Architecture + Design

This encyclopedia explores the hidden meanings of visual symbols across time and geography, from the sun to whales and the human hand. Spanning different eras and cultures, over 800 beautiful images combine with expert illuminations of symbol history, meanings, and psychic associations, offering readers a precious and fascinating resource for thoughtful interpretations of life, art, and spirituality.

Hardcover, 6.6” x 9.4”, 808 pages

An affordable overview of the great French modernist’s essential inventions

This volume compiles iconic furniture pieces by Charlotte Perriand (1903–99). The French designer’s career began in 1927, when she was just 24, and presented her steel and aluminum bar, “Bar under the roof,” at the Salon d’Automne—prompting Le Corbusier to hire her as a furniture designer. Perriand produced works with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret that remain canonical today. In 1940, she was invited to Japan to be the official advisor on industrial design for the Ministry of Trade and Industry; she recommended that the Japanese turn their efforts to creating products for export to the West. Unable to return to Paris because of naval blockades, she stayed in Vietnam for four years, where she learned about weaving, woodwork, rattan and other natural products. This experience prompted her to use materials such as bamboo and cane to create affordable mass-produced furniture—featured here along with other classic works.

A concise introduction to the opulent modernism of a long-neglected design pioneer

Neglected for most of her career, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco. Gray was to stand alone throughout her career, first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer and finally as an architect; at a time when other leading designers were almost all male and mostly members of one movement or another—whether a loose grouping like De Stijl in the Netherlands—she remained staunchly independent. Gray’s design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and she developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers (Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies van der Rohe).
This affordable volume presents the works for which she remains revered today.

Midcentury masterpieces from the inventors of the Eames chair

Best known for their contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design, film and photography, Charles and Ray Eames remain among the most renowned American designers of the 20th century. The couple married in 1941 and moved to California, where they pursued their furniture design in molded plywood. During the war they were commissioned by the US Navy to produce molded plywood splints, stretchers and experimental glider shells. In 1946, Evans Products began producing the Eames' molded plywood furniture. Their iconic molded plywood chair was called "the chair of the century" by the influential architectural critic Esther McCoy. In 1949, the Eameses designed and built their own home in Pacific Palisades, their design and imaginative use of materials making this house a mecca for architects and designers internationally. Today it is considered one of the most important postwar residences in the world.
This volume introduces key works by the couple from across their career.

Acclaimed furniture works from the Bauhaus polymath

Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) is without doubt one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture. Equally significant, though smaller in scale, are his adventures in furniture design. Like any good architect, Mies knew that architecture and furniture inevitably slip into dialogue and affect one another (he brought his knowledge of recent industrial technologies to bear on many of the chairs and tables he produced) and consequently, his earliest designs, beginning in the mid-1920s, were conceived for specific interiors. At first furniture design seemed more daunting than architecture: “There are endless possibilities and many problems—the chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable. It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a chair,” he once declared. But Mies soon found novel ways to marry traditional luxurious fabrics and leathers with contemporary chrome frames, while effecting a distinct separation between the supporting structure and the supported surfaces. Today his modern furniture pieces such as the Barcelona chair, table, ottoman and day bed and the Bruno chair are acclaimed popular classics.

A portrait of once-beloved, now-decaying cars in junkyards across America, from one of the New Journalism’s key figures

Brooklyn-born photographer Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential photographers of the last six decades. His immersive and groundbreaking works include The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969) and his 2024 memoir This Is My Life I'm Talking About.
When he was 21, Lyon’s father passed on to him a 1953 Oldsmobile. He discovered the ecstasy of speeding along Georgia highways during the civil rights movement, with red dirt fields of peanuts and cotton flying by. In the excitement of driving, he realized his own mortality. Lyon’s Junk: America in Ruins features approximately 86 American cars, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, in junkyards across the western United States. The pictures were taken in Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma.
This is a work of pure visual photography. The premise behind the work is that many things—sculptures, monuments, buildings—take on a new and added beauty as they deteriorate and become ruins: a certain pathos is added to their original beauty. This is true of the automobiles in this series: once the beloved machines of people and families who owned and drove them, they now evoke a terrible beauty and sadness.

