Surface Magazine

More than 140 influential midcentury designers from California are profiled in A Handbook of California Design, 1930–1965 (MIT Press), including internationally acclaimed legends like Charles and Ray Eames and local artisans like Margaret De Patta and Doyle Lane. Many of the book’s concise biographies cross-reference other entries, linking designers, manufacturers, and craftspeople working during a booming period of creativity in the state.

Bright: Typography Between Illustration and Art (Daab) explores the potential of text as an artistic medium, with examples ranging from handwritten scrawls on paper to neon lettering suspended from a gallery ceiling. Interviews with Ed Fella, Tracey Emin, and Lawrence Weiner, among others, accompany images of type- and script-based pieces by more than 200 artists.

Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata was renowned for his interior spaces and furniture made with industrial materials like acrylic and steel wire. Presented in two volumes sheathed in a candy-colored plastic slipcase, this eponymous monograph from Phaidon is the first complete collection of his work; it includes essays by Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic and a selection of Kuramata’s writings.

The catalogue for an exhibit on view from June 2 to Sept. 2 at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, A New Sculpturalism (Skira Rizzoli) takes a good look at the region’s superstar architects (such as Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Neil Denari, and Greg Lynn), as well as its emerging wave of talent, including Patterns, Oyler Wu Collaborative, and Johnston Marklee. What brings the pack together is, as MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch puts it, a “sculpturalist aesthetic.”

Introducing: Culture Identities (Gestalten) explores how museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions have brought to life many of the most groundbreaking graphic designs of the past few years. Among those featured: Pentagram for MoMA, Sagmeister for Casa da Música, and OK-RM for the Strelka Institute.

Architect and designer Matteo Thun is so prolific that in The Index Book (Hatje Cantz) he presents his projects—via evocative photos, sketches, and drawings—literally from A to Z. His work includes Bulgari’s Anfiteatro watch, the Choose family of lamps for Artemide, and the Nhow Hotel in Milan (spread).

Coinciding with the architect’s 125th birthday, Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography (Thames & Hudson) analyzes Corb as a scene-setter, from Chandigarh in India to Villa Savoye in France. Writes Norman Foster in the introduction: “[He] was perhaps the first architect to understand that image, idea, and message are wholly interdependent.”

Viviane Sassen: In and Out of Fashion (Prestel) collects the strangely beautiful work of Amsterdam- based fashion photographer Viviane Sassen for brands like Carven and magazines such as Dazed & Confused and Numéro. Sassen’s images, at once hypnotic and mysterious—and often moody—meld a fine-art sensibility with high fashion.

Kartell (Taschen), the patriarch of plastic furniture, has proved that mass-produced pieces can be innovative, alluring, and long lasting at the same time. This book chronicles the Italian company’s 60-plus-year history, which includes designs by Gae Aulenti, Ron Arad, and Philippe Starck, among others.

Fransje Killaars (010 Publishers) showcases the Dutch artist’s kaleidoscopic, textile-centered portfolio, which, as critic Bianca Stigter writes in the book, “liberates color of its meaning.” One of the featured pieces is her wallpaper-style 2008 installation “Marriage Hall” (spread).

Pattern (Phaidon) brings together 10 curators, including fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson and stylist Keegan Singh, to pick the top 100 fashion designers. Made up of revealing, behind-the-scenes sketches and runway images, the book includes Thom Browne, Phillip Lim, and Rachel Antonoff.

Over the past 25 years, Swiss-French photographer Hélène Binet has gained renown for her large-format black-and-white photos. Her first monograph, Composing Space (Phaidon), showcases her ethereal images of projects such as Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

Art directors Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag launched the lauded studio M/M two decades ago. M to M of M/M (Paris) (Rizzoli) catalogs the firm’s experimental yet refined projects for and with the likes of Björk, Madonna, and Hermès.

After various trips to China’s Xinjiang region to capture its sacred sites, American photographer Lisa Ross has compiled the results in Living Shrines of Uyghur China (The Monacelli Press). More than just documentary images, they reveal a type of evolving, if slowly disappearing, religious architecture.

A self-published book from Mexican architect Fernando Romero and his firm, FREE, You Are The Context presents a wide range of interconnected, bold-minded design ideas, some fantastical (a city inside a hexagon), others down-to-earth (FREE’s Soumaya Museum in Mexico City).

