Julie Lasky

Critic; Writer; Editor / United States / Design Observer

Julie Lasky’s Notable Books of 2011

The design books that interest me most these days play havoc with disciplinary boundaries.

Among my recommended sextet, one pretends to be about industrial design but is an environmentally motivated critique of consumerism. Another purports to be about interior design while appealing to enlightenment values that are too often neglected (along with illustrations from Diderot’s Encyclopedia) in other contemporary books on the subject. A third features the work of a rock star fashion designer who is equally persuasive as a sculptor. A fourth reveals designs for informal communities that are grounded in engineering and technology. A fifth argues for uniting architecture and landscape, disciplines that may abut one another in space but are weirdly disjointed in approach. And the sixth isn’t really about design, it’s about photography. You can draw your own connections.

1 book
Joel Sanders

The architect Joel Sanders hopes to “usher in a new model of integrated practice…that reunites two fields of inquiry that should never have been divided.” With Groundwork, he and the landscape architect Diana Balmori accomplish on paper what they’d like other designers to attempt in the world: a demonstration of the seamless unity of nature and culture that is demanded in an age of increasing environmental threat. The authors believe that green materials and technologies provide a common medium for interdisciplinary design approaches, just as glass and steel defined the inside/outside continuity of modernism. Much of the book is made up of their examples: from a Parisian house buried among 1,200 hydroponic ferns to a sculpture park built on a former brownfield along Seattle’s waterfront to the authors’ own design for an equestrian facility that morphs into a public park, which they proposed for New York’s 2012 Olympics bid.

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