A World Without Words

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Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 1998, English

Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design; Nonfiction, Photography

ISBN: 9783907044827

From the Publisher. What feeds the inspiration of the designer? Observation. In Jasper Morrison’s collection of photographs found in his own collection of books, icons of design history meet up with the unassuming objects of everyday life, and curious findings with the archetypes of modernism. Every picture tells a story and in juxtaposition with its neighbor a new one is also created—without words, in the language of form. Morrison responds to the arbitrariness of form with simplicity and complexity, poetry and humor in a repertoire of compelling designs. A World Without Words is a school of seeing that addresses both designers and consumers who wish to explore the universe of goods.

The book is based on a slide show Morrison assembled in lieu of a lecture he was asked to give in 1988 at the Instituto Europeo in Milan.

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Jasper Morrison

On list of Books by Jasper Morrison

Alice Rawsthorn

On Alice Rawsthorn’s Book List

This book begins with a slightly battered photograph of a rumpled Jean Prouvé drawing an outline with chalk on a blackboard. The next page shows a section of one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Cars, and the page after that what looks like Arabic calligraphy but turns out to be a visual record of the movement of the tip of a bird’s wing in flight. Each page bears a single image and among them are photographs of a matador, one of Charles and Ray Eames’s plywood leg splints, fishermen’s huts in the English seaside town of Hastings, an Yves Klein painting, a dust pan, the Piaggio scooter factory, and lots of chairs. . . . View the complete text

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