10 Notable Design Books of 2013: May Reviews

All the Buildings in New York *That I’ve Drawn So Far

by James Gulliver Hancock
Universe Publishing (Rizzoli) (April 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose)
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If people picking up this 64-page collection of sketches are disappointed that Australian illustrator James Gulliver Hancock has only drawn one half of one percent of New York City’s buildings, his loose and playful depictions of iconic and lesser-known buildings will change their emotions to delight pretty quickly. Unlike guides that give insight into a city, this one lets us see inside Hancock’s mind; we see how he sees. Perspective, proportion, and color may be divorced from reality, but his artistic takes capture the details and essences of important and otherwise overlooked buildings. His sketches also bridge the childlike and the architectural, making the book appealing for any age.

Architectural Guide Japan

by Botond Bognar
DOM Publishers (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose)
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In 2012, Berlin’s DOM Publishers put out a two-volume guide (half firsthand account, half government propaganda) to Pyongyang, North Korea, an odd locale given that few people can or will ever visit the city. But this year DOM released an excellent guide to a place where architecture buffs rightfully flock: Japan. While a single guide for a country like the United States does not make sense, Japan is only 9/10 the size of California but home to three times as many people. This guide reinforces the amazing quantity of great 20th- and 21st-century architecture in the country, and Japan expert Botond Bognar’s descriptions give just the right amount of background on the 700 buildings; his introductory essay on the “course of contemporary architecture” is valuable in its own right. This is also a print guide for the digital age, with QVR codes that enable mapping of each entry on a smartphone.

Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s Concept of Space

by Samit Das
Niyogi Books (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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Rabindranath Tagore is best known as India’s first Nobel Prize–winning poet and hardly known at all as an architect. But if self-taught architects with a lyrically philosophical bent interest you—Heidegger and Wittgenstein were fellow travelers in this rare realm—then this groundbreaking book by Indian artist and Tagore scholar Samit Das will be a highly satisfying read.

Tagore’s sole architectural achievement was Santiniketan, a West Bengal ashram-university incorporating a religiously focused arts curriculum completed in 1921. Through Das’s finely grained black-and-white photography and carefully crafted descriptions, we obtain a vision of a singular architecture compound, all buildings and landscaping intended as objects of meditation on the place of humans in the natural world. What Santiniketan looks like in these pages suggests a blend of Indian vernacular architecture synthesized with Corbusian modernism. Anyone interested in where modernism and Asian vernacular styles intersect will find Das’s book consistently insightful.

Building Seagram

by Phyllis Lambert

Foreword by Barry Bergdoll
Yale University Press (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Mark Lamster (Dallas Morning News, Design Observer, Architectural Review)
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Phyllis Lambert’s long-anticipated book on the making and maintenance of New York’s greatest postwar building is a unique hybrid, at once a scholarly history, a memoir of her own experience as daughter of Seagram chief Sam Bronfman, and a manifesto for civic responsibility in architecture and urban planning.

Lambert writes with precision and great passion, and largely alters the conventional wisdom about the building, giving greater credit to Philip Johnson. Her account of the building process, the development of an art program, and the efforts to protect the building are great contributions to the record.

D&AD: 50

by Ron Stanley, editor
TASCHEN (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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This sprawling and carnivalesque catalogue of award-winning UK advertising design coheres through anecdotal commentaries by past presidents and sundry luminaries associated with the D&AD, a British educational charity formed to catalyze creativity and chutzpah among design professionals. Most D&AD members find their home in advertising for print, television, and the Internet. Their annual awards for design culled from the organization’s half-century history take up the bulk of this gorgeously produced catalogue. Punctuating these award-winning photographs and illustrations—every image eminently worthy of serious study—is palaver from D&AD bigwigs. Many of their cogent remarks center on the boundary-breaking advertising designs of the 1960s. “In line with the liberated times, graphic design was becoming much sexier and more risqué, pushing boundaries that our parents’ generation would have found beyond the realms of good taste,” nostalgically notes former D&AD president and designer Terence Conran. That nostalgic air regarding the ’60s extends into commentaries about subsequent decades. Comments shift tonally as excitement and foreboding accompany the growth of digital design tools in the 1990s and beyond.

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images

by Edward Dimendberg
The University of Chicago Press (March 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose)
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I own and have read four books on New York’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro—three overviews (Flesh, Scanning, and The Ciliary Function) and a case study (Blur)—so what pleases me most about film professor Edward Dimendberg’s analysis of their 1976-2008 oeuvre is that there is still so much to learn about the trio’s work. Early, pre-Renfro projects not documented in the other books are presented here, as are the mundane yet fascinating details of how later projects either came to be or fizzled. Not surprisingly, Dimendberg approaches the trio’s work in terms of imagery and their investigations into contemporary visual and spatial realities. Yet his analysis does not weigh heavily on the book, so it is an enjoyable read that carefully traces their growth and evolution.

