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As lovers of and writers about design, there’s one question we’re constantly asking ourselves: How can we get designers to make us their amazing pieces at cost? But what we nearly always fail to wonder is: Would it actually be possible to make these pieces ourselves? DIY Furniture changes all that, presenting 30 projects from the likes of Peter Marigold, Uhuru, Lindsey Adelman, and Paul Loebach, along with blueprints on how to make each one with off-the-shelf parts ranging from plastic water pipes to zip ties (a Sight Unseen obsession, they pop up in at least four projects). The entries range from the ultra-practical (a woven rug made from cargo rope knotted with twine) to the semi-ridiculous (kudos to anyone who attempts Julia Lohmann’s cast-concrete and wool Resilience Table, which the designer created for her solo exhibition at 2008’s Design Miami/Basel and which now sells for an undisclosed sum at Moss).
It’s highly probable that the genius of Dezeen lies in its simplicity — an inspiring jumble of random people, products, and buildings fly by in a constant, daily stream, uncluttered with concept or commentary. For most of us in the design industry, it’s like an IV drip of news and information, easy to process and vital for understanding what’s going on in the world outside our studios. On first glance, Dezeen’s new Book of Ideas, edited by founder Marcus Fairs, could be mistaken for a direct translation of that ethos; a kind of excerpt of the site’s greatest hits, repackaged at print resolution. But while its 116 entries do represent many of the most popular posts since Dezeen launched in 2006, this — as its title makes plain — is a book about ideas, not simply news, which gives it a specific point of view that the site has never really purported to have. Inside, Fairs personally guides readers through the wonders of innovations like a balancing barn, a textile-skinned car, and the first aesthetically pleasing CFL — all of which share an “I wish I’d thought of that” awe factor — meditating on how they’ve impacted design and how websites like his have empowered them do so. We asked Fairs to go one step further for us and identify five of the book’s projects that have made an especially big impression on him.
Yesterday on Sight Unseen, we featured a London design couple whose work seems to flourish under the very weight of their creative differences. Today, we turn our attentions to a London design couple whose outlooks are so similar, and whose work so beautifully streamlined, that it can often be difficult to tell where the mind of one ends and the other begins. We’ve been fans of the work of Industrial Facility’s Kim Colin and Sam Hecht since the very earliest days of our design journalism, but while the book they released earlier this year doesn’t include a single image from that output, it speaks volumes about the way the two begin to design together. Usefulness in Small Things: Items from the Under a Fiver Collection brings together the couple’s collection of mass-produced, locally sourced, everyday objects that Hecht has been amassing for nearly 20 years — cheese knives from Japan, plastering tools from Greece, vomit bags from the UK, wine bottle sponges from France, and the like, all chosen for low cost — under five pounds — and for their ability to tell Hecht when he traveled something about where he was. “Each of the objects I found appealed to me for a specific reason: the ability to address and identify a small and localized need, even when some were hopelessly flawed in their execution,” he writes in the introduction.
Who knows why an artist is compelled to collage? The reasons can be as highbrow as an homage to the Dadaists, as basic as a way to test the possibilities of Photoshop, or as ordinary as a destination for the found materials that tend to accumulate in the corners of creative studios. For Brooklyn-based artist James Gallagher, the discovery of the medium two decades ago happened entirely by chance. As an art-school grad and a new dad, Gallagher writes in the preface to Cutting Edges — the book he curated earlier this year for Gestalten — “I had little time to get to the print shop (let alone anywhere else) so for one particular project, I began cutting apart old prints and piecing them together to form a new composition. The results completely reinvigorated my creativity… there was something truly cathartic about stripping images down to their simplest form and then building them back up again.”
In the context of the hysteria currently surrounding all things old-fashioned and handmade, it makes a certain sense to mount an examination of architecture’s low-tech roots: those hand-rendered sketches and schematics that still tend to quietly precede even the most digitally advanced structures. It’s debatable whether the practice as a whole is consciously returning to those roots, as the new book Architects’ Sketchbooks argues, but when the architects who find joy in committing their thoughts to paper open their notepads for all to see, the appeal runs deeper than any cultural trend. “For me, the process is often more fascinating than the end result, and at the heart of architecture, which is part of the process of building worlds, lies the language of drawing,” writes Narinder Sagoo of Foster + Partners in the book’s foreword.
It’s possible you’ve spent hours foraging flea markets, wondering how a Russel Wright pitcher or an Eames shell chair or a Jens Risom credenza might fit into your home décor. But did you ever stop to wonder how those pieces may have figured into the homes of their own makers? Leslie Williamson, a San Francisco–based photographer, did — and the result is Handcrafted Modern, a new book that offers an intimate glimpse inside the houses of 14 of America’s most beloved mid-century designers.
There’s a certain taboo attached to pop stars who attempt to forge acting careers, and vice versa. Painters aren’t normally supposed to take up fashion design, and just because you’re a great photographer doesn’t mean you’ll make a great chef. But here at Sight Unseen, where we attempt to travel to the very heart of creativity, we delight in any and all cross-disciplinary meanderings, which is why our ears perked up when we heard about American Fashion Designers at Home, by Rima Suqi. Even if some of the more than 100 CFDA members featured in the book hired professionals to craft their spaces, the translation of their aesthetics from one genre to the other is an endless source of curiosity.