Commissioning work can be a tricky, fickle business. Which is where the new Thames & Hudson guidebook Commissioning Contemporary Art comes in. Written by British critic and journalist Louisa Buck with lawyer Daniel McClean, the book lays bare the dos and don’ts of the process.

The young Berlin-based photographer Ingo Mittelstaedt makes use of found materials and various spatial arrangements to create striking, intriguingly abstract images. Pictorial (Scheidegger & Spiess) collects some of his most recent work.

Edited by Terry Jones, the founder and creative director of i-D magazine, Yohji Yamamoto (Taschen) is part of a series of oversize books featuring fashion design- ers. (Other titles look at Rei Kawakubo and Vivienne Westwood.) Here, more than a decade’s worth of Yamamoto collections are displayed in all their playful, poetic glory.

Inspired by art as experience, John Dewey’s 1934 aesthetics opus, Understanding Architecture (Phaidon) seeks to present a definitive commentary on buildings, showing that it’s not simply through technical know-how that we make sense of them. Rather, it’s through experiencing buildings that we learn their truest, deepest meanings.

The brainchild of Michael Maharam, Irving Harper (Skira Rizzoli) catalogs a 40-plus-year archive of paper sculptures by Harper, who was the director of design at George Nelson Associates from 1947 to 1963.

Miniature and Panorama (Lars Müller Publishers) documents the intricate, ecologically conscious work of Swiss firm Vogt Landscape Architects, including a grassy gridded courtyard at the Park Hyatt Zurich (pictured) and the sprawling esplanade surrounding Herzog & de Meuron’s Allianz Arena in Munich.

In the aptly titled In My View (Thames & Hudson), more than 75 international artists share some of their biggest influences: Bill Viola dishes on Giovanni Bellini, Hiroshi Sugimoto discusses Petrus Christus, and George Condo relishes Rembrandt van Rijn.

Japanese photographer Noritoshi Hirakawa’s images in Union De … Interactional Casa Barragan (Hatje Cantz)—taken in and around the former home of the famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán—ponder how humans respond socially to architecture.

Contemporary Follies (The Monacelli Press) honors 51 modern-day structures that are harmonious with their natural surroundings, such as Snøhetta’s recently completed Norwegian Wild Reindeer Pavilion in Dovrefjell National Park (near right).

The Norway-based architecture firm Helen & Hard (Hatje Cantz) has quietly gained notoriety through its tasteful use of timber. This monograph showcases the firm’s work, including the ribbed Vennesla Library and Cultural Center, completed in 2011.

Imagining the House (Lars Müller Publishers), an intricately printed collection of pencil sketches by the Chinese architect Wang Shu, offers a revealing look inside the mind of this year’s Pritzker Prize winner.

For the first time in book form, Pleats Please (Taschen) brings to view the Issey Miyake project that started 19 years ago and has since become legendary for its innovative production technique. 

The massively ambitious 20th Century World Architecture (Phaidon) indexes roughly 750 structures built between 1900 and 1999, selected by more than 150 advisers. Inside, there’s everything from Sir Edwin Lutyens’s 1902 Deanery Garden house to Peter Zumthor’s 1996 Vals thermal baths.

The Little Black Jacket (Steidl) exalts Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld’s modern take on Chanel’s classic staple. Inside, cultural figures such as designer Olivier Theyskens, architect Junya Ishigami, Kanye West, and Yoko Ono pose in the coat.

Don’t know much about thermo-bimetals, piezoelectric ceramics, or Bendywood? Now you will. An encyclopedic guide to practically every material available on the market today, Material Matters (Black Dog Publishing) is a must-have for anyone working in textiles or manufacturing.

In 1997, Silvia Fendi was asked to come up with “a particularly easy and functional handbag,” she writes in Fendi Baguette (Rizzoli). What resulted, though, was “the exact opposite.” This behemoth of a book celebrates Fendi’s fearless edict with full-page photos of the iconic bag in its many iterations.

Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando has built his career on severe yet serene concrete structures. His new monograph, Ando: Complete Works 1975-2012 (Taschen), thoroughly documents his Zen-like work, including a house and stables in New Mexico, completed in 2008.

The Cartier Collection: Precious Objects (Flammarion) culls from more than 1,300 pieces found in Cartier’s archives in Geneva. Among them: a sarcophagus-like vanity case with a carved-bone cover from 1925 and pencil drawings of a handbag clad with gold, diamonds, and emeralds from 1950.

