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50s_2
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.”
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Dimes_opener
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.
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Arranging Flowers10
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.
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BFerry-Outtake-opener
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."
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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.
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Tauba-0005_open
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.
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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.
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7531
12.23.16

Excerpt: Book

A New Book’s Palm Springs Still-Lifes — And Aging Female Models — Are the Epitome of Chic

The holidays may be coming up this weekend, but for our money, the best gift this season won't be available until after Christmas — that's when pre-orders start shipping for DUNES, a 96-page journal that serves as both a nostalgic love letter for and a thrift and vintage guide to Palm Springs, California. DUNES was conceived by photographer Lauren Coleman — who spent her childhood in an iconic Palm Springs house — and produced as a collaboration between Coleman, graphic designer Sarah Kissell, and stylist Tiff Horn.
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IMG_0149
11.04.16

Excerpt: Book

An Introduction to Italy’s Favorite Anti-Minimalist

It is perhaps ironic that Paola Navone should release a book entitled Tham ma da, a Thai word meaning "ordinary." Tham ma da doesn't refer to Navone's design sense, however, nor is it an adjective to describe the interiors she creates. But it is a fitting description of how she can take a humble material and multiply it so that the effect is something much, much greater.
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07a_kitchenonpalms
09.16.16

Excerpt: Book

Inside Jonas Wood’s Perspective-Bending Interior World

The LA artist Jonas Wood currently has a new exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery; called Portraits, it depicts various loved ones — his family on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah; his wife, Shio Kusaka, with an unruly-haired dog — in Wood's signature colorful, mise-en-abyme–happy style. (We like to think of it as Henri Rousseau, if Rousseau lived in 2016 Culver City). But our favorite Wood era remains Interiors, the 2012 catalogue that's being re-issued this week and that we're excerpting on the site today.
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Judd blue chair
08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part II: On Color and Defining ‘Modernism’

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-'80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we'd excerpt text from both. The second interview we're posting today comes from New York New Art, a 1989 tome that Monica unearthed at an antique mall in Nashville. The interview, with John Griffiths, took place at a Judd exhibition where the artist was showing new pieces in metal and perspex. It covers everything from why Judd began using color to whether the term "Modernism" actually means anything. Read on for more after the jump!
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