To an extent, Art of McSweeney’s — an oral history of the San Francisco–based quarterly, from Chronicle Books — is about the quirky illustrations, charts, graphs, and covers that have defined the look of Dave Eggers’s publishing venture for the last twelve years. But even more, it’s about the art of book-making, which in this case means reproductions of original sketches; odd detours to visit Arni and Bjössi, the Icelandic printers who produced more than a dozen issues before McSweeney’s moved its printing facilities to Singapore and North America; interviews with authors and artists; charts of printing specs; drawings of pensive clouds; and guides to reviewing unsolicited material.
Gordon Brinckle, the late, eccentric subject of a new photography book called The Projectionist, was an outsider artist to be sure: A small-town projectionist at the local movie theater, Brinckle spent his free time sketching and constructing a small-scale movie palace called the Shalimar in the basement of his Middletown, Delaware, home. (Which we suppose makes him more like an outsider artist, designer, architect, and engineer all rolled into one.) Photographed and written by Kendall Messick, a filmmaker who grew up across the street from the Brinckle family, the book documents the artist and his process, mixing photographs of Brinckle’s fully realized creation with original artwork, architectural plans, sketches, and linoleum prints of ticket stubs and uniform designs. Brinckle had some vocational training but was otherwise self-taught, and the book is a fascinating glimpse at how an artist can work in a vacuum and yet still mimic the methods used by designers far and wide.
There are several somewhat shocking things about Plastic Dreams: Synthetic Visions in Design, the first book out from a new eponymous imprint by ex-Taschen impresarios Charlotte & Peter Fiell. First and most arresting is its bright orange, webbed half-slipcover, designed by the Brazilian shoe company Melissa and infused with that company’s signature scent: It’s somewhere between a piece of tutti-frutti chewing gum and a bottle of Designer Imposters fragrance. Second is the reminder that some plastics aren’t wholly synthetic — a fact that’s easily forgotten — but rather the descendants of various amazingly named rubber plants, like Gamboge, Gutta Percha, and Caoutchouc. And third is the realization of just how many products would never have been possible, or would at least have been dramatically altered, without the material’s development: dental plates, curling irons, vinyl LPs, and more.
Lists are one of the strange byproducts of daily life. You hardly ever think about them — until, of course, one of them becomes obsessive enough to turn into a book. But even for the rest of us, a list can reveal much about the habits of its maker — the multitaskers and the romantics, the punctilious and the impulsive among us. In the hands of artists, a list can become a document of the art-making process or even a work of art unto itself. That’s the idea behind this new book by Liza Kirwin, curator of manuscripts at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, which counts hundreds of thousands of lists in its collection.
The products featured in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams will be familiar to any Rams disciple, but what struck us most about the book was a section devoted to Braun’s beautifully understated communication design and to that department’s fearless leader, Wolfgang Schmittel. He ran a tight ship — an in-house manual went out to each member of the design team with instructions on how to appropriately and inappropriately market the Braun product line — but as a result, the Braun image “differed greatly from the existing design forms of other manufacturers at the time, due to its clarity.”
The editors of Neuland, a recent compendium of up-and-coming German graphic designers, struggled with all the usual big, philosophical questions while putting their book together: What is German design? What is German? Who cares? If they were Ellen Lupton or Steven Heller, they might have spent pages upon pages ruminating on these issues. Instead, they did what any editors who are actually designers by trade might do — they asked their 51 subjects for the answers.
When Henry David Thoreau took to the woods in 1845 to begin his Walden experiment, it was more of an exercise in social deprivation than an outright attempt to recharge his creative batteries. But his flight from civilization does prove that he — and all the generations of writers and makers who have flocked to sylvan retreats for productivity’s sake — felt every bit as besieged by the distractions of modern life as we do nearly two centuries later. Paging through Arcadia (Gestalten, 2009), a catalog of contemporary architectural hideaways built among trees and mountains, all I could think about was how powerful a tool nature has always been in creative life: We need to be immersed in culture to inform the things we create, but we also desperately need escape to give our minds the space to process it.
Francesca Gavin is a London-based writer, editor, and blogger, and, like you and me, she’s a major voyeur. For her book Creative Space: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators, out this year from Laurence King, she traveled the world, slipping inside the studios, apartments, and houses of designers, artists, photographers, stylists, curators, writers, and filmmakers — always with photographer Andy Sewell in tow — to document the chaotic interiors she found there.
Clay, paper, foamcore, potato starch: The materials designers use to mock up their products are strange and varied. (We once saw Stephen Burks make a 1:1 chair model from a lattice of neon bendy drinking straws.) The Making of Design: From the First Model to the Final Product offers an inside look at the creation of recent design icons, from the Bouroullecs’ Vegetal chair for Vitra to the Braun Pulsonic.