I would usually not write about monographies but nothing feels better than breaking my own rules today: the first book is starring blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type, the second one is dedicated to the paintings of Miltos Manetas.
Fraktur Mon Amour, by designer Judith Schalansky (Amazon USA and UK.)
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type was commonly used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. By the end of the Renaissance it had mostly been replaced by the typeface Latin Antiqua. The use of Blackletter type became taboo in Germany after World War II because it was incorrectly associated with the Nazis who actually banned its use in 1941 because it was falsely believed to be a Jewish invention. Revelations about the true history and meaning of Blackletter type have resulted in a resurgence in usage by graphic designers. (…)
Fraktur Mon Amour reproduces 300 variations of Blackletter fonts ranging from historical fonts to contemporary reinventions in a sensuous beautifully crafted hot-pink prayer book-style catalog that is destined to become a fetish object for designers and type enthusiasts. Each Blackletter font is presented on a full page along with its complete alphabet date of origin the name of its designer and its original foundry. On the facing page is a composition created from that font that explores the subversive beauty of this unique typeface. In addition 137 of these fonts–including four created exclusively for this book–are collected on an enclosed CD (Mac and PC) for free private and restricted commercial use. Fraktur Mon Amour is the winner of several awards including the Type Directors Club of New York’s 2007 Award for Typographic Excellence.
Who knew that fonts could have such fascinating lives? I believe this book has received a huge echo in design blogs but as it is the most elegantly and skilfully designed book i have received in 2008, i thought it deserved a few more words here. Closed it looks like a bible. Open it and you get over 700 pages of pure pink font porn. My expertise and talent at discussing fonts being extremely limited i’ll end with a video flip through the book:
Miltos Manetas: Paintings from Contemporary Life, (Bilingual edition italian-english at Amazon USA and UK.)
Publisher Johan & Levi Editore writes:
Every electronic componenet portrayed bears witness to a certain period in the development of technology, implicitly marking the pace and duration of Manetas’ research and immediately flagging up a ‘present’ and a ‘past.’
In his work Manetas acts as an observer of this daily phenomenon. At times he works from a ‘subjective’ angle, bearing witness to both our total involvement in technology, and the sense of alienation that comes from interacting with machines. Other times he takes a ‘bird’s eye view’ to draw attention to the gestures, often underestimated or taken for granted in daily life, that man performs on machine, in a world which is lacking in concrete ‘actions/ that point up to what is going on.
Echoing Baudelaire’s famous ‘Painter of Modern Life’, Manetas, as an observer of the contemporary world, is part of a time-honoured tradition in art> the practice of depicting man and the elements which represent modernity in the era in question has been a prerogative of the Impressionists, the Realists and the exponents of New Objectivity, not to mention the paintings of Post-Revolutionary Russia, where ‘modern’ meant ‘industrial.’
Joysticks and joypads, plugs, keyboards and routers, a shoe lost among cables, a pair of feet emerging behind an open laptop, videocassettes, websites and girls watching intensely at a computer screen. Miltos Manetas hands a thought-provoking mirror to the gadgets blogs, tech magazines and even new media art exhibitions. The soft-coloured canvases reminds us that we are not merely ‘users’ ‘interacting’ with ‘devices’, but people absorbed in activities which might still appear as trivial to some but are nevertheless essential to our new human equilibrium.
The introduction essay is penned by the only media theorist and guru who is as flamboyant as Manetas himself: Lev Manovich.
On 24th – 25th January and 13th February, Manetas will perform some live internet paintings in the East Wing of The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The Internet Paintings will also be included in the forthcoming exhibition, Unreal, “Altered Perspectives in Painting’ at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
Image on the homepage part of Judith Schalansky’s fraktur set.
Related stories: Superneen world and Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type.
Three D: Graphic Spaces, edited by Gerrit Terstiege, the editor-in-chief of European design magazine form. Includes a design-historical essay by Steven Heller, an interview of Stefan Sagmeister about his typographical installations and various interviews with graphic designers by Sophia Muckle.
(Amazon UK and USA)
Publisher Birkhäuser says: Three D – Graphic Spaces highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films. The result is a host of suggestive new pictorial worlds that range from playfully arranged still lifes to room-filling installations. Edited by Gerrit Terstiege, editor-in-chief of the European design magazine “form”, and designed by the prizewinning German studio Pixelgarten, this book offers an inspiring look at the various modeling techniques and means of expression involved.
