The craftsman
$36.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Provocative and enlightening, Richard Sennett's "The Craftsman" is an exploration of craftsmanship - the desire to do a job well for its own sake - as a template for living. Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? Pure competition, Sennett shows, will never produce(...)
October 2014
The craftsman
Actions:
Price:
$36.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Provocative and enlightening, Richard Sennett's "The Craftsman" is an exploration of craftsmanship - the desire to do a job well for its own sake - as a template for living. Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? Pure competition, Sennett shows, will never produce good work. Instead, the values of the craftsman, whether in a Stradivari violin workshop or a modern laboratory, can enrich our lives and change the way we anchor ourselves in the world around us. The past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working - using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials - which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognize this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.
$50.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Since the 1500s, scientists have documented the plants and fungi that grew around them, organizing the specimens into collections. Known as herbaria, these archives helped give rise to botany as its own scientific endeavor. "Herbarium" is a fascinating enquiry into this unique field of plant biology, exploring how herbaria emerged and have changed over time, who promoted(...)
Herbarium: The quest to preserve and classify the world's plants
Actions:
Price:
$50.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Since the 1500s, scientists have documented the plants and fungi that grew around them, organizing the specimens into collections. Known as herbaria, these archives helped give rise to botany as its own scientific endeavor. "Herbarium" is a fascinating enquiry into this unique field of plant biology, exploring how herbaria emerged and have changed over time, who promoted and contributed to them, and why they remain such an important source of data for their new role: understanding how the world’s flora is changing. Barbara Thiers, director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden, also explains how recent innovations that allow us to see things at both the molecular level and on a global scale can be applied to herbaria specimens, helping us address some of the most critical problems facing the world today.
Current Exhibitions
$10.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Squares, circles and triangles are at the core of what makes the industrial world around us. A universal visual language apparent in all things—the tools we use, the fashion we wear, the buildings we live in and the communications we see. Visionary modernist architects, designers and artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, and Josef Albers(...)
The incredible journey that is consciousness
Actions:
Price:
$10.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Squares, circles and triangles are at the core of what makes the industrial world around us. A universal visual language apparent in all things—the tools we use, the fashion we wear, the buildings we live in and the communications we see. Visionary modernist architects, designers and artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, and Josef Albers celebrated both the beauty of form as well as the functional potential hidden within these 3 primary shapes and colors. This publication invites each reader to interpret a landscape of symmetries, simplicities and geometric structures.
Illustration
$39.50
(available in store)
Summary:
Today, we live in an economic system that revolves around producing and consuming objects made of plastic and metal, electronics, synthetic textiles and other things that do not decompose within a foreseeable amount of time. We start to review the role of these objects in a series of challenges that lie ahead of us. In the design discipline, sustainability and social(...)
The responsible object; a history of the design ideology for the future
Actions:
Price:
$39.50
(available in store)
Summary:
Today, we live in an economic system that revolves around producing and consuming objects made of plastic and metal, electronics, synthetic textiles and other things that do not decompose within a foreseeable amount of time. We start to review the role of these objects in a series of challenges that lie ahead of us. In the design discipline, sustainability and social responsibility have become prolific epithets, generating new products, materials, and technologies, designed to change the course of our future. The intrinsic design ideologies are often not new, but form a fundamental part of design history, reappearing throughout the previous centuries. This book presents a history of socially committed design strategies within the western design tradition, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. A critical resource for designers, students, cultural critics, and anyone interested in building a sustainable future.
Design Theory
$23.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a(...)
On looking: a walker's guide to the art of observation
Actions:
Price:
$23.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.
Journeys
$28.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some(...)
The return of curiosity: what museums are good for in the 21st century
Actions:
Price:
$28.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some of our most important cultural institutions and the vital function they serve as stewards of human and natural history. Reflecting on art galleries, science and history institutions, and collections all around the world, Nicholas Thomas argues that, in times marked by incredible insecurity and turbulence, museums help us sustain and enrich society. Moreover, they stimulate us to think in new ways about our world, compelling our curiosity and showing us the importance of understanding one another. Thomas looks at museums not simply as storehouses of old things but as the products of meaningful relationships between curators, the public, history, and culture. These relationships, he shows, don’t always go smoothly, but they do always offer new insights into the many ways we value—and try to preserve—the world we live in.
Museology
$35.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on “design thinking” are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical(...)
