Phil Patton’s Notable Books of 2011
The best books offer new angles on subjects, like dramatic spotlights on stage or a clever shot on a pool table.
So a book about painting turns out to say a lot about architecture and a car maintenance manual can reveal a hidden human story. Look at Le Corbusier as a “car nut” and you get a fresh impression of his cities; study the details of the architecture firm KieranTimberlake’s walls and windows and you learn about technology.
This is an important lesson in a time when books and the business behind books are changing. The definition of what constitutes the proper subject for a book is also changing. What this new situation demands is our constant curiosity about books: we need to pick up and leaf through and note down titles and search out references.
Here are some titles that sent me off in surprising directions.
Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History
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Written to accompany an inspired exhibition first mounted at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; currently at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and due at the Georgia Museum of Art next year, the book reveals a powerful overlooked artist, George Ault. The book and the exhibition focus on five paintings made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads community of Russell’s Corners near Woodstock, New York. Ault was a sort of darker, deeper cousin of Charles Sheeler or Charles Demuth or even Edward Hopper. Poor, critically neglected, isolated, he committed suicide in 1948.
Ault’s paintings, like those of Sheeler, Demuth, and Hopper, also have a lot to teach us about architecture and space and the emotions associated with both. The space Ault painted is also cinematic, or theatrical—it could be a set for a darker, never-performed Thornton Wilder play. Nemerov sees Ault in the context of Precisionism or Neue Sachlichkeit and ambitiously uses him as a lens to look at visual thinking in America in the 1940s. The wide-ranging text is perhaps overreaching but also intriguing with its references to film noir and documentary photography.
For over a decade, the Berlin architect Jürgen Mayer H. has collected computer-generated security patterns, numbers, envelope linings, and so on. He has published a limited-edition book of them under the title Wirrwarr, a German word meaning chaos and confusion, with onomatopoetic overtones of buzz.
These would have been an appropriate submission for our Typologies class at the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism program. They are the sort of omni-present and overlooked form of design we are interested in.
The patterns serve as inspiration to his architecture, as, for example, in the facade of the Hasselt Court of Justice, completed this year in Hasselt, Belgium. Some of the images will be on display at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 22, 2012.
Announcements
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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