The book collects designs of about 50 international creative individuals and studios. A volume on a similar subject, Book review: Tactile – High Touch Visuals, was published last year but Three D: Graphic Spaces is way more talkative, offering essays, deeper analysis and descriptions.
The projects are grouped into 4 main categories: Still Lifes Come Alive, Intricate Installations, Touching Type and Thrilling Animation.
Nice touch: at the end of the book, you’ll find a small description of the design studios as well as the contact address and url of their website.
A few examples. In no particular order:
Rebecca Stephany‘s Paradise is Made of Paper, an XL origami installation in the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
Damien Poulain, 3-D illustrations for Uniqlo paper no.3, 2007. Tokyo, New York and London are neatly and unmistakably represented using just a couple of landmarks and key elements of the local culture.
Uniqlo paper no.3 (worldwide). Photography: Lacey
Rita’s Living Room sketches the typical style of a Québec living room. Nothing glamor or ready for the pages of trendy design magazines, just simple, archetypical decoration and lay out. Ultimately, the designers ask: ‘Where is the design? What is design anyway?’
Jocelyn Cottencin‘s practice stands at the intersection of photography, video, installation and graphic design. Her 2004 wall drawing La consommation d’oxygène est différente d’un individu à l’autre (‘the consumption of oxygen differs from one individual to another’ video) is based on the typo ‘Floréale’ that she created in 2003. Convinced that the fate of her work was to disappear swiftly, she used chalk to draw the floral pattern. Surprisingly the work remained intact for 3 years.
Elene Usdin‘s La Barbe Bleue series turns the most terrifying aspects of Bluebeard‘s butchery of his wives into dolls limbs and threads of wools.
Playarea for footwear Pointer. Models are robots given the illusion of 3D life with the help of soft shadows.
Emil Kozak‘s work for MAG, a competition for the best magazines in Denmark. All the posters Kozak designed for each award have a connection to the medium of the award.
Graphic comes to life in a more literal way in this video by Colors and the Kids and in another one shot by Jared Eberhardt for Cansai De Ser Sexy:
Julien Valle and Nicolas Burrows’ explicit paper metaphor of the way digital existence spills over our physical life.
Related stories: Book Review: Super Holland Design, Book Review – Enter Spanish Creativity, Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, Book review: Tactile – High Touch Visuals, Joshua Davis at OFFF – Lisbon.
The Infrastructural City – Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis (Amazon UK and USA.)
Publisher Actar says: Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.
I was waiting eagerly for The Infrastructural City – Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. 3 reasons for that.
Number one, is Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Varnelis’ previous book which he co-authored with Robert Sumrell. Anyone who had that one in their hands will get my point.
Lane Barden, Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel
Reason number 2 is Los Angeles, the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever ‘walks around the city center’ to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That’s what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live.
From the series Los Angeles parking booths by Mac Kane
Let’s get to reason number 3. The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye. In this book, Los Angeles is little more than a (fascinating) case study, a pretext to explore the effects that today’s complex and distorted infrastructures, whether planned by public entities or developed by private and competing corporations, have on contemporary urbanism.
As Varnelis writes: Our goal was not modest: we set out to replace Reyner Banham‘s Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) as the key text for understanding the city urbanistically. Instead of four ecologies, The Infrastructural City offers essays commissioned to researchers who bring the discourse on urbanism outside of its usual and sometimes way too formal boundaries. These essays cover the three scales of networks: landscape, urban fabric and the object.
In one of the essays of the book, David Fletcher invites us to ’embrace freakology rather than bucology’. The advice could apply to many aspects of the Los Angeles. Its river, for example. Instead of following blindly the assumption that it is an eye-sore and a disgrace whose dignity would only be recovered when the concrete is removed and its native vegetation and wildlife reimposed, one should be aware of the fact that coming back to the ‘natural’ state could only be done at the cost of anihilating a complex ecosystem made of exotic and native species that has slowly found its equilibrium over decades.
Image from the project Not A Cornfield
This hotchpotch of imported and original flora can be observed all over L.A. making it one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Most of us however, tend to reduce Los Angeles to its ubiquitous and iconic palm tree, a tree that is actually not a native species either. Most of them were planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, at a time when a city built around cars felt that it might have to re-invent its landscape. The average lifespan of the palm tree is 70 to 100. Its days under the California sun are numbered. And it doesn’t seem that the city is going to waste much tears on them as no palm tree has been invited to the Million Trees party.
