John Pardey
About architect Vilhelm Wohlert's (b. 1920) architecture projects in Denmark and abroad. Especially about the Louisiana art museum north of Copenhagen, which he designed together with the architect Jørgen Bo.
Specifications - Hardcover. 214 pages. Measurement: 31 × 27 cm
Bobbito Garcia
Twenty years after its first release, and a decade since the most recent edition, this timeless, definitive volume on sneaker culture is finally back in print. Lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive, Where'd You Get Those? is an insider's account that traces New York City's sneaker culture back to its earliest days. Describing how a small and dedicated group of sneaker consumers in the 1970s and early '80s proved instrumental in establishing current corporate giants such as Nike and Adidas, sneaker aficionado Bobbito Garcia writes with exactitude and affection.
Chronicling the rise of sneakers through the lean years of the '60s, the bulk of the book examines nearly 400 sneakers released in the golden years of 1970-87, via information-packed entries for each model, including all color combinations available, nicknames of particular shoe models, relevant athlete endorsements, and running commentary and stories from a rogues' gallery of fanatics who weigh in on the pros and cons of each sneaker. Through lifestyle chapters such as "Arts and Crafts" (which details the process of customizing sneakers) and "Thou Shalt Not" ("The No-Nos of New York Sneakers"), Where'd You Get Those?interrogates this enduring subculture from every angle. This 20th anniversary classic edition features the cover artwork from the first edition, as well as essays collected from the 10th anniversary edition.
Specifications - Hardcover. 208 pages. Measurement: 26 × 21 cm
steidl
Sean Scully uses pastels to create abstract works in emotive response to color. This beautifully produced two-volume set, which accompanies the traveling exhibition Wall of Light, which starts at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. then travels to The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas and The Cincinnati Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ends at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together 100 of those subtle and ecstatic celebrations, along with four written pieces about them by Arthur Danto, who has been tracking Scully's work for a dozen years. Danto is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, and has since 1984 also been the art critic for The Nation. His contributions here range from catalogue texts for some of Scully's most significant exhibitions to a Nation piece, and are brought together here for the first time, allowing readers to trace the history and development of a major artist in the writings of one of America's leading art critics. Among Danto's insights are that "Scully's historical importance lies in the way he has brought the greatest achievements of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment." He also comes bearing secrets from the artist: "Pastel involves rubbing friable chalk over toothed paper, which in its nature confers a certain sparkling luminosity to the forms, and it is responsive to differences in pressure. The principle of pastel, Scully once told me, is that of putting on makeup.
Specifications - Hardcover. 232 pages. Measurement: 8.3 × 6.3cm
Dave hickey
Working within the strict format of the vertical stripe, Tim Bavington explores methods of designing his paintings, from intuition and chance to architectural systems and bar-coding. In recent years his interest has turned to music.
Specifications - Hardcover. 125 pages. Measurement: 10 × 8 cm
Judy Linn
Before she was a world-renowned singer-songwriter and dubbed “The Godmother of Punk,” Patti Smith was a struggling poet posing for the lens of photographer Judy Linn. In intimate portraits of an artist as a young woman, Linn captures Smith at her most vulnerable, as a raw performer on the verge of becoming an iconic artist. Linn’s photographs offer a fascinating document of Smith’s maturation into one of the most influential women of her generation while also spotlighting her close relationships with other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard. This book captures a moment lost in time, when a poet experimenting with music crossed paths with a young artist experimenting with photography. A must-have for anyone interested in the evolution of an artist, Patti Smith 1969-1976 showcases the collaboration between Smith and Linn that rewrote the definition of what it means to be a woman and an artist.
Specifications - Hardcover. 144 pages.
Phil Frost
Initially conceived as a personal project on the walls of Sorrenti’s New York loft, the material in Draw Blood for Proof eventually found its way onto gallery walls as a large-scale installation piece in 2004. Papering the site from floor to ceiling with layers of collected snapshots, contact sheets, prints, Polaroids and ephemera drawn from over fifteen years of work, Sorrenti’s collection was a unique look into the artist’s diaristic creative process, going beyond ideas of public and private production.
Re-photographed as a series of 8x10 Polaroids and reconstituted here, Sorrenti’s montage finds yet another incarnation in book form. Here the images are both documentation and personal exploration, and the layout repositions Sorrenti’s photographs in a series faithful to their placement on the walls of the gallery. This gives the viewer a sense of the raw impact of the original installation but also creates new visual relationships between images as they move across spreads, redefining themselves and one another on the pages. Images obscured in one layout may appear fully and with renewed force on the next. The result is a free-associative experience like memory or dreams, rooted in Sorrenti’s methods but drawing on his cache of personal associations, and the act of perception becomes part of the work.
Specifications - Hardcover. 162 pages.
Thames & Hudson
Of all the great couture houses, Dior is the most prestigious and internationally celebrated. Since its foundation in 1947, it has been the embodiment of a vision of sublime femininity, a vision to which Christian Dior’s successors – Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré and John Galliano – have remained faithful while at the same time reinterpreting it in their own new and distinctive ways.
This book traces the history of the House of Dior through the constantly changing contours of its haute couture. Arranged in five sequences, one devoted to each artistic director, this panorama of the evolution of a couture house is also a history of fashion since 1947, of its dreams and realities, its big events - the shows and the society occassions - and main protagonists, its high-profile stars and clients, its models and journalists, and its indispensable petites mains, or seamstresses, and all the others who work their magic discreetly behind the scenes.
