Announcements
Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture by Robert A.M. Stern
Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture
By Robert A.M. Stern
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2022
Architect, historian, and educator Robert A. M. Stern presents a personal and candid assessment of contemporary architecture and his fifty years of practice.
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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Recent Articles
Alberto Alessi
Born in Arona (Novara), Italy, in 1946, Alberto Alessi is president of Alessi S.p.A. and head of Marketing Strategy, Communications, and Design Management.
The eldest son of Carlo Alessi, Alberto belongs to the third generation of the Alessi family, and officially joined the company in 1970, the day after he received his law degree. He initially was in charge of commerce, the development of new products, and communications.
Since 1970, he has collaborated with architects and designers around the world to enhance the company’s reputation of working with key names in the field of international design.
Alberto Alessi has written several books, including La Cintura di Orione (1986), Not in Production, Next to Production (1988), and The Dream Factory: Alessi since 1921 (1998). During his career he has contributed articles to many international magazines and publications and he has been a visiting professor at several design colleges.
A member of the Academic Board of the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki (UIAH), Alessi also sits on the Honorary Committee of the Design Museum, London. He became Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London, in 1993; Doctor Honoris Causa of the UIAH, 1993; Honorary Professor of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, Saarbrucken, 1994; and Doctor of Fine Arts at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, 1995. In 1998 he received the Design Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
He received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of the University from the University of Central England, Birmingham, in 2001; was named a Master at the Atelier de Formation en Haute Pâtisserie de l’Ecole supérieure de cuisine française (ESCF Ferrandi) in Paris, in 2008; was granted an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Lincoln University (UK) in 2010; and was the recipient of Collab’s Design Excellence Award for 2010 at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts.
Alberto Alessi curated the exhibition “The Dream Factories: People, Ideas, and Paradoxes of Italian Design Factories” at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Opened on April 6, 2011, and on view through February 26, 2012, the exhibition illustrates Alessi’s vision and analysis of what he refers to as the “factories of Italian design.” According to Alessi, these factories have developed a series of highly specific artistic intermediation practices, which are among the best expressions of international contemporary product design on the one hand, and of the market, on the other.