Hopefully this will mean that the new breed of palm tree that double as cell antenna is going to loose some popularity as well:
Cell phone antenna camouflaged into fake tree
If trees of all sorts and a river are to be expected in a section dedicated to the landscape of L.A., lowly gravel is not. Neither is oil. Well, not in the way Frank Ruchala (don’t miss another of his essays, Recovering oiLA, you can access it on Lulu) pictures it: an actor which used to supply as much of the US’ oil demand as Saudi Arabia, an asset whose value nowadays has to compete (most often than not unsuccessfully) with real estate. Los Angeles contains one of the most intense concentration of pipelines in the world yet, the presence of the precious resource is often camouflaged behind mundane facades. As we all know now, the Industry with a big I in Los Angeles is no longer the one that earned it the nickname of ‘Oildorado.’
Postcard view (ca. 1900) of oil rigs in a booming giant oil field in the Los Angeles area. © Peter A. Scholle, 1999
The rest of the book explores what is below that patch of pavement, inside the backyard garden of an unassuming house or what goes though monster warehouses. Each chapter is written by a different expert but the many photographies, graphics and a certain spirit enable the book to find its own voice.
Photograph by Ric Francis/Associated Press (via)
As i mentioned above most of the infrastructures analyzed in the book provide food for thought wherever you happen to live.
Cables overhead. Image Xeni Jardin, One Wilshire flickr set
One Wilshire, the unassuming container of the U.S. telephone and data connections reaching across the Pacific evokes the very tangible spin-offs of information society. The analysis of Los Angeles & Long Beach’s ports, both major dispatchers of an unprecedented rise in the volume of goods from the Far East to the city and to the rest of the country, speaks to our seemingly unstoppable gluttony. I found some of the most illuminating comments in Roger Sherman‘s essay about change-based thinking, a position that invites architects and urbanists to envision their work under a different lens, one that would ‘sett a trap’ to capture potential change that inevitably occur in the lifespan of a city.
Image on the homepage from Lane Barden‘s series Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel.
The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (available on Amazon USA and UK.)
010 publishers write: In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, architecture plays an important role. Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films. In addition, the ‘master of suspense’ made some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen. Spaces of confinement also turn up in the ‘Gothic plot’ of films in which the house is presented as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Furthermore, it became a Hitchcock hallmark to use famous monuments as the location for a climactic scene. Last but not least, Hitchcock used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, which are closely connected to Hitchcockian narrative structures (suspense) or typical Hitchcock themes (voyeurism). Apart from dealing with these issues extensively, Steven Jacobs discusses at length a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans especially made for this publication.
1966 “Torn Curtain,” Director Alfred Hitchcock. 1966 Universal. – Image MPTV.net
This is one dangerous book for people like me who don’t need an excuse to jump in the sofa and watch a Hitchcock movie instead of staying in front of the computer to work. Still, no matter how many books have been written about the “Master of Suspense” i never felt compelled to read any. Until this one.
Author Steven Jacobs claimed that he had written a monograph about an non-existing architect which make more sense than one might think at first sight. After all, movie directors and production designers have been known for using film sets as an intermediary to reflect on the city of the future. Having designed more models than built houses didn’t prevent architectural studio Archigram to be one of the most influential and iconic architectural studios ever. Hitchcock didn’t advance the slightest step in that direction. His art did not explore possible or futuristic architecture but remained grounded in what was available at the time of films, with a marked preference for old-style furniture and bourgeois mansions (think Victorian or his own house near Guildford.)
Lobby Card from Vertigo (1963 reissue). Image tcmdb
The Wrong House (a title referring to the 1956 movie The Wrong Man) is roughly made of two parts.
The first part of the book, the theoretical one, is by far the most fascinating. It explains in details how Hitchcock regarded set design as crucial element of the drama, used both domestic elements and touristic sites as protagonists in the story but also extended the architectural language to camera movements and positions, editing and other cinematographic practices.
