer Should Read
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Compiled by a former editor-in-chief of Interiors, this book offers data that can be a key tool in making interior elements fit the people who use them. We may be a bit taller and a lot wider than we were in 1948, but this is still a useful reference.
This may seem a strange choice, but this catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, shows us dramatically and humorously how design decisions based on fashion can affect us in ways that are awkward, painful, and even disfiguring.
An entertaining and sometimes withering critique of the mid-century American house, with keen observations on our habits of dining, sleeping, and bathing.
An art historian’s autobiography written in the form of a tour through his own house on Rome’s Via Giulia, seeing its furnishings, art, and objects, remembering their sources and significance for him. As a result we review his whole life. Of more importance, we are poignantly reminded of how meaningful and communicative are the inanimate objects we choose to live with.
Although in his preface Nelson admitted the book’s title might have been “How I See,” this is clearly a plea for all of us—particularly designers—to be more consciously aware of our surroundings.
The original aim of this book was re-education to new visual phenomena (more abstract, less literal) and new spatial conceptions (more flowing, less static). Even though we are now fully attuned to abstraction and flow, this book still has interesting things to tell us about perceiving and expressing structure, relationships, and rapidly evolving reality.
Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s observation that “The advent of modernity coincided with the emergence of the private individual,” this is a scholarly but sprightly history of interior design from the Victorian era to today.
Part of the six-volume Vision + Value series edited by Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at MIT, this volume never specifically mentions interior design, but its 13 essays (by artists, architects, a geneticist, and a mathematician) are repeatedly relevant to it. One example, the essay by art psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, begins: “One of the basic visual experiences is that of right or wrong. . . . The shape of a house, a shelf, or a picture frame may repose contentedly or show a need to improve by stretching or shrinking.”
Although it was first published almost a century ago and offers finer details than most of us need, this is a fundamental and poetically written book about the material world for which we must design—about how things grow and why they take the shapes they do, about weakness and strength, speed and size, symmetry and asymmetry, and the partitioning of space. I recommend the 1961 Cambridge University Press abridged edition.
First published in 1936 as Pioneers of the Modern Movement and given its new title in a Museum of Modern Art edition of 1949, this book teaches the importance to modernism of such transitional figures as William Morris, H. H. Richardson, Victor Horta, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Louis Sullivan. As Pevsner states, it shows that “the new style, the genuine and legitimate style of our [20th] century, was achieved by 1914.” The 2005 edition adds color illustrations and brings the story forward to Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel.
Four years before his death, French philosopher Bachelard wrote of the character of such spaces as cellars, attics, forests, nests, shells, huts, and drawers and considered what roles they play in our imaginations. He asked designers to envision the experiences their designs will generate, not to work with abstractions that may not affect their inhabitants. He opposed Cartesian logic and celebrated poetry, play, and daydreams. He was against the square and for the round. A dense book, best to be read slowly, glancing up occasionally for a daydream.
Nelson is, of course, best known for his furniture design, but he should be at least as much appreciated for his often iconoclastic writings about design. The design problems he observed in the adolescence of modern design are with us still, though rarely as wittily considered.
Written by Ruskin as a polemic favoring Venetian Gothic style over the “pestilent” design of the Renaissance, this passionate book can now be read as a marvel of close observation and imaginative description of buildings and their interiors. Many modern readers, however, may prefer the 1960 one-volume abridged edition to the original three-volume version of 1851–53.
E. B. White once wrote that Walden was “a good argument for traveling light.” Surely such an argument for communing with nature, economy, liberty, and—above all—simplicity is a text from which a great many interior designers could benefit.
Announcements
Total Armageddon: A Slanted Reader on Design edited by Ian Lynam
Total Armageddon: A Slanted Reader on Design
Edited by Ian Lynam
Publisher: Slanted Publishers
Published: March 2019
Total Armageddon is about design. And culture. And complexity, notably how we, as a global civilization, deal with science fiction, taste, social media, the cities we live in, aesthetics, PowerPoint, burkas, Big Tech, full-contact sports, and other thorny topics. The book celebrates 15 years of independent publishing and brings together a who’s who of authors and essays from 32 issues of Slanted Magazine.
A Field Guide to Color by Lisa Solomon
A Field Guide to Color: A Watercolor Workbook
By Lisa Solomon
Publisher: Roost Books
Published: August 2019
In this creative workbook you’ll discover fresh ways to connect with color in your art and life. Using watercolors, gouache, or any other water-based medium, explore color theory while playing with paint through a balanced blend of color experiments and loose color meditations. This inspiring workbook will change the way you relate to color
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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