For brands, gaining the attention of consumers in the digital age takes creative finesse. Taken by Surprise (Gestalten) shows how companies have managed to do so with the help of designers. One example, at right, is Berlin-based illustrator Sarah Illenberger’s sculptural product displays for eyewear maker Mykita.

American-Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen’s debut monograph Occupied Territory (Aperture), first published in 1987, has been expanded for this reissue of black-and-white prints of lobbies, motels, and other peculiar ’70s and ’80s interiors.

Steven Holl: Color, Light, Time (Lars Müller Publishers) analyzes the meticulous methods behind Holl’s projects, from Beijing’s vast Linked Hybrid to Kansas City’s ethereal Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Edited by Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz of Barcelona firm TwoPoints.Net, Pretty Ugly (Gestalten) scans the fields of graphics, art, fashion, and design to establish a new, vaunted definition of “ugly” via experimental work by the likes of Nacho Carbonell and Côme de Bouchony.

“Sustainable design” may be a tired buzzword, but Vitamin Green (phaidon) highlights buildings and products—the Oru kayak by San Francisco–based collective Civil Twilight, for example—that suggest green design, at its best, can live up to the hype.

Thomas Heatherwick: Making (The Monacelli Press), the London-based designer’s first monograph, covers more than 140 of his whimsical, geometric designs, including the famed U.K. pavilion, made from illuminated acrylic rods, at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

In 2005, Rafael Viñoly Architects launched firm-funded research grants. Pressures and Distortions presents the 2009–10 team’s work, exploring architectural ideas for changing, high-stress environments such as Bogotá, Mexico City, and Shenzhen.

Coco Chanel’s early-20th-century empire, built alongside Picasso, Dalí, and others, became a subject the National Art Museum of China dug into last year with a sprawling exhibit. Culture Chanel (Abrams) is the show’s catalog of paintings, prints, and letters.

“Futuristic” is an over-used, often misused adjective for describing architecture. Even so, the projects featured in Futuristic (Daab)—MVRDV’s cone-shaped Gwanggyo Power Center, for example—suggest that, at times, it may be an apt description.

The U.K. remains an incubator for top design talents. 21 Designers for Twenty-First Century Britain (V&A Publishing) showcases a selection of those working there who have come to light since 2001. Among them: Max Lamb and Troika.

Touted as “a champion of the intellectual agility of today’s design” by MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, Mathieu Lehanneur (Gestalten) compiles a decade’s worth of the designer’s work, including a mysterious icosahedron leather box for Cartier.

Using examples like Herzog & de Meuron’s Beijing National Stadium and OMA’s CCTV tower, Understanding Steel Design (Birkhäuser) pontificates on the structural possibilities of the dynamic material.

Paris-based designer Matali Crasset has become known for retooling everyday typologies into colorful forms distinctly her own. Matali Crasset: Works (Rizzoli) catalogs her projects for clients such as Alessi and Danese, in reverse order, from 2011 to 1995.

When Swiss designer Hannes Wettstein died at age 50 in 2008, he left behind an impressive oeuvre of pragmatic projects. Seeking Archetypes (Lars Müller Publishers) is a reference guide to his life’s work, from Molteni & C’s Alfa chair to Fraefel’s Neo bathroom.

“Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective” arrives at the Denver Art Museum on March 25 after its debut in 2010 at the Petit Palais in Paris. Yves Saint Laurent (Abrams), the exhibit’s colorful catalog, captures the fashion designer’s illustrious life, career, and couture.

In nature there exist many strategies that could be applied to design and architecture. Industry of Nature (Frame) cites examples that use a more organic approach, such as Joris Laarman’s Bone chair and Sir Norman Foster’s sponge-like Swiss Re tower.

As India’s population explodes, so too does its architecture. Architecture in India Since 1990 (Hatje Cantz) examines its new buildings, like New Delhi–based firm Morphogenesis’s double-skinned Pearl Academy of Fashion in Haipur.

“If you don’t record everything, moments slip away and are lost forever,” writes British designer John Pawson in A Visual Inventory (Phaidon), which culls from more than 250,000 images Pawson has taken in places such as Cambodia and Connecticut.

Design Behind Desire (Farameh Media/Daab) uncovers the concepts that make up modern-day erotica. In the mix: The Bouroullec’s “Quilt, the thing” chair and collages by Surface contributor Bruno Grizzo.