Encounters 2: Architectural Essays

by Juhani Pallasmaa
Rakennustieto Publishing (April 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose)
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Any book by the Finnish architect, educator, and writer Juhani Pallasmaa is cause for celebration, be it part of his trilogy on the senses, a history of architecture, or a collection of essays. This second volume of Encounters collects 26 articles and lectures from 1998 to 2011 on subjects local and international, physical and abstract; it is a mélange anchored by Pallasmaa’s familiar and nuanced views, most easily described as phenomenological. The essays exhibit the remarkable consistency of his ideas, his conceptual rigor, and his use of writing as a studied means to explore the essential tasks of architecture. Like the first Encounters, I find myself returning to the essays to get grounded and be reminded of what is really important in architecture.

Italian Liberty Style

by Irene de Guttry and Maria Paola Maino
24 Ore Cultura (February 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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Of books focused on Art Nouveau decorative arts there is no dearth, a fact perhaps connected to the burgeoning interest in biomorphic forms and patterns in our time. But Italian Liberty Style is the only book in English that critically reflects upon the peculiar Italian version of Art Nouveau, and that fact alone makes this well-illustrated but brief overview essential.

Arguably, Art Nouveau was a first foreshadowing of stylized decorative patterns emphasizing the sinuous and undulating lines and interlocking luxuriant flora and fauna displays now digitally reproduced from detailed nature photography. Putting this decorative design orientation within a specifically Italian context means that the forms and colors of decorative items (think furniture, pottery, and glass) were derived from Italy’s rural landscapes and urban food markets. Additionally—and this is a key point the authors pass over a bit breezily—Italian Liberty Style has roots in the manic profusion of energetic zigzagging details of nature in Baroque period art, and in other Italian Renaissance art influenced by North African Islamic arts, particularly calligraphy. So to dive into the 100 illustrations comprising this book’s core, you are immersing yourself in cross-cultural cross-talks charged with spicy Italian flavors.

The Light Pavilion by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph a. Kumpusch for the Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu, China 2007–2012

by Christoph a. Kumpusch, editor
Lars Müller (March 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board member John Hill (Archidose)
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Lebbeus Woods died the month (October 2012) before the completion of Steven Holl’s massive Sliced Porosity Block in Chengu, China. Situated partly within and in front of one of the five mixed-use towers is the “Light Pavilion” (dubbed “Time Light” by locals), Woods’s only permanent construction, carried out with New York-based architect Christoph a. Kumpusch. This slim, handsome volume documents the installation through sketches, construction drawings, photographs (during construction and after completion), and words from Woods, Holl, Kumpusch, and others. The installation fractures the regular grid of Holl’s building into angular lines of light and color. Its power and intensity is undeniable, apparent in photos where the Sliced Porosity Block is the subject but the installation attracts the eye.

Threads of Silk and Gold: Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan

by Hiroko T. McDermott and Clare Pollard
Ashmolean Museum (January 2013)

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Reviewer: Book Board Member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)
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Japanese textiles invite multi-sensory interaction from design mavens and textile collectors alike. Intricately embroidered surfaces and luxurious silk folds seem to cry out for appreciative human touch. Mark this catalogue from a recent show of extremely rare Japanese textiles designed solely for Western markets a rare achievement. Production values were so rigorous for this volume that a reader comes as close as possible to sensing the depth and irregular surfaces of textiles.

Since these commissioned or market purchased textiles were intended to decorate the interiors of Victorian-era homes, wall hangings and screens abound, festooned with de rigueur Oriental exotica, embroidered dragons, phoenixes, and tigers. But surprising subject matter intrudes as well since this work was entirely export fare. There are hangings with kitschy embroidered American flags Jasper Johns might envy, and a naturalistic seascape worthy of a beach town’s souvenir shop. The tawdriest imagery is totally redeemed, however, by baroquely ornate embroidery patterns crowned with gold thread stitching of stunning virtuosity. The few dozen surviving Japanese textiles from Meiji Japan featured here—few people took these textiles seriously as art worth preserving in the West in the late 19th century, so many examples have decayed—shimmer and glow with an otherworldly splendor evocative of a Noh play, or to amplify the East-West cultural exchange factor, a Morris Graves painting of a rare bird of an inner eye with deep Asian vision.