The best design and architecture books of 2022 (so far)

This book edited by Marco Biraghi and Adriana Granato has the merit of making readers want to (re)discover Milan’s architecture (from WWII to today), even non-professionals. In the academic rigour of the texts written by over 150 authors on 150 buildings, with pictures by the Dutch photographer Sosthen Hennekam, L’architettura di Milano offers a contextualised reading of masterpieces by greats such as Gio Ponti, Magistretti and Caccia Dominioni. “An architecture that is virtuous in its way of coming to grips with what already exists […]; and in its ability to speak a modern language in response to the progressive thrust of the epoch,” writes Biraghi. Right up to today with designs by “some of the most talented architects on the planet”, by “the students of the students of masters” and by the latest generation.
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“Rome is above all an atmosphere, a light, a climate”: words written in the text La porpora e l’oro. In the book that contains it, the capital of Italy is thus described by Ludovico Quaroni but the picture that is painted is familiar and throbbing with life. An image from 1968 that conveys “the monumental sense of the existence of any poor devil” – true and valid even today. The selection of black-and-white photographs clearly shows the overlapping and pairing of roads, shacks, monuments, advertising posters, ruins, caper plants. Each photo is a list of unlikely and clashing pairs that nonetheless profoundly embrace the personality of the city where Quaroni was born and where “in people’s spirit and in the architectural space, all the history of a given place is alive, always.”
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The Covid-19 pandemic has overwhelmed the world’s architecture, both physical and social. But seen through the eyes of a historian, it is not so different from what came before. What has changed is human society, never so developed and technologically advanced. Yet, this society too is overcome by fear, anxiety, which has unhinged the rationality of almost all human activities, from school to healthcare. But why? How could this have happened? Proceeding (against the tide) and enlightened by liberal values, Gilberto Corbellini and Alberto Mingardi question the relationship between human communities and microparasites, which have established a dialogue to create open social architectures. Why now?
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Michael Murphy and Jeffrey Mansfield, the founder and design director of MASS Design Group, respectively, have written a book, intertwining history, theory and practice while covering the stages of healthcare facility design: from Filarete to Alvar Aalto, from Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn to Paul Rudolph and even Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern-day nursing assistance. Analysing the epidemics throughout history and the architectural transformations, both modern and contemporary, which have accompanied them, The Architecture of Health explores how infrastructures have always made healing easier and above all confirms the fundamental role architecture played and will continue to play in building our societies.
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Gian Carlo Calza, professor of Art History of East Asia at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice and director of the International Hokusai Research Centre, has recently edited for Skira the most authoritative and complete publication to date on Japanese advertising posters. From 1955 to 2020, page after page, masterpieces from the past are presented alongside the most interesting and innovative contemporary designs. In 520 pages, the author comments on 756 posters by 85 different graphic designers. These include Kamekura Yūsaku (1915-1997), creator of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics logo, and Ikko Tanaka (1930-2002) with his legendary Nihon Buyo posters, made for UCLA (1981) and Hiroshima Appeals (1988), where a white dove stands out against a grey atomic explosion.
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Just as a dictionary gathers the words of a language, this book edited by Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany – designers, activists and professors – uses entries to define the rules and modalities of graphic design. Theirs is not an encyclopaedic work but rather an attempt to offer multiple reading tools, open to interpretation and ready to trigger debate and discussion. Fifty-two entries in total – from the A in Accomplices to the U in Unstable Signs – take into consideration books, objects, people, biographies and institutions narrated by 20 authors (designers and teachers, activists and theorists). As with all glossaries, it offers the major advantage of freedom: beginning wherever the reader wishes, focusing on preferred definitions and gathering food for thought for other journeys.
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An acronym for “Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano”, FUORI was more than a Marxist-type association that in the 1970s claimed the rights of homosexuals. Founded in Turin by the bookseller-activist Angelo Pezzane, it was a hotbed for the evolution of customs, ideas and style, as can be seen by the streamlined graphics of the homonymous magazine. Published from 1972 to 1982 on an irregular basis with a print run that, at times, reached almost 8,000 copies, FUORI is a milestone to understanding how the evolution of ethics always corresponds to work on aesthetics. As the complete collection is only available at the Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome, the book by Antonelli and Ragazzi indemnifies a national legacy that today goes beyond all categories.