Shop: Out of Practice (The Monacelli Press) details 13 projects by the digitally driven New York–based firm SHoP Architects. Included are the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, set to finish this year, and a 310,000-square-foot business hub in Botswana (at right).

Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Taschen), an oral history by architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, culls interviews the two conducted with the surviving members of the late-1950s Metabolist movement, their protégés, and others.

What began as a scrappy upstart supplying textiles to Broadway theater sets is today a powerhouse. Maharam Agenda (Lars Müller Publishers) documents the brand’s rise and highlights projects by the likes of Hella Jongerius and Jasper Morrison.

As technology evolves, so too does the manufacturing of fibers and fabrics. Advanced Textiles for Health and Well-Being (Thames & Hudson) looks at how materials contribute to—and better—the world we live in, using examples like Dainese’s Bio-Suit.

Rising: Young Artists to Keep an Eye On (Daab) spotlights 100 emerging, little-known talents, all selected by an advisory board. Particularly eye-catching: Yaşam Şaşmazer’s haunting wood sculptures and Marcel Walldorf’s hyperrealist installations.

In the digital age, good retail, event, and exhibition design needs to go beyond flashy frills. Out of the Box (Gestalten) provides a curated look at more than 130 interactive projects from the past few years that exemplify the emerging field of “brandscaping.”

The digital age has revolutionized one of the most traditional forms of image-making: collage. Cut & Paste (Laurence King Publishing) shows how, with experimental works that include compositions by Bela Borsodi, far right, and John Stezaker.

While much of contemporary design, photography, and art appears straightforward on the surface, visual surprises frequently reveal themselves on closer inspection. Erratic (Gestalten) celebrates that depth in exemplary pieces, including, on the cover, Fiona Banner’s “Jaguar” (2010) at Tate Britain.

“Some people have made the comparison between my body and that of another David—Michelangelo’s masterpiece in Florence—but that’s just a happy coincidence.” So writes the blue-eyed British model David Gandy in his book from Rizzoli, a collaborative effort with Dolce & Gabbana. Fleshy photo spreads inside suggest he’s being modest.

Written and edited by landscape designer Diana Balmori and architect Joel Sanders, Groundwork (The Monacelli Press) explores projects in which their two respective disciplines meet in new ways. Twenty-five examples are featured, including Snøhetta’s Petter Dass Museum in Norway.

Knoll Textiles (Yale University Press) chronicles the work of the storied company from 1940, when Hans Knoll founded it, to today. Published as a catalog in conjunction with a recent exhibition at New York City’s Bard Graduate Center, this opus is the size of an encyclopedia—and it’s just as useful as one.

Manuel Lima, the New York–based founder of visualcomplexity.com, works at the forefront of network science and information visualization. Appropriately, his book Visual Complexity (Princeton Architectural Press) cuts through digital clutter, using colorful examples to illustrate these fields.

German industrial designer Dieter Rams, Braun's head of design for 35 years, is legendary for his simple, clean products. As Little Design As Possible (Phaidon), Rams' first comprehensive monograph, exhaustively details his life and work.

As prosthetic and robotic technologies advance, the human body is increasingly becoming its own architectural site. New York-based filmmaker and architect Madeline Schwartzman delves into this emerging field in See Yourself Sensing (Black Dog Publishing).

Swedish firm Tham & Videgård Architects has gained renown for creating colorful, experimental projects that mix international ideas with unfussy regional details. Out of the Real (Birkäuser) showcases 28 of them, including, at right, the Tellus Nursery School.

Milan-based designers Paolo Rizzatto and Francisco Gomez Paz masterminded Luceplan's radiolarian-like Hope light (2009), made of polycarbonate Fresnel lenses. In Hope (Lotus), they present a behind-the-scenes look at its conception, development, and production.

Zurich-based photographer Georg Aerni's debut monograph Sites & Signs (Scheidegger & Spiess) subtly explores environmental transformations in areas both urban and rural, from a Hong Kong skyscraper to a Swiss golf course.

“Arrrgh! Monsters in Fashion,” an exhibit at Greece's Benaki Museum this summer, examined the role of beastly fashion, using creations by the likes of Maison Martin Margiela and Issey Miyake. Not a Toy (Pictoplasma) is the vivacious show's lookbook.

Computer coding isn't just for programmers anymore. Designers now use machines and interactive algorithms, as A Touch of Code (Gestalten) makes clear, using examples such as Troika's kinetic Victoria and Albert Museum sign in a London tube station.

