EP Vol. 1

The Italian Avant-Garde: 1968–1976

Alex Coles, Catharine Rossi (Eds.)

This long-awaited first title in a new series from design historian Alex Coles takes on the giants of the Italian avant-garde. The EP—Extended Play—series will fluidly move between art, design and architecture, and create a space between the popular magazine (“single play”) and academic journals (“long play”). Catharine Rossi guest edits EP Vol. 1, exploring the interactions between alternative collectives including Arte Povera, Archizoom and Superstudio and iconic designers Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini. Also highlighted are overlooked spaces, works and performances generated by Zoo, Gruppo 9999 and Cavart. Design by Experimental Jetset. With contributions and interviews by Paola Antonelli, Andrea Branzi, Alison J. Clarke, Martino Gamper, Joseph Grima, Alessandro Mendini, Antonio Negri, Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Studio Formafantasma and Ettore Vitale, among others.

Add to your order

FIELD ESSAYS / ISSUE ONE

JONATHAN MUECKE AND BAS PRINCEN

Sophie Krier (Ed.)

A new series from designer Sophie Krier looking at processes emerging on the frontiers of design. Every “field essay” is a renewed attempt to formulate a visual grammar for design research. In this issue, the work of American furniture designer Jonathan Muecke is juxtaposed with the architectural photography of Dutchman Bas Princen. The Cranbrook educated Muecke creates boldly imaginative artifacts—such as his series of carbon fiber chairs—that probe the realms of our perception and make us more aware of its mechanisms. Princen, on the other hand, frames built and un-built landscapes—where typologies blur between office park and science fiction monolith, for example—to dramatic effect. Both create visual propositions that “make room” in the space between what we construct and what we experience.

Add to your order

FLYER DESIGN

The Ideas to Gather People

Little did we know the flyer is actually experiencing a renaissance! Traditionally defined as small printed matter made for time-sensitive news, a flyer is a classic form of media used since Roman times. In our digital era the PDF flyer— thin and banner-sized for Facebook invites, or square-formatted for Instagram— is revolutionizing this classic platform for ad-hoc graphic design. To feed this newfound demand, Flyer Design presents 250 wonderful present-day examples of Japanese flyer designs, presented in five categories: exhibitions, performances and dances, movies, music events and festivals. With its striking green and pink cover and spreads featuring overlaid graphics, photography and text, this smart volume signals that flyers are a classic medium fit for the digital age— no Xeroxes allowed.

Add to your order

FURNITURE OF THE FOGO ISLAND INN

Joseph Kellner (Ed.)

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

Connecting to hospitality and its import on the island, the project attempts to preserve local heritage, foster the arts, and to stimulate an entrepreneurial culture of art and design as well as international dialogue. The furniture and textile pieces featured in the book, which are inventive and resourceful in their use of regional materials, respond to the unique environment of Fogo Island. Categorized under themes such as traditional, minimal, tactile, functional, pattern, and fancy, each function as both object and artifact. As a point of exchange and means toward self-sufficient community building, this project also serves as a model for resistance against the homogenization in design by focusing on a particular place and time that is expressed through form, color, and material.

Add to your order

RON GILAD

Spaces, Etc./ An Exercise in Utility

Zoë Ryan

Ron Gilad’s hybrid objects combine material wit with aesthetic play; they sit on the fat, delicious line between the abstract and the functional. After training as an industrial designer in Jerusalem, he established his studio Designfenzider in New York in 2001. Though primarily working on furniture, products and tabletop objects, these forms are conceptual opportunities for Gilad to ask questions in 3-D form. Published to coincide with Ron Gilad’s first US exhibition, this volume documents the designer’s recent work, Spaces Etc./ An Exercise in Utility plus an essay from Art Institute of Chicago design curator Zoë Ryan.

Add to your order

Golden Bell and Beehive

Light Fittings Designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto

Add to your order

HENRIK VIBSKOV & ANDREAS EMENIUS

The Fringe Projects 1–10

A vast, comprehensive – and sometimes hilarious – collaboration, The Fringe Projects brings together two young artists, the Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov (born 1972) and the Swedish graphic artist Andreas Emenius (born 1973), who embarked on a two-year, 10-part journey to explore, as essayist Hannah Heilmann describes it, the “choreography of random.” The artists presented earnest-yet silly tableaus featuring themselves as models, as well as furniture, “man-machines,” and a soap-box dragster-always involving yards of fringe-in magazines, museums, and even a restaurant. The book itself features a fringe-bedecked cover as well as interviews with the artists (one of which, in keeping with the tone of the projects, takes place in a car wash).

Add to your order

HUMAN-SPACE-MACHINE

Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus

Torsten Blume & Christian Hiller (Eds.)

In 1921, architect Walter Gropius founded a theater workshop at the Bauhaus. It conducted new research and experiments on the relationship between humans and technology. The workshop’s central protagonists—Lothar Schreyer, Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholoy-Nagy—investigated issues of mechanization, machine industrialization and rationalization. They sought a new, meaningful relationship with the dynamized, increasingly technically animated environment. In their stage laboratory, they developed abstract motion studies, designed atmosphere machines and built actual theater apparatuses. They also organized the famous Bauhaus celebrations, where they staged themselves as a collective of “new humans.” For the first time, an exhibition and a catalog from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation showcase sketches, drawings and photographs as well as films, figurines, costumes, models and apparatus devoted to the experiments and concepts of the legendary Bauhaus stage!

Add to your order

IMPORTANT ITALIAN GLASS

Sara Blumberg & Jim Oliviera (Eds.)

There is an old Murano saying, “Good tools are nice, but good hands are better”, highlighting the deeply artistic nature of Italian glassmaking. This historic compilation of three outstanding private collections offered at auction covers a wide range of 20th-century Italian glass and features all the titans of the field: Napoleone Martinuzzi, the Baroviers, Fulvio Bianconi, Tomaso Buzzi, Paolo Venini, Carlo Scarpa, Dino Martens and Eugene Berman. Volume 1 (2012) documents the collection of Frank Toskan; Volume 2 (2013), the Parisian private collection, including a fine collection of mid-century glass by Barovier; Volume 3 (2014), contains glass from the Dimitri Levas collection and is currently the highest grossing Italian Glass sales in history. Levas began collecting in 1979 just as these works entered the secondary market, buying from the legendary Fifty/50 Gallery in New York. For the first time all three volumes are joined together in this one important document on the best of modernist Italian glass.

Add to your order

IMPORTANT ITALIAN GLASS

Sara Blumberg & Jim Oliviera (Eds.)

There is an old Murano saying, “Good tools are nice, but good hands are better”, highlighting the deeply artistic nature of Italian glassmaking. This historic compilation of three outstanding private collections offered at auction covers a wide range of 20th-century Italian glass and features all the titans of the field: Napoleone Martinuzzi, the Baroviers, Fulvio Bianconi, Tomaso Buzzi, Paolo Venini, Carlo Scarpa, Dino Martens and Eugene Berman. Volume 1 (2012) documents the collection of Frank Toskan; Volume 2 (2013), the Parisian private collection, including a fine collection of mid-century glass by Barovier; Volume 3 (2014), contains glass from the Dimitri Levas collection and is currently the highest grossing Italian Glass sales in history. Levas began collecting in 1979 just as these works entered the secondary market, buying from the legendary Fifty/50 Gallery in New York. For the first time all three volumes are joined together in this one important document on the best of modernist Italian glass.

Add to your order