An arresting visual document that charts the degradation of one of America’s most astonishing natural monuments

In November 2022, the water level of the Great Salt Lake fell to its lowest on record. Diverted water supply from its feeding rivers, pollution from nearby extraction plants and ravaging droughts have brought this landmark to a crisis point. As the lake reached its lowest ebb, photographer Fazal Sheikh (born 1965), together with writer Terry Tempest Williams (born 1955), walked the shoreline, awed by its epic beauty while recording the destruction of its natural habitats. As Utah native Williams writes in her essay, "Retreat," she is witnessing the death of a lake that has been a constant presence in her life. Meanwhile, Sheikh documents the shrinking salt basin from above, revealing how the lake has been exploited: plundered for its natural salts, dissected by concrete highways, discolored by toxic waste, depleted by evaporation. His images hold a mirror to the lake’s surface, charting its destruction while demanding the viewer’s visceral response.

The need-to-know names of Japanese graphic design from the late 19th century to the pre-digital decade, presented alongside more than 500 color images of vintage ephemera

With Fracture, author Ian Lynam presents a survey of Japanese design across a century as told through the biographies of its most influential creators. The chronology begins less than two decades after Japan’s opening to the West, ending a 200-year isolationist policy. Lynam features the stories of more than 90 pacesetters shaping the country’s modern aesthetic. We meet Hani Motoko, considered Japan’s first female journalist, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build the "Hall for Tomorrow" schoolhouse in Toshima City, Tokyo. Amid the national propaganda of the interwar period, a vision of the modern Japanese woman emerges in the advertisements of Hisui Sugiura and Tada Hokuu. The 1964 Olympics marked a watershed moment for Japanese design on the international stage, with Yusaku Kamehura’s "red circle" logo and the design of pictograms used in the competition for the first time. Finally, the survey concludes with the rise of women's liberation or ribu, and the state of graphic design at the threshold of the digital age.
Illustrated with children’s book pages, travel posters, maps, product advertisements, erotic magazine covers and more, Fracture functions as a visual treasure trove of Japanese ephemera while also introducing readers to the creative minds behind these formative designs.
Ian Lynam (born 1972) holds an MFA in graphic design from California Institute of the Arts. He is a faculty member at Temple University Japan Campus as well as at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His previous books on design include War with Myself, The Failed Painter and The Impossibility of Silence.

A magnificent collection of portraits combined with selections from the archives of great writers

Telling the stories of the best-loved writers in English literature, Writers Revealed investigates their enduring appeal from the 16th century to today through the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the British Library. The Portrait Gallery’s outstanding collection of author portraits are paired with intimate handwritten manuscripts, letters and notebooks, as well as rare first editions of books from the British Library. From William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, Writers Revealed features over 70 poets, novelists and academics. Each short profile—which provides insight into the writers’ inspirations, struggles and working practices—is beautifully illustrated with a portrait and manuscript or rare book. Readers will enjoy in-depth encounters with some of the world’s most talented writers, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen, Benjamin Zephaniah and Angela Carter, and discover just what it is that makes these individuals so endlessly compelling.

Twenty charismatic creatures made with playful flourishes by the quills of 17th- and 18th-century calligraphers

Sourced from Letterform Archive’s collection of historic writing manuals—books in which Europe’s leading scribes showed off their talents—this set of 20 unique notecards with accompanying envelopes delightfully displays hand-drawn animals made with ink and pen. Dogs, cats, bears, elephants, lions, dragonflies, peacocks, swans and more are reproduced in bright hues on an array of colorful backgrounds. These technically masterful and playfully expressive artworks by famed calligraphers such as Jan van de Velde, John Seddon and Joseph Friedrich Leopold make ideal companions for handwritten messages of all kinds. Presented in an elegant foil-stamped box, this set is the perfect gift for all animal-loving pen pals.

