10 Notable Design Books of 2013: July Reviews

The Design Book: 1000 New Designs for the Home and Where to Find Them

by Jennifer Hudson
Laurence King Publishing (May 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Stephanie Murg (Unbeige)
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Like fine art, the world of design can be intimidating territory for newbies. More than once I’ve received an e-mail that essentially asks, “Where do I start?” A new book offers a just-the-objects snapshot of contemporary design that would otherwise require weeks of trawling the web, poring over design and shelter magazines from around the world, and more than one pilgrimage to Milan’s Salone del Mobile. Behold The Design Book, an image-filled survey that promises “1,000 new designs for the home and where to find them.”

Editor and researcher Jennifer Hudson has organized the sourcebook into nine chapters, including tables and chairs, sofas and beds, electronics, and miscellaneous, a catch-all where you’ll find everything from Eero Aarnio’s “Diva” watering can to a sleek coffin (in eco-friendly lacquer) by Timothy Jacob Jensen. Scattered among the objects, which are identified by name, designer, material, dimensions, and manufacturer or vendor (unfortunately the book is oddly devoid of dates), are Q&As with the likes of Jaime Hayon, Piet Hein Eek, Xavier Lust, and Nendo, who notes, “We see our job as being able to give people small ‘!’ moments”—the objects in this book offer many such little epiphanies for those looking to take the pulse of design for the home.

Emilio Pucci

by Vanessa Friedman; edited by Armando Chitolina
TASCHEN (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci always resisted the title of “artist” and accepted solely the title of “dressmaker.” This lovingly compiled and monumentally scaled catalogue of his signature designs should settle the issue. Pucci was a major artist whose creativity consistently transcended the ready-to-wear sportswear lines that made his name internationally acclaimed. The authors compile a thorough listing of Pucci’s influences: the art and architecture of his beloved city of Florence, his lifelong romance with tropical colors patterned in exuberantly rhythmic prints inspired by his travels in Africa and Indonesia, and his love of cinema. And fitting for a 20th-century Renaissance man was Pucci’s adoration of the painters of Italy’s first renaissance, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, mingled with his highly selective borrowing of ecstatically kinetic color motifs from the psychedelic ‘60s and the pop art ‘80s.

Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas

by Denis Wood
Siglio Press (2nd revised edition, May 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Allison Arieff (SPUR)
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I love this book just for the fact that Wood says he strips away the extraneous “map crap” (scale, orientation, street grids) to create this simultaneously dreamy and subversive document of his Boylan Heights neighborhood. Wood is interested not in intersections but what's within interstitials. His mesmerizing graphics capture barking dogs, absentee landlords, disfigured trees, and the paper route of Lester Mims. The absence of the expected doesn’t make these cartographic explorations any less informative, however. The narratives accompanying Wood’s maps tell a much deeper story of this North Carolina neighborhood than any “normal” map ever could.

Hand-Drying in America

by Ben Katchor
Random House (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose.org)
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A highlight of Metropolis magazine since 1998 has been Ben Katchor’s comic strips that grace the monthly’s back page. The funny and nostalgic stories describe our multifaceted relationships with the world of design, be it the implements we wield, the spaces we inhabit, or the cities we move through. The broad range of subjects parallels the concerns of Metropolis itself, making the relationship between the magazine and illustrator a fitting one.

This book collects 15 years worth of strips that capture Katchor’s amazing consistency in churning out pieces that draw us into a parallel world that resembles New York City but is made up of oddly named places and even odder characters. The strips also trace the magazine’s evolution over the same period, most overtly in “The Tragic History of the Oversized Magazines,” which takes up a two-page spread roughly in the center of the book (newer readers may not know it, but Metropolis used to be an impressive, tabloid-sized magazine), and in the way the comics change in size from beginning to end.

Without an introductory or any other essay to be found, the collection lets the strips stand on their own. And they do so extremely well, even though on repeated readings (in order or jumping around) most of the strips do reveal a structural and narrative logic. But to imbibe, in one place, stories about the design of a “new building ruined by the sound of the common wall light switch" and “boys wielding cheap bristle brushes and pails of 14-karat gold paint” roaming the streets to fulfill their “decorative impulse” on surfaces of neutral color, among many other memorable strips, is one of the greatest treats of 2013.

Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

by Alice Rawsthorn; designed by Irma Boom
Hamish Hamilton/Penguin (March 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Alissa Walker (Los Angeles)
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Not many design books strive to trace the origins of an industry that’s ubiquitous in our daily lives. But in Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, Alice Rawsthorn makes one of the most persuasive cases for pinpointing the birth of design as she introduces readers to a man named Ying Zheng who ran a kingdom named Qin in 246 B.C. By standardizing the size and shape of his army’s bows and arrows, he was able to defend his empire and conquer new lands more efficiently than his fellow warrior-kings, becoming the emperor of what would eventually be the most populous country in the world: Chin.

As fans of Rawsthorn know well, she’s one of the only design writers out there who can so effectively move between different types of design: high to low, 2D to 3D, microbial to global, analog to interactive. The result is what might be the first truly multidisciplinary design book. Although it devotes plenty of words to the heavy hitters—Wedgwood, Thonet, Braun, and Apple serve as the “Big Four”—Hello World also takes some surprising and thought-provoking detours from the typical design canon, from the menacing graphics of pirate flags to the carbon fiber legs of amputee actor and artist Aimee Mullins.

