Marco Romanelli
Marco Romanelli’s Book List
I belong to a generation for which books were daily bread. In the years before university they were a secret refuge where I could learn something about the world outside, about myself, and about the future (many more things are experienced in books than in reality!). Later, books (and art) became the main tool for building my own place in the world of design. Especially during the height of postmodernism, the only relief from the madness and pastiche that was supposedly a liberation from modernism—but was in reality the application of another kind of strict formalistic dogma—came from well-chosen written words.
Now that I write books myself I always consider them as simple, humble messages in a bottle. Will someone find them? Will someone understand? If even one person finds them, it is enough, for me.
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Sometimes a book is a key: Empire of Signs was my key to Japan. I read it as a university student, but I never forgot concepts like what it means to wrap a present or the discovery of haiku poetry (so similar to the expression of a well-designed object).
Written in 1957 in Italian under the title Amate l’architettura (“Love Architecture”), this book was dedicated “not to architects, but to people falling in love with architecture.” During his long life, Gio Ponti never wavered in his conviction that people can learn to read and love architecture. This is not a book that you have to read from first to last page—just open it and read one sentence every night before falling asleep.
The silence, the shadow, the lacquer, the beauty, the water, the garden, and the lesson that one flower is often enough.
The exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” held at MoMA in 1972—for which this book is the catalogue—marked the beginning of prominence for Italian design worldwide, but it also signaled the beginning of a very deep unconscious change in the minds of Italian designers. In some sense the period of “il bel disegno italiano” ended then: addressing Italy’s growing social and political problems could no longer be put off. Another lesson from this exhibition is that furniture design must retain a direct relationship with interior architecture, and not become specialized and separate. It is only in this way that furniture design can be humanized (and tested) as it originates.
If I had to choose the best contemporary designer and colleague, it would be Konstantin Grcic—first, for his personal qualities of understatement and kindness (I am a little bit bored by the vainglory of many other designers, so impressed with themselves); and then for his trying to design only when he is certain he has something new (and perhaps almost necessary) to say in the world of form. His list of works is an amazing collection of masterpieces.
A book I have read almost three times, or rather, at three different times of my life—as a child, as a young father with a child by the hand, and as a professional designer. The last reading has been the most intense: where else you can find a more accurate definition of the why and when of design? The Little Prince is a design book. It should be compulsory in every design school.
What is an “open work”? It is work that can be different for each of us, since we are individuals, but the object is always the same. Isn’t this the best result for an industrially produced piece? It is one work, but it can be interpreted in one million different ways!
I didn’t love Ettore Sottsass when I met him in the beginning of his postmodern period. He was my furniture design professor in my master’s in design program and he never considered the possibility of a student designing in “another way.” But I have always thought that his way of writing about life in design was exceptional. Here is the secret: there is no difference between life and design for a real designer!
Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, and Consistency were, according to Calvino, the qualities required for a work of literature. Why not use these same criteria for a work of design?
Announcements
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Edited by Michael Merrill
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published: October 2021
The first in-depth study of drawings as primary sources of insight into architect Louis Kahn’s architecture and creative imagination. Based on unprecedented archival research, with over 900 illustrations and written contributions by Michael Benedikt, Michael Cadwell, David Leatherbarrow, Louis Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, Michael J. Lewis, Robert McCarter, Michael Merrill, Marshall Meyers, Jane Murphy, Gina Pollara, Harriet Pattison, Colin Rowe, David Van Zanten, Richard Wesley, and William Whitaker.
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Forthcoming: 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.
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy by John Lobell
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy
By John Lobell
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: June 2020
Noted Louis I.Kahn expert John Lobell explores how Kahn’s focus on structure, respect for materials, clarity of program, and reverence for details come together to manifest an overall philosophy.
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context by David Raizman
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context
By David Raizman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: December 2020
An innovative approach to graphic design that uses a series of key artifacts from the history of print culture in light of their specific historical contexts. It encourages the reader to look carefully and critically at print advertising, illustration, posters, magazine art direction, and typography, often addressing issues of class, race, and gender.
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian by Rick Poynor
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian
By Rick Poynor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: September 2020
A comprehensive overview of the work and legacy of David King (1943–2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism, blending political activism with his design work.
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