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Before Conran “there were no chairs and no France,” according to the satirical author Craig Brown. An inside joke, certainly, yet somehow it aptly sums up the ideal of a man convinced that “design is there to improve your life.” A talented designer, philanthropist and successful businessman, Sir Terence Conran (1931-2020) is mainly known for opening Habitat in the 1960s, the furniture store chain that aimed to offer the public at large a decidedly improved lifestyle. Plus, in the 1980s, he also founded the Design Museum in London. Written by Deyan Sudjic, a critic for the The Observer and a director of the museum as well, this book describes the personality and work of the man who for four decades shaped the tastes of his peers, contributing to making Great Britain what it is today.
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Over the course of his long and prolific career, Álvaro Siza has rarely spoken firsthand of the process guiding his practice. Instead, this small but attentively edited publication, allows this little-known dimension of his to emerge, with a collection of contributions in English and sketches by the Portuguese master. The book also offers the opportunity to reread some seminal works – such as the Boa Nova teahouse and the pools in Leça da Palmeira – from Siza’s perspective, which is both poetic and pragmatic. The designs include different scales, from cities to furniture. The anthology is rounded off by two essays: one by Vittorio Gregotti (intro to the 1998 Italian edition) and another by Daniela Sá, director and cofounder of Monade.
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What has made Italian industrial design unique in the world for over 60 years? The book Created in Italy edited by Odoardo Fioravanti, Giulio Iacchetti and Francesca Picchi answers this. Intended as a catalogue for the homonymous exhibition held in the Italian Cultural Institutes across the world and accessible online, the editors call it “an exploration of Italian industry” to “stage an impassioned story of Italian know-how”. It gathers contributions by main players – businessmen like Alberto Bombassei and critics like Enrico Morteo – and the stories of 31 companies (“an archipelago of successful experiences”), like Abet Laminati, Foscarini and Vibram. By discussing Italian skill, “an opportunity to facilitate dialogue and collaboration between Italian and international companies” is also possible.
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With the nonchalance of a narrator drawing upon the palace of memories, enriching these with anecdotes and irony, Robert A. M. Stern describes his journey into the world of architecture in this dense publication filled with personal and professional pictures taken from his own archive. Arranged chronologically, just like an autobiography, Between Memory and Invention outlines the course that has led the eighty-year-old modernist, who studied at Yale with Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Vincent Scully, to embrace a traditionalist approach, filtered through the lens of postmodernism. For the wealth of its testimonies and documents that substantiate this story, the publication is a learned and pleasant text on the history of architecture over the last 60 years.
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Everyone knows that brutalism has been (for the past 20 years) on the rise. Confirming this trend is a book by the art and architecture historian Agata Toromanoff, who has gathered 50 of the most representative contemporary designs – the heirs, across the world, of béton brut art. The tropical villa on the shores of Bali designed by Patisandhika Architects, the former grain silo transformed by Cobe into apartments in Copenhagen and the French International School by Henning Larsen in Hong Kong are three examples. In this enthusiastic survey, the use of concrete stands out for its elegance and plasticity, thus confirming that the beauty intrinsic to the “masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light” reminiscent of Le Corbusier is today alive more than ever.
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It is a well-known fact that in the most celebrated art academy of the 1920s, real gender equality was not practised in terms of artistic opportunities, despite the premises of the Bauhaus Manifesto. Encouraged by the masters to pursue only the “more suitable” disciplines such as weaving, ceramics and bookbinding – only 4 women would enrol in architecture – just a handful of the 475 women, out of a total of 1,400 students between 1919 and 1932, stood out as key players, many being the invisible collaborators of Pygmalion men. Anty Pansera is credited with reconstructing and systematising the stories of all these women, also shedding light on the defeated and the forgotten, and thereby portraying a revolutionary age when women challenged the limits imposed upon them even by an avant-garde school.
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Published in 2019 in English and translated into French in 2021, the graphic novel by Charlotte MalterreBarthes with illustrations by Zosia Dzierzawska, tells the story of Eileen Gray and her E-1027 villa. The authors – the former is the co-founder of the Parity Front association for gender equality in architecture, while the latter is the illustrator/creator of the Armadillo studio and co-working in Milan – dedicate this book “to all girls, women and grandmothers, and to the men who support them”. Among anecdotes around Gray’s modernist masterpiece, they focus on Le Corbusier’s depictions, a breaking point from the Irish architect’s vision and proof of how little her work was understood by maestro Corbu and Jean Badovici, the home’s owner who was enamoured of Eileen.