40 postcards with 20 favorite images from a dazzling journal of Deco-era Japanese design

Launched in the late 1920s, The Complete Commercial Artist (Gendai shōgyō bijutsu zenshū 現代商業美術全集) showcased work by Japan’s early design visionaries in 24 volumes on posters, window displays, lighted signs, and more. These retro postcards feature stylish and colorful selections from this masterpiece of print modernism.

40 postcards with 20 favorite images from a dazzling journal of Deco-era Japanese design

Launched in the late 1920s, The Complete Commercial Artist (Gendai shōgyō bijutsu zenshū 現代商業美術全集) showcased work by Japan’s early design visionaries in 24 volumes on posters, window displays, lighted signs, and more. These retro postcards feature stylish and colorful selections from this masterpiece of print modernism.

For Fuller, nature is the most exquisite technology we know; and what underlies all of his work is the quest to uncover nature’s fundamental principles—in order to foster their manifestation as a pattern integrity 'for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship.'" –Jaime Lawrence Snyder, Lars Müller Fuller Series Editor

A Los Angeles Times 2021 holiday gift guide pick

The work of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) is among the most extraordinary and inventive in 20th-century design and architecture, not least for its incorporation of a range of intellectual and technical disciplines. Fuller described himself as an “engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.''

R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking is a major reassessment of Fuller’s legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences. Drawing extensively on his archive and with over 300 images, the book follows Fuller’s explorations of geometry, language and intellectual property in their relation to design principles and pedagogy, organizing its survey of Fuller’s work through parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology of his career.

From Paper Tube Emergency Shelters and his Nomadic Museum built with containers to the Swatch/Omega Campus and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, discover the altruistic practice of the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, who is lauded for his “curiosity, commitment, endless innovation, infallible eye, and acute sensibility.”

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Incorporating both formal details and welcoming elements, a sophisticated and balanced look tailored to a sense of home, as shown through the portfolio of Foley & Cox

Foley & Cox is a New York-based interior design firm renowned for serene spaces subtly layered with color and texture that create a sense of welcome and comfort. Taking creative cues directly from their clients–their perceptions, preferences, and passions–the firm creates serene interiors infused with personal style.

This elegant book presents 24 homes, ranging from elegant prewar apartments in Manhattan to retreats in the Hamptons and summer places along the coast of New England and in Europe, and even to a private jet and a yacht that cruises the Mediterranean. What unites these spaces is an overall balance and elegance, infused with luxurious fabrics in subtle tonal variations and a judicious use of highlight color, often in the artwork and accessories. Founder Michael Cox is a master at creating settings for art collections and selecting distinctive vintage pieces that add a sophisticated touch to the rooms.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 304 × 241 mm (12 × 9.5 in)
• Pages: 248 pp
• Illustrations: 220 illustrations
• ISBN: 9781580936163

How design can help foster the conditions for global peace: an intersectional visual conversation between activists, designers, architects and theorists

How might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in and take action to create it now? Designing Peace is an intersectional snapshot of the actions—culturally diverse and wide-ranging in scale—that are currently in play around the world.

Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars and architects to policymakers and graphic, game and landscape designers, Designing Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity.

Designers engage with individuals, communities and organizations to create a more sustainable peace—from creative confrontations that challenge existing structures to designs that demand embracing justice and truth in a search for reconciliation. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.

This illustrated biography tells the story of Gropius's life, beginning with his shattering experiences in World War One, his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler, the establishment of the Bauhaus, and the tragic death of their daughter Manon.

After Gropius's agonized decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, the book explores his life in exile in London and then his move to America in 1937, where he lived and worked until his death in 1969.

Features more than 375 illustrations including letters, telegrams, sketches, drawings, photographs, posters, brochures, and other ephemera. The authors present the life of Walter Gropius as not just a key figure of 20th-century architecture, but as an extraordinarily generous person - a connector, protector, and benefactor who improved the lives and careers of all those with whom he came into contact.

This is the first comprehensive illustrated biography of one of Modern architecture's most important figures.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 238 mm (12 × 9 3/8 in)
• Pages: 320 pp
• Illustrations: 377 illustrations