1954, Rear Window
Most of the settings for his movies were mounted in studio, where Hitchcock had total control over the shooting conditions. The most bourgeois house was often represented as a space of oppression, danger and a provider of the uncanny. The interior is stuffed and closed, keys give the viewers access to the murder room, and each step on a stair advances the denouement as much as it delays it. Other buildings, even the public ones, are not necessarily safer, perversion lurks behind motel doors, museums are made for mysterious encounters.
1948 James Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cast on the set of “Rope.” 1948 Warner – Image MPTV.net
In location shootings, the film director had a field day toying with crowds and playing with urban icons. The former gave him some great opportunities to insert his famous cameos. The later included the Golden Gate Bridge, the British Museum, the UN Headquarters, Mount Rushmore which are so intimately connected to the films shot there that it can be said that Hitchcock tailed tourism as much as it stimulated it.
Still from Vertigo, 1958
1959, North by Northwest (via filmposters)
The second part of the book, made of case studies that dissect meticulously the architecture and internal design of 26 houses from 22 different films, is a bit overwhelming. When Jacobs hasn’t been able to trace drawings of sets built in the studio, he reconstructed the floor plans of these houses, mostly on the basis of what he saw in the films. Each movie is investigated from an architectural point of view. That’s how The Balestrero House in The Wrong Man is analyzed under the perspective of Kitchen sink claustrohpobia, Bates house and motel are defined as schizoid, Sebastian house in Notorious is a place for Nazi hominess and that’s how Rebecca discovers that Manderley is in fact Bluebeard’s Castle.
Plan of the ground floor of Manderley in the film Rebecca
I wouldn’t say that The Wrong House is an architecture book. As i am much more interested in architecture than cinema i was surprised to see how metaphorically the term “architecture” was used along its pages. But then i also like to be surprised once in a while….
Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, by Sabine Seymour (Amazon UK and USA.)
Published by Springer, abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.
Lags, a series of patches for coping with social jet lag, by Teresa Almeida
The book contains only 15 pages of theoretical discourse. It might not sound like a lot but they have the virtue of going straight to the point. Sabine Seymour knows what she’s writing about. Because the Vienna slash New York-based designer and researcher has spent several years dedicating her energy and brain to the exploration of what the next generation wearables would bring, she can see beyond the hype and detect what is truly inspiring or meaningful design-wise. Mondial Inc is a commercial entity born from her research and her role as an educator. She has lectured and exhibited her work internationally and she’s currently a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and the University of Arts and Industiral Desin in Linz, Austria.
Taiknam Hat, by Ricardo Nascimento, Ebru Kurbak and Fabiana Shizue, reacts to medium wave radio signals
The theoretical intro covers briefly the history of wearable computing, comments on the technology used to enable garments to interact, underlines textile innovations, adds some design considerations in the process, etc.
Space invader knitting by Be-Geistert
After the intro, there’s just a magnificent show and tell of some of the latest (a number of them haven’t been published anywhere else) and most interesting techno-fashion projects. You’ll find the big names of the industry (phillips, Nike, Adidas) but also pioneering and fearless fashion designers (Hussein Chalayan), the explorers of poetical fashion (Ying Gao), the young stars (CuteCircuit), the makers of fermented dresses (Donna Franklin), the always elegant (Despina Papadopoulos), the unclassifiable Kate Hartman), the lady ready for the catwalk in outer space (Kouji Hikawa), the geeky knitters (Cat Mazza, Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz), etc.
Kouji Hikawa‘s Space Suit and Cooling Pants
The book won’t tell you everything you dream to know about fashion and technology, how to make a singing skirt or used nanotech in your next project, but it will definitively enable you to have an idea of the breadth and scope of the discipline. Besides it demosntrates that techno-fashion designers have gone a long way since the time “wearable technology” consisted of a keyboard roughly distributed over the body.
There are many books about fashion and technology but this one is truly unique. It’s engaging, intelligent and it will make you smile and inspire as you turn the pages over. Besides, it makes a fantastic resource for students and anyone interested in the subject. There’s a bibliography, a glossary of innovative materials, a list of blogs and websites but also events and institutes which will enable readers to dig further into the subject.
Textile XY by Maurin Donneaud
The book was launched last Thursday in New York. Phil Torrone from Make magazine was there. Just for info, Ulrike Reinhard had a chance to video one of Sabine’s presentation a while ago.
Image on the homepage is Diana Eng and Emily Albinski’s Inflatable wedding dress.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