Design: the invention of desire
Actions:
Price:
$35.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on “design thinking” are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical performances, award-winning author Jessica Helfand asserts that understanding design's purpose is more crucial than ever. Design is meaningful not because it is pretty but because it is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. For example, as designers collaborate with developing nations on everything from more affordable lawn mowers to cleaner drinking water, they must take into consideration the full range of a given community’s complex social needs. Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as how—and why—they motivate our behavior.
Design Theory
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In "Celluloid Skyline" James Sanders shows that the dream city of the movies, created by more than a century of films, may hold the secret to the allure and excitement of the actual place. Here are the cocktail parties and power lunches, the subway chases and opening nights, the playground rumbles and rooftop romances. Here is an invented Gotham, a place designed(...)
Commercial interiors, Building types
October 2003, New York
Celluloid skyline : New York and the movies
Actions:
Price:
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In "Celluloid Skyline" James Sanders shows that the dream city of the movies, created by more than a century of films, may hold the secret to the allure and excitement of the actual place. Here are the cocktail parties and power lunches, the subway chases and opening nights, the playground rumbles and rooftop romances. Here is an invented Gotham, a place designed specifically for action, drama, and adventure, a city of bright avenues and mysterious side streets, of soaring towers and intimate corners, where remarkable people do exciting, amusing, romantic, scary things. Sanders takes us from the tenement to the penthouse, from New York to Hollywood and back again, from 1896 to the present, all the while showing how the real and mythic cities reflected, changed, and taught each other. Illustrated with scores of rare and unusual production images culled from Sanders's decade-long research in studio archives and private collections around the country, "Celluloid Skyline" offers a new way to see not only America’s greatest metropolis, but cities the world over
Commercial interiors, Building types
$30.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In "Chasing the perfect" writer/designer Natalia Ilyin delivers her observations on design and the world it has molded. According to Ilyin, "Modern design is based on deeply idealist notions, and its inherent perfectionism has dovetailed beautifully with our commodity-based economy's need to keep people itching so that they will buy things and keep the society chugging(...)
Chasing the perfect : thoughts on modernist design in our time
Actions:
Price:
$30.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In "Chasing the perfect" writer/designer Natalia Ilyin delivers her observations on design and the world it has molded. According to Ilyin, "Modern design is based on deeply idealist notions, and its inherent perfectionism has dovetailed beautifully with our commodity-based economy's need to keep people itching so that they will buy things and keep the society chugging along. I began "Chasing the perfect" because I started to become aware of this collusion, this silent pressure that a language of design based in perfectionism had brought to bear on how I developed as a person." "Chasing the perfect" is especially relevant in our times as interest in graphic, industrial, and architectural design moves more and more into mainstream culture. Each of the 10 chapters features Ilyin’s accessible and often hilarious writing, which is highlighted with a broad range of images-some quite unexpected-from the designed world around us.
Design Theory
The Sweetsburg archives
$25.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Jonathan Reid Sévigny was born and raised in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a culture so unique and full of rare and local treasures that become significant to those who grew up there but perhaps seem completely foreign and often tacky to outsiders. It isn’t the most glamorous town, nor does it have any particular sites or landmarks that one would go out(...)
The Sweetsburg archives
Actions:
Price:
$25.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Jonathan Reid Sévigny was born and raised in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a culture so unique and full of rare and local treasures that become significant to those who grew up there but perhaps seem completely foreign and often tacky to outsiders. It isn’t the most glamorous town, nor does it have any particular sites or landmarks that one would go out of his / her way to visit. In The Sweetsburg Archives Sévigny is attempting to use his Quebeçois boyhood as an archetype for the relationship between the individual, the hometown, and the bewildering beauty that connects the two. As adults, we tend to romanticize our youth, we try and remember the best things about our coming of age, but we’re also scarred by certain events which we wish we could go back and change; fight back, kiss back. At a glance Sévigny’s depictions of Cowansville seem crisply utopian, a neat little playground of nice boys and girls. However, a closer look reveals their human forms are corrupt, splayed, eaten, and absorbed by animal fraternities, by swords of ritualistic death, by minute veils of the macrocosmic sky in all its unknown intricacies. The scene becomes otherworldly in the kid’s play, pushing us to remember that what is around and inside is both innocent and dirty, violent and soft, and constantly revised.
Illustration