The sequel to Gestalten’s 2009 survey on paper as design medium, Papercraft 2 features such works as Rikke Otte’s jazz instrument–shaped sculptures and, at right, Bela Borsodi’s Deco-style figures. Added bonus: a DVD of paper-made projects in motion.

The Design Works of Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby (Rizzoli), the firm’s first monograph, details the creative methods of the London-based, research-driven duo and documents their diverse, multi-scale portfolio of clean-cut work for clients such as Cappellini, Vitra, and Sony.

Extremism (UPM), the latest book from London-based designer Tom Dixon, spotlights industrial design at its most extreme—that is, functional, efficient, affordable, uncomplicated, and long-lasting. Dixon makes his case using examples of his own work, including the Peg chair (2010) and Etch pendant light (2011).

Architecture isn’t simply built on land anymore; now it has to be part of the natural environment. Landform Building (Lars Müller Publishers) explores this emerging terrain through projects like Copenhagen-based BIG’s terraced Mountain apartment complex and Ryue Nishizawa’s open-air Teshima Art Museum.

The Art of Not Making (Thames & Hudson) examines more than 115 contemporary artists who employ artisans and craftspeople to realize their art—or, in some cases, recontextualize the work of others. Maria Roosen’s “Red Rosary” (2008), at right, is among the examples. 

“Insider information.” That’s how graphic designer Ben Bos describes TD 63—73 (Unit Editions), a look back at the first decade of Total Design, the Dutch firm founded nearly 50 years ago. Full-color spreads of Modernist corporate identities, logos, posters, and catalogues abound.

A guidebook on the study and practice of design for performance, the Stuttgart-based Atelier Brükner’s monograph Scenography: Making Spaces Talk (Avedition) shows off more than 60 of the firm’s projects, including the digitally driven BMW Museum in Munich.

Artist and RISD grad Andrew Kuo’s What Me Worry (Damiani/Standard Press)— the debut book from the new imprint by Standard Hotels—takes trivial stats from his daily life and turns them into witty, colorful infographics. Also included: sculptures, paintings, diary entries ... and recipes.

Over 200 member properties strong, the Design Hotels community continues to grow. Thirty-three of the group’s unsung players, including Mira Hong Kong’s Martin Lee and Memmo Beleeira’s Rodrigo Machaz, are profiled in Design Hotels: Made by Originals.

Russia in the 1920s was an incubator for Modernist architecture, and Building the Revolution (Abrams) documents what little remains from that era with archival images, plus the avant-garde art that inspired it, and photographs taken by Richard Pare during the past 15 years.

The colorful, eclectic ensembles in Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being (Gestalten)—including Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s grotestque geometric figures, at right—showcase the human form in the digital age, rejiggering the roles of fashion, beauty, and art.

Allied Works Architecture/Brad Cloepfil: Occupation (Gregory R. Miller & Co.) covers work by the innovative Oregon-based architect and the firm he founded in 1994—from the Wieden+ Kennedy headquarters in Portland to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

Dutch superstar Hella Jongerius’ gifts for craft, color, and coziness helped usher in a new era of design. In her saddle-stitched, soft-covered monograph Hella Jongerius: Misfit (Phaidon), more than 250 works bring her prolific career thus far into focus.

Onefivefour, the 1989 monograph of American architect Lebbeus Woods, has been reprinted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Princeton Architectural Press. Full of convention-bending sketches, the book—which helped make Woods into a cult hero among students and academics— creates art out of math and physics.

Usefulness in Small Things (Rizzoli), by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of the minimally minded studio Industrial Facility, is a survey of inexpensive objects collected from around the globe by the designers—from the ultra-ubiquitous to the painfully clever.

Chandigarh, the capital of two states in India, and Brasília, the capital of Brazil, are the focus of lensman Iwan Baan’s Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living With Modernity (Lars Müller Publishers). Linked by their masterplanned origins, the sprawling land- scapes he captures tell the architectural tale of two cities that have mutated over time.

In Ugly (Fiell Publishing), London-based critic Stephen Bayley pulls from the annals of history to ask one of the most perplexing questions: What is ugly? Along the way he considers everything from B-52 bombers to English bulldogs, finding, in the end, beauty.

Surface contributor Marc Kristal’s Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture (The Monacelli Press) teaches how to understand a building beyond merely analyzing form. Says Kristal, “It’s a way of divining the intentions of the designer and the requirements of the client.”