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These are secondary (read: personal) accounts of Adele Cassina, narrated with her keen and light-hearted eye in this fine book created with her daughter Chiara: the beginnings in Meda in the 1950s, a provincial town that became the centre of the (design) universe; the years of her father Cesare (founder of Cassina, C&B with Piero Busnelli and Flos with Dino Gavina), a friend of Ponti, Magistretti, Scarpa and Albini. Reserved yet intense, Adele’s story is not only that of a bystander, as seen with the turning point in 1993 when, with her late husband Rodrigo Rodriquez, she established Adele-C. Her compellingly personal account perfectly complements the official history: the adventure of three generations that have made Italian design great.
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The result of research that lasted 20 years, the volume by Zeuler R. Lima – a professor, architect and curator – does not just document the life and career of Lina Bo Bardi. The ideas, dreams and designs of the “weary goddess”, as she was nicknamed by Valentino Bompiani, are contextualised in the historical, human and geographic landscape in which the architect of the SESC Pompéia operated: from her first experiences in publishing (at Domus with Gianni Mazzocchi) to her trip to Brazil that changed her life, with her husband, the gallerist Pietro Maria Bardi, and her encounters with pioneers of modernism. The author chooses a historical reconstruction, while trying to be loyal to her courageous and independent voice. “It’s a book written with rigour and tenderness,” he says.”
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All objects contribute to defining our lives, but some do so more than others because they have greater social, scientific and political implications. This is why they should occupy a pivotal place in the canons of our material culture. So say the authors of Designing Motherhood, a book supported by research carried out via the eponymous Instagram account for over two years, making it possible to expand and enrich the study with a polyphony of voices and testimonies. Through the ups and downs of contraceptives, breast pumps, abortion kits, post-partum clothes and gynaecological equipment, as well as parental leave and child-rearing techniques, the volume tells the story of how the battles of motherhood have been designed within society, while also suggesting alternative paths.
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Established in 2020 during the pandemic, Design Emergency originated as an Instagram account intended to stream a series of weekly conversations. Since then, its creators – Paola Antonelli, curator of the Architecture and Design Department at MoMA in New York, and Alice Rawsthorn, design critic for The Observer – have taken turns conducting the interviews with the same aim: to underline the crucial role of design in facing the key challenges of our times. The book, available from this April, gathers the exemplary stories of designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists and activists, such as Michael Murphy (MASS Design Group), Marco Ranieri (the anaesthetist who invented a ventilator by adapting a snorkelling mask), Formafantasma and Neri Oxman.
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Harry Bertoia’s furniture is an integral part of modern and contemporary design. Everyone, at one point or another, has come across his legendary Diamond Chair, manufactured by Knoll since 1952. We all remember him more as a designer, even though the American Bertoia (who was actually born in Friuli in 1915) only devoted a handful of years to this activity: the Eames Office (1944-1946) and for Knoll (1950-1952). Compliments to the retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (the first after almost 50 years) and the accompanying catalogue that shed light on his work as an artist – the creator of jewellery and sculptures – and an author of spectacular large-scale installations, in public and private venues, 52 of which have been catalogued in the volume by Marin R. Sullivan.
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From Baron Haussmann to Frank Gehry, from abbot Laugier to Sigfried Giedion, from Oscar Wilde to Jean Baudrillard. The former editor of Domus touches on the key figures of modernity in a transversal account of consumer society’s idiosyncrasies in its relationship with architecture and cities. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani’s reflections explore a number of the discipline’s canonical themes while neutralising its dogmas: the self-absorbed design practices of starchitects; architects as artist-mediators; cities as “variations on theme parks”, in the words of Michael Sorkin. All the chapters uphold what is almost a manifesto on the role of design today in creating the conditions for a “happy life”, a goal that seems disarmingly simple for the uncertain times we live in.
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During his 30-year partnership with Venini, which began in 1965 when Ludovico de Santillana invited him to Murano, Tapio Wirkkala created around 200 models. This fine, large-format book documents his contribution thanks to some previously unpublished material from the Venini historic archive and the designer’s own archive. The publication is rounded off by research with other sources and an analysis of the actual objects made available by museums and collectors across the globe. The wealth of documentation and detailed presentation are the features that make this book a precious tool in approaching absolute masterpieces where the designer explored the expressive potential offered by Venetian craftsmanship.
