A Taxonomy of Office Chairs
From the Publisher. Details over 180 of the most innovative office chairs designed and built from the 1840s to the present, with a color photograph, details of the designer and manufacturer, and a short text accompanying each chair. Features designs from numerous well-known designers, including Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, Gio Ponti, Richard Sapper, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic. Gives a visual overview of the entire evolution of the modern office chair. Includes ten chapters of technical drawings, comprising over 400 drawings, underlining the exhaustive research and technical prowess behind the book. The fruition of an authoritative four-year research project which will appeal to product designers, furniture manufacturers, design enthusiasts and students, furniture collectors, and anyone needing to buy an office chair.
Olivares took a boring topic—office chairs—and after four years of research produced a monograph that will have you wanting to redesign the chair you’re sitting in. With an almost scientific rigor, he includes over 400 illustrations of details of chairs, some by famous designers like Marcel Breuer and the Eameses, to one-hit wonders like Fred Scott’s Supporto chair for Hille, and a short but insightful essay on the evolution of the chair. A model for anyone looking for an approach to the history and taxonomy of a product.
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If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
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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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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022
An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.
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.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
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