10 books to read this summer

Metamorphosis Signals – as the title suggests: signals of metamorphosis, clues of a profound change. Not only in design but also in society, which, after discovering the unconscious, opens itself to the hybrid. Starting from the restless yet joyful forms produced by young French designer Audrey Large, suspended between art and design, between digital and material, architects Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò – founders of the international research program IN Residence – have created a magnificent volume in form and content. It focuses not so much on the new modes of production linked to 3D technologies but on ‘the ways humans interface with the artificial presences that inhabit their environment.’ Enchanting.

For years we have been waiting for a book that tells not only about projects but also about the vision of the duo composed of Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine, tireless explorers of the border areas between cinema and architecture. Finally, it has arrived. A polyphonic score, composed of 12 talks with leading architects such as Kazuyo Sejima, Álvaro Siza, Anne Holtrop, or Jacques Herzog, addressing our relationship with space, helping us unravel the complex weaves of perception in which sensitive and symbolic dimensions overlap. The title of the book sounds like a statement (and like a perfect definition of architecture), The Emotional Power of Space. So, let’s make room for this power!

A huge body of work that of Antonio Citterio, designer, and architect. And finally, for the first time, fifty years of projects that have made the history of Made in Italy design are brought together in a volume. Published by Silvana Editoriale, the book consists of seven chapters with two brilliant introductions by Andrea Branzi and Francesco Bonami. It tells the story of Citterio’s productions from the 1970s with the Baia sofa, designed with Paolo Nava, marking the beginning of a decade-long collaboration with B&B Italia, to the more recent collaborations with Cassina, Knoll, and Illy. Over 600 projects that illustrate the designer’s unmistakable style, a sophisticated modernity made of skilled technical details and timeless elegance.

A small book conceived as a manifesto aimed at rethinking the interior design in the era of the climate crisis. As explained by Philippe Rahm, the iconic and irreverent Swiss architect, ‘before the 20th century, decorating homes in the Western world entailed practical functions: keeping out the cold in winter, enhancing the light filtering through small windows embedded in thick, heavy walls, and blocking drafts blowing around all windows and doors...’ But then with modern design, decoration has lost its utilitarian function, making the ‘temperate climate’ of interiors dependent on fossil energy, which has produced global-scale pollution. It is time to reevaluate the ancient forms of decoration, furnishing homes with sustainable materials but also according to the principles of a new aesthetic that Rahm calls ‘The Anthropocene Style’ in his manifesto.

The history of design as we know it excludes centuries of highly skilled and creative production by Africans and the African diaspora. This book – edited by Terresa Moses of the University of Toronto and Omari Souza of the University of North Texas – seeks to turn things around. Starting from the media attention sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, it delves into the protests of African American communities in the 1920s and 1960s and examines the creative tactics they employed. Building on these historical roots, the book leads us to question design’s ability to challenge racial biases, forms of oppression, and establish itself as a truly inclusive social practice.

What does Henry Howard Holmes, the first American serial killer, who confessed to his crimes in 1896, have to do with design? Everything, according to design historian Alexandra Midal. In fact, in order to commit his crimes, the murderer designs a house filled with modern machinery and sophisticated traps. For this very reason, Holmes turns killing into an art – or rather an industrial art. This connection was already considered by Sigfried Giedion when, in his famous work Mechanization takes command (1948), he compared the functionalist and serial mechanics of industrial design with the perfectly ordered and relentless system of slaughterhouses, where animals are killed ‘on an assembly line.’ Alexandra Midal follows the same path, telling us, with delightful detail of macabre elements, how the designer and the serial killer not only emerge at the same historical moment but from the same culture. Black humor, horror, and irony, but above all, an original and stinging vision of the role that design plays in the modern world.

Originally conceived as a catalog for an exhibition currently on display at the Mudac in Lausanne, this book, curated by Marco Costantini, is more than just a catalog: it presents, for the first time, the Lebanese design scene from the 1920s to the present. Connected to the history of this complex country, which has often been referred to as the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East,’ from the civil war that began in the 1970s to the explosion in the Port of Beirut in 2020, the history of Lebanese design reveals strong similarities with Western modernity but also many contaminations and singularities.
An important volume, with impressive iconography, that reminds us of the need and urgency to rewrite the history (and current state) of design in a plural way, exploring other scenes, other horizons, other destinies.

Berlin-based publisher K Verlag decided to republish Tavares’ volume Des-Habitat after the Brazilian pavilion – curated by Paulo Tavares and Gabriela de Matos – won the Golden Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. The Brazilian architect, curator, and activist revisits and comments on Habitat – the famous art and design magazine directed by Lina Bo Bardi in the 1950s. Analyzing the contaminations between local vernacular culture and the lexicon of modernism, Tavares creates a small but fascinating work, in words and images, on the complex webs woven between history and tradition, between colonial oppression and creative emancipation. Unmissable.

In addition to the ten design titles, I want to add a novel. For those who have not read it yet: Bewilderment, published in 2021 by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers. It tells the story of a father whose job is to search for life on planets in the farthest galaxies and his son, gifted with incredible insights, sudden rages, and unable to adapt to the mediocre life of an American town. The book explores the position of the human between the infinitely large cosmos and the infinitely small atoms, between the epic struggle for the survival of species and the abuses of power. It is a book full of questions that cannot help but shake us. However, even though it is marked by pain and a sense of dramatic burden, it is an ode to life, diversity, and freedom.