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Fulvio Irace offers an ideal continuation and enlargement of his 1996 book Milano Moderna, a critical reading of Milan’s architecture from the post-war period until today. An essential analysis in its precise choice of topics, it brings out what has always been the essence of the Lombard metropolis: modernity, or rather “its changing ideals of modernity”. The interpretation is textual and visual, each complementing the other. The essays range from Luigi Moretti to Milan’s new skyline, alternating with shots by five photographers, “the new landscapists”, as Irace writes: Gabriele Basilico and Paolo Rosselli (modern architecture), and Marco Introini, Filippo Romano and Giovanna Silva (contemporary architecture).
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After analysing the impact of architecture on comics and graphic novels (with the book Bricks & Balloons, in 2013), the cultural anthropologist Mélanie van der Hoorn approaches another tangential and potentially complementary theme with respect to design. Her latest book, Serious Fun, surveys all those games and video games that focus on architecture and city spaces and were conceived by architects, city planners, artists and developers, from the end of the 20th century: dollhouses, construction games and video games like SimCity and Block by Block. In over 200 pages, this book explores them from an architectural perspective and, in some cases, presents them as valid instruments for both architects and city planners.
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A “temporary migrant” between Italy and Denmark for 20 years, Marco Sammicheli uses the diary format to describe events in the lives of those who, like himself, travel back and forth between two countries and “have passionately lived their creative adventures, ideal impulses and challenges”. The journey starts in Rome with Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antonio Canova’s great rival, and ends in Holstebro with Eugenio Barba, a theatre director from Gallipoli. Each chapter focuses on a city, area or circumstance, and each is narrated via the stories of artists, architects, writers and intellectuals who found their way in another country. This bilingual edition sheds light on the cultural and professional hybridisation that has marked the history of design.
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Born as a Facebook group in 2019, Forgotten Architecture soon became the epicenter of a growing community of enthusiasts, from different backgrounds, but with a common mission: to enhance the work of little-known architects, buildings - often of great quality - which, in order to different reasons, they have been forgotten or abandoned. After three years, their "archive of completed and disappeared projects", the result of a collective and horizontal research, becomes a book: 280 pages edited by Bianca Felicori, architect and researcher, who is the advocate of Forgotten, collect about fifty projects , some unpublished, thematically divided into 11 chapters as well as five essays by as many authors. The book will be distributed by Before or Never, collecting orders online by June 7. And then, never reprinted again.
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“A grounded factory man and successful artist,” Luca Meda was an architect and designer whose life and career were inextricably linked with Molteni&C, for whom he began working as art director in 1968. He was always focused on improving what already exists, at the service of the company and the market. This is what clearly emerges in tthe first monograph dedicated to Meda, it includes unique critical essays and illustrations covering 350 pages. The result of research elaborated by the Iuav Project Archive in Venice with Meda’s personal archive on loan, this publication is a tool for exploring the relationship between corporate culture and the inventive power of artisans, designers and architects that has distinguished the history of Italian design.
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Alle volte, nel passato, s’incontra la contemporaneità. Sono 23 le lezioni di storia dell’architettura di Paolo Portoghesi e Virgilio Vercelloni che questo libro raccoglie e restituisce al lettore. Tenutesi fra il 1970 e il 1971 nell’edificio Trifoglio di Gio Ponti, alla facoltà di Architettura del Politecnico di Milano, riportano la voce di un’università rinnovata, non ancora uscita dal travaglio delle proteste studentesche e degli scontri con le forze dell’ordine. In questo contesto, i due autori emergono come sperimentatori di un nuovo modo di trasmettere la storia dell’architettura “per confronto”. Tanto per farsi un’idea dell’irriverenza degli accostamenti: Frank Lloyd Wright e Francesco Borromini, il Brutalismo e il Manierismo, la poetica del cemento armato e il Gotico.
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The Expo and Coronavirus have triggered radical transformations in Milan. Public spaces have taken on new meaning, at times assuming previously unseen forms. Two bilingual publications by Urban Center examine the reasoning and modalities behind this process. The first is an atlas in progress, Milan Public Space, by Chiara Quinzii and Diego Terna. The second, Milan Gender Atlas, explores urban spaces from the perspective of women and gender minorities. Part of the Sex & the City research project, it traces a trajectory between representation, phenomenology and socio-economic dynamics while revealing how cities are conceived by and for male bodies. The result is a practical tool for measuring the distance between the new Milan and a truly inclusive city.
GR