A visual feast of contemporary photographs by the most outstanding fashion photographers of their time, including Richard Avedon, Henry Clarke, Nick Knight, Willy Maywald, Irving Penn and many others, is complemented by Laziz Hamani’s studio portraits of 150 exceptional designs selected from the 120 haute couture shows presented by Dior in its sixty years of existence.
Specifications - Hardcover. 335 pages. Measurement: 36.6 × 29cm
Huse På Mallorca
In 1972, Jørn Utzon found sanctuary by building a house on the island of Majorca. Perched on a cliff top looking towards Africa and built of the local stone, he named it Can Lis, in honour of his wife. Some twenty years later, Jørn and Lis Utzon moved inland to a mountainside and there refined the stone architecture of Can Lis in the making of a new home, Can Feliz.
With Can Lis, Utzon defined the essence of a modern Mediterranean architecture. His ability to assimilate and express a culture through architecture was already evident in the first house he had built for himself, in 1952, at Hellebaek in Denmark. Later, in the Kuwait National Assembly building, he created a persuasive model for a modern Islamic architecture, whilst in Sydney he made a building that has come to stand for a city and a nation.
Can Lis and Can Feliz have been, like their architect, elusive – reclusive even – yet they deserve to be included amongst the succession of houses that, more than any other building type, defined the course and achievements of twentiethcentury architecture. Through comprehensively documenting his houses on Majorca this book demonstrates how, by tapping into the particularities of place and culture, Utzon was able to create a seemingly timeless architecture of universal interest.
John Pardey
Specifications - Hardcover. 76 pages. Measurement: 30 × 26 cm
Bagsværd
This was the principle governing the Bagsværd Church project.The inspiration for the form and the architecture came from a wonderful visit, not once, but several times, to a vast sandy beach in on one of the Hawaiian islands Oahu, on the windward side, where the trade wind ceaselessly comes from California many thousands of metres above the sea, like a completely steady breeze, and from early morning it increases in strength until 11 o’clock so that you can lean against it – otherwise you simply don’t know the peace that wind gives – and sometimes it brings some clouds with it, and then the light and the sun fall through the clouds down on to the sand.
It’s wonderful. It’s a natural space that gives a profound spiritual peace, and spiritual peace is just what this is. It’s the happiness in living, it’s the joy and the gratitude.
So the natural space that gripped me has been turned into the body of the church, and the body of the church is naturally the biggest space in the church, though there are also a number of other rooms, and together they form a complex that can be compared to a monastery.
Specifications - Hardcover. 165 pages. Measurement: 31 × 27cm
steidl
“Though these pictures appear like magnificent modern paintings, they are in fact a deeper unconscious social artistic expression of an urban re-development that historical events since the Gründerzeit have fermented and brought to the surface.” Robert Polidori
The soaring, rigid walls of the tenement blocks torn open by the bombing of World War II dominated the German streetscapes of the 1950s. Fire walls, originally integrated in the building and serving as fire shields, suddenly became visible and turned into outer walls. That is how the originally rather technical term got a new meaning: Firewalls as walls spared by the fire.
Those long brick walls often adjoin to vast vacant lots once taken up by buildings that were never reerected after the war. Windows—sometimes bricked up again—cover the walls without any rational order, bearing witness to the troublesome moments of Germany’s history, just like smut, traces of bullets, shrapnel holes, the outlines of previous buildings, and provisional repairs. The remarkable housing boom following the fall of East Germany whitewashed most of the scars and overgrew the occasional graffiti and advertisements originally decorating those walls. A look behind them reveals—like a negative form of the same cast—the imprint of the building’s story.
Specifications - Hardcover. 152 pages. Measurement: 37.5 × 29.5 cm
Phaidon
Eugene Richards is one of America’s greatest living social documentary photographers. His intense vision and unswerving commitment to documenting the plight of the disadvantaged has produced powerful work on topics such as drug addiction, poverty, the mentally disabled, ageing and the personal consequences of war. The Blue Room is his first colour project, a moving, highly personal project that brings together the themes that encompass all of Richards’ work – what he describes as the ‘transient nature of things’. The photographs are portraits of the abandoned and forgotten houses of western America in areas such as the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. In the early twentieth century, railroads lured settlers west with the promises of homesteads and towns rose across the plains. But in the wake of the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s the towns faltered then failed. Richards enigmatic photographs of these forgotten homes are a meditation on memory and loss – family photographs stuck on a wall, a wedding dress hanging in a bedroom, snow falling on a bed by an open window, a wild horse standing at an open kitchen window. Richards’ contemplative, beautiful photographs inspire us to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and make a quiet statement on the inevitability of the circle of life and death, and the vulnerability of man in the face of shifting economic opportunities and the climate
Specifications - Hardcover. 168 pages.
Thames & Hudson
Curated by William A. Ewing, Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements provides an overview of Burtynsky’s work across four decades, including both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. Relinquishing the project-based lens through which the photographer’s work has previously been presented, the major monographs Oil and Water being the most recent examples, this book presents Burtynsky’s photographs in five free-flowing sections which combine and contrast work from throughout his career. This original approach provides a sense of both his visual language and his exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of our globalized world. Each section is interspersed with selected texts which work in concert with the images, to provide a fuller understanding of Burtynsky’s view of the world.
With an introduction by Ewing and an afterword by Joshua Schuster, Essential Elements provides an entirely new way of seeing Burtynsky’s work for those who are already familiar with it as well as an accessible introduction for those encountering his photographs for the first time.
Specifications - Hardcover. 202 pages. Measurement: 27.5 × 33 cm