Steve Portigal

Interviewing Users

by Steve Portigal
Rosenfeld Media (May 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Alissa Walker (Los Angeles)
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In speaking with designers I know, the idea of interviewing users often falls to the wayside. Not that they don’t think they should do it, but they often feel that they’re not the best people to do it—that unearthing substantial findings is best left to someone else, maybe the project’s writer, or some separate research department, or an outside consulting firm that crunches and delivers the data on a silver platter. This book by the insightful writer and ethnographer Steve Portigal not only proves that interviewing should be a keystone of design work, it also makes a case for how and why designers should be carving out the time to do this work themselves.

Using a conversational tone peppered with plenty of notes from the field, Portigal passes on excellent advice for conducting the kinds of interviews that will elicit groundbreaking insights. There are practical checklists about nearly every aspect of the process, from how to show images, to being aware of body language, to notetaking and recording interviews (even this jaded reporter learned a few tips). Other writers and researchers contribute essays, and there’s also a vast online component, which includes Creative Commons-licensed images and forms that can be downloaded and adapted by the reader.

James Turrell: A Retrospective

by Michael Govan and Christine Kim
LACMA/Prestel (May 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose.org)
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Artist James Turrell is being given the superstar treatment in 2013 with three major exhibitions on the coasts and in the middle of the United States: “James Turrell: A Retrospective” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), “James Turrell” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and “James Turrell: The Light Inside” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. To accompany the first, LACMA has created an impressive catalogue that charts the artist's five-decade-long career and beautifully documents his “skyspaces” and other architectural constructions, most notably the ongoing Roden Crater project in Arizona.

Space is a loaded term for architects, since their designs define the extents, flow, and character of the spaces that people inhabit. For Turrell, space is as important, but in a different way. He admits to being involved with the architecture of space and the creation of form, but says, “When I prepare walls I make them so perfect that you actually don’t pay attention to them.” People in his installations and skyspaces are therefore drawn to the color of the light and the sky. For Turrell, light is his material and perception is his medium, so space is where the two converge.

Kamisaka Sekka: Dawn of Modern Japanese Design

by Khanh Trinh, editor
Prestel Publishing (April 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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This sensitively written and finely produced catalogue accompanying last year’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia of the work of the artist Kamisaka Sekka offers a visionary re-thinking of the classical Japanese style known as “Rinpa.” For Westerners unfamiliar with Rinpa, Richard Wilson’s introductory essay offers a concise overview of this style, which showcases the natural world suffused with poetic lyricism and which dominated both fine and applied Japanese arts from the 16th to the end of the 19th century.

This historical preface opens a pathway into the heart of the book: the 300 plus color illustrations of Sekka’s art accompanied by Trinh’s biographical and artistic account of how Sekka matured into a leading figure in the evolution of modern Japanese design. Essentially, Trinh presents Sekka as a liminal artist par excellence. A world traveler aware of the Western art world’s emergent fascination with Japanese aesthetics at the birth of the 20th century, Sekka possessed both the taste and sensibility needed to treat traditionally stylized Japanese nature imagery with a robust experimental spirit and a healthy dose of humorous irreverence. Sekka’s woodblock book of satiric designs from 1903 risked outright vulgarity (one dog sniffing the excrement of another) when not mocking sterile imitation of traditional motifs (a Japanese character becomes stylized into a menacing cartoonish devil).

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy

by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Brookings Institution Press (June 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Witold Rybczynski (emeritus, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania)
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The headline in New York’s Daily News of October 29, 1975, famously read, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” characterizing the federal government’s disdain for the Big Apple’s financial woes. There have been no similar headlines recently but there may as well have been, as a fractious and ineffective Congress seems unable—or unwilling—to craft effective national policies to deal with the urban fallout of the current Great Recession.

The economic slow-down, which began in 2008, hit cities and metropolitan areas particularly hard but, as Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley point out in their provocative book, this time federal inaction has had an unexpected effect. It produced what they call a metropolitan revolution, a sort of power inversion in which federal inactivity in urban affairs has spurred local initiatives. “Nearly four years after the recession’s official end,” Katz and Bradley write, “it is clear that the real, durable reshaping is being led by networks of city and metropolitan leaders—mayors and other local elected officials, for sure, but also heads of companies, universities, medical campuses, metropolitan business associations, labor unions, civic organizations, environmental groups, cultural institutions, and philanthropies.”

The reshaping they describe in numerous examples—New York, Denver, Cleveland, and Houston are discussed in detail—takes political, economic, even global form, but it also has a physical component. One example is urban and suburban “innovation districts,” enclaves of mixed-use, often adjacent to research universities and medical complexes, whose urban design enables key attributes such as high density, proximity, and walkability. Jane Jacobs would approve.

Swiss Made: The Untold Story of Switzerland’s Success

by R. James Breiding
Profile Books (May 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Phil Patton (New York Times)
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The world-weary Orson Welles intones this line in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film based on Graham Greene’s novel: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” But R. James Breiding’s Swiss Made shows that Switzerland produced much more than that, and besides, the cuckoo clock is a pretty big deal.

Clocks speak of a culture of time and punctuality and of timepiece making, from wristwatch to Swatch, that says much about modern life as well as about Switzerland. Swiss Made, which is subtitled “The Untold Story Behind Switzerland’s Success,” is one of the rare titles to put design in the context of business case studies and cultural economics.