If you're heading to the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen soon, we're guessing your schedule is already packed with exhibition visits and design aperitivos. But there's also a good chance that, if you're anything like us, you always carve out at least a little time for mandatory design sightseeing, too? With Scandinavia being a goldmine for mid-century anything, it's definitely folly to go to a place like Copenhagen without digging for architectural gems, and this year, we're making it incredibly easy to find them with our Modernist Travel Guide. ICYMI, Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, distilled two decades of his work documenting over 10,000 Modernist landmarks into a handy, pocket-sized travel guide covering 363 buildings (with addresses!) in 30 cities around the world, and luckily for all of us, Copenhagen is one of them.

This week, the New York Times is counting down the 100 best books of the 20th century. So while you could be reading one of those this summer — or, perhaps, the book everyone I know is talking about, which does tangentially relate to this site in the form of a motel-room renovation — we've recently had a few more hefty design tomes come across our desk. What better time, then, to inaugurate a new column, where we tell you all the great things we're reading, browsing, or simply returning to again and again for inspiration. 

In her encyclopedic 1996 book Fifties Furniture, author Leslie Piña outlines the five styles that influenced the midcentury era: Art Deco, Bauhaus and the International Style, Machine Age Modern, Biomorphism, and Abstract Expressionism. The result, say Jared Blake and Ed Be of Lichen NYC, who chose the book as the last subject of their guest editor week, is something like "basic algebra." Fifties furniture, explains Be, is "a blueprint for a lot of the furniture that we’ve seen in the past twenty or thirty years in America.”