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from the pages of Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food, Water, Life

Since founding Studio Orta in 1993, the Paris-based husband-and-wife team of Lucy and Jorge Orta has produced an extensive body of work that addresses universal concerns about community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Beyond merely addressing these issues artistically, their work suggests solutions by modeling fresh approaches to social dilemmas. Their often-playful projects incorporate elements of fashion, art, and architecture, which they combine with performances, multimedia events, and public debates. Featuring hundreds of drawings and photographs, Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food, Water, Life presents recent works that fall into the categories of food, water, and the environment. An interview by curator and critic Hou Hanru provides insight into the artists’ processes and motivations.

From the pages of Fast Forward Urbanism

In the wake of recent failures in America’s urban infrastructure, an emerging group of activist designers are calling on architects to rethink their relationship to the city. For them, the future of the American city lies not in modernism’s large-scale master plans or new urbanism’s nostalgic community planning. Instead, they favor working with the realities of urban space, finding hidden opportunities in what already exists in our cities; they eschew monolithic, top-down approaches.  Fast-Forward Urbanism presents a mixture of essays, opinions, and design projects by well-known architects and theorists including Stan Allen, Will Alsop, Lars Lerup, and Keller Easterling. Equal parts theory and practice, their ideas lay the groundwork for the next American metropolis. Fast-Forward Urbanism will be a useful tool for designers as well as anyone working in the federal recovery effort, from policy-makers to engineers to builders to planners.

From the pages of Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food, Water, Life

Since founding Studio Orta in 1993, the Paris-based husband-and-wife team of Lucy and Jorge Orta has produced an extensive body of work that addresses universal concerns about community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Beyond merely addressing these issues artistically, their work suggests solutions by modeling fresh approaches to social dilemmas. Their often-playful projects incorporate elements of fashion, art, and architecture, which they combine with performances, multimedia events, and public debates. Featuring hundreds of drawings and photographs, Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food, Water, Life presents recent works that fall into the categories of food, water, and the environment. An interview by curator and critic Hou Hanru provides insight into the artists’ processes and motivations.

spread from OneFiveFour by Labbeus Woods

*Visit today’s BLDG BLOG for an article on the underground Berlin as meticulously illustrated in Labbeus Woods’ monograph of imaginary futures, OneFiveFour.

“Woods both describes and draws a series of projects set in what we might call a speculative sister-city of Berlin. Called “Centricity,” it is a metropolis populated with titanic physical devices: “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change. Tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”

[Image: From “Underground Berlin” by Lebbeus Woods].

Lebbeus Woods is a true visionary, whose drawings are among the richest and passionate as any in the history of architecture. For his first monograph, OneFiveFour, Woods painstakingly drew a book of two-page spreads that weave text, architectural elements, math, and physics into a unique vision of a new humanism for the information age. The powerful immediacy of the art makes it one of the most influential books we have ever published. Critic Michael Sorkin says it best: “In the mesmerizing, astonishingly wrought images of Lebbeus Woods…we are plunged into unfamiliar territory, a world of architecture beginning again….His ever-expanding discourse of the almost impossible is an inspiration not just to build, but to think.”

From the pages of Publish Your Photography Book

We live in the golden age of the photography book. Since the early 1990s, the number of photography book publishers has continued to grow while technological developments have placed more tools for bookmaking directly in the hands of photographers. For the students and working artists who have chosen photography as their primary means of expression, having their own photography book is seen as a passport to the international photography scene. Yet, few have more than a tentative grasp of the component parts of a book, an understanding of what they want to express, or the know-how needed to get a book published. Publish Your Photography Book is the first book to demystify the process of producing and publishing a book of photographs. Industry insiders Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson survey the current landscape of photography book publishing and point out the many avenues to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. This expert guide is organized in six sections covering the rich history of the photo book; an overview of the publishing industry; an intimate look at the process of making a book; a close review of how to market a photo book; a section on case studies, built around discussions and interviews with published photographers; and a final section presenting a wealth of resources and information to aid in the understanding of the publishing world. Publish Your Photography Book also includes a number of additional interviews and contributions from industry professionals, including artists, publishers, designers, packagers, editors, and other industry experts who openly share their publishing experiences.

From the pages of In The Wilds: Drawings by Nigel Peake

In the Wilds is a collection of artist Nigel Peake’s hand-drawn observations of rural life. From the trees, fields, lakes, and rolling hills that define the country landscape, to the farm houses, tractors, fences, and telegraph poles that build it, Peake’s obsessively detailed pencil and ink drawings and beautifully muted watercolors capture the slow moving rhythm of his surroundings. In a time when everyone seems to be seeking relief from the fast pace of everyday life, In the Wilds offers an escape to a countryside as timeless as it is idyllic.

From the pages of Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing

From Andy Warhol to the sassy designers of today, screen-printing is a medium with undeniable panache. Prized for its accessibility and bold, saturated colors, screen-printing is cheap, versatile, and a little dirty. Not to mention fast. Author Mike Perry (Hand Job, Over and Over) screened his first shirt in college and wore it later that night. So listen up, burgeoning artistes: it can’t always be bad to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Pulled stretches screen-printing in all directions, leaving no element untouched. This book is a survey and a how-to, a collection of prints and an idea bank. It brings together more than forty talented screen printers, including Aesthetic Apparatus, Deanne Cheuk, Steven Harrington, Maya Hayuk, Cody Hudson, Jeremyville, Andy Mueller, Rinzen, and Andy Smith, among many others. Pulled is for the creative person who wants to leave his mark on cotton, or anything else.

Boston-based Leers Weinzapfel Associates’ deeply rooted interest in the aesthetic, cultural, and civic power of architecture has resulted in a portfolio of stunningly tailored buildings fitted to their specific set of conditions, and conveying both conceptual consistency and individual character. Made to Measure, the firm’s first monograph, captures the handcrafted spirit of their work. The practice has built a reputation for its ability to meet extraordinary building challenges with uncommon design clarity, elegance, and refinement. They approach highly constrained and technically demanding design problems with a clear set of modernist core principles, a passion for material and detail exploration, and a desire to create meaningful places for social interaction.

NYC’s Highline as featured in Architectural Lighting: Designing With Light and Space

Architectural Lighting, the latest addition to the Architecture Briefs series, provides both a critical approach to and a conceptual framework for understanding the application of lighting in the built environment. The key considerations of lighting design are illuminated through accessible texts and instructional diagrams. Six built projects provide readers with concrete examples of the ways in which these principles are applied. Short essays by architect Steven Holl, artist Sylvain Dubuisson, and landscape architect James Corner explore the role of lighting in defining spatial compositions.