Home DepartmentsExcerpt: Book
07.10.24

Excerpt: Book

A Brutalist Cemetery, a Center for Spiritual Exploration, a Compendium of Product Design: What We’re Reading, Summer 2024 Edition

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. 
More
03.21.22

Excerpt: Book

“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
More
02.22.21

Excerpt: Book

Ken Miller’s New Book Pictures Photography Anew

A new volume by editor and curator Ken Miller celebrates photography not for the referential images it can capture, but for the possibilities of the medium in and of itself. Titled PICTURES, the book celebrates non-representational photography, and it’s a formal announcement of sorts that photographs, as an art form, have come into a category all their own and not just in service of documentation, representation, or narrative.
More
01.06.21

Excerpt: Book

The Colorful Vintage Design Book We Return to Again and Again for Inspiration

We know objectively that the start of the year is generally a time of renewal and a time to birth new projects. But to be honest, this is often the time of year when we feel most low and uninspired, which may be why we often turn to books in our own libraries for energy. I often come back to Interiors in Color, a 1983 book translated from Italian that features interiors by many of that era's best-known players.
More
10.16.20

Excerpt: Book

This Vintage Mid-Century Primer Provides the Blueprint From Which Contemporary Design Emerged

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.”
More
04.17.20

Excerpt: Book

Three Recipes for Virtuous Comfort Food, From a Fave Restaurant of New York Creatives

Right now we're all cooking at home, and all we want is virtuous comfort food — exactly the kind of food that the New York restaurant Dimes is known for. Today we're sharing three recipes from its new book, Dimes Times, all of them warm and soothing, relatively easy to make, and freezer-friendly, too. It's no sitting-at-a-Matisse-inspired-table-sipping-wheatgrass-margaritas, but it's the perfect thing for a pandemic that has deprived us of such.
More
03.26.20

Excerpt: Book

This 1960s Guide to Ikebana is the Resource We Need Right Now

I found The Art of Arranging Flowers, a comprehensive 1960s guide to the Japanese art of ikebana, in Stockholm at the beginning of last year. Too heavy to carry home, I tracked it down from a seller in Indiana and promptly bought it, thinking it would be a nice visual touchstone and a cool thing to display on my coffee table. Little did I know that a year later, I'd be wondering if the book could serve as an actual resource for those currently stuck in their homes, flailing about for ways to express their creativity.
More
01.09.18

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Documents the Architectural Mash-Ups of One of Earth’s Most Mystical Locales

Pretty much everyone is a travel photographer on Instagram these days, and there's nothing we like better than when one of our favorite photographers heads somewhere far-flung. But for Brian Ferry's latest project — a book called The Deepest Lake, which documents Ferry's 2014 trip to Kashmir — Instagram didn't seem like the proper vehicle on which to be seen. "When I post photos online, it can feel insignificant," Ferry says. "People scroll past it once and then move on. I want people to have the time and the space to really look at a photo, and so I had the idea to make a book."
More
Cassina This Will Be the Place
12.19.17

Excerpt: Book

This 90-Year-Old Company’s New Book is Anything But Old-Fashioned

Cassina's 90th-anniversary monograph, This Will Be the Place, is, quite frankly, a remarkably cool book for such a furniture company to produce. Rather than proselytizing about all of the great pieces their workshop has produced over the years, Cassina looks both outward and towards the future, asking others to weigh in on what exactly the concept of "the future" means at this point and what the domestic landscape will look like when we reach it.
More
06.07.17

Excerpt: Book

Tauba Auerbach on Making Art — and Salad — In a New Cookbook

There's been a glut of cookbooks lately with as much a foot in the art and design world as they do the food (see Nacho Alegre and Peter Shire's amazing photography collab in the recent Sqirl book, for starters). But perhaps no author has meshed the two worlds together as effortlessly and as completely as Julia Sherman, the artist behind the immensely popular blog Salad for President, whose cookbook of the same name was released last month and which we're excerpting here today.
More
Entryways of Milan
04.21.17

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city's most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi.
More