Wallpaper* City Guides add New Destinations

Wallpaper* City Guides have added 10 new destinations: Delhi, Hamburg, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Marseille, Montreal, Moscow, Reykjavik, Seoul, and Venice. The guides present a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design conscious traveller.

Whether you are staying for 48 hours or five days, visiting for business or a vacation, the editors have done the hard work for you, from finding the best restaurants, bars and hotels (including which rooms to request) to the most extraordinary stores and sites, and the most enticing architecture and design. Wallpaper* City Guides enable you to come away from your trip, however brief, with a real taste of the city’s landscape and the satisfaction you’ve seen all that you should.

Wallpaper* City Guide, Published by Phaidon. Buy them here: Amazon

Books: Strike a Pose

Strike a Pose documents a new extroverted architectural language. The iconographically charged scenes and futuristic spaces featured are playful and experimental and range from private residences to schools and operas, museums and interior design. Manifested in spectacular structures, eccentric forms and vivid colours, this expressive approach goes way beyond conventional stylistic and geographic boundaries.

Strike a Pose, Eccentric Architecture and Spectacular Spaces,
Edited by R. Klanten, L. Feireiss. Buy it here: Amazon

Books: How to Wrap Five Eggs

How to Wrap Five Eggs, a mid-60s classic of Japanese design, is back in print. Assembled by graphic designer Hikeyuki Oka in 1965, this stunningly laid-out paean to traditional Japanese packaging is rife with sumptuous black and white photos by Michikazu Sakai of all manner of boxes, wrappers and containers that appear at once homely and sophisticated, ingeniously utilitarian yet fine and rare.
- dwell

“what we have lost for sure is what this book is all about: a once-common sense of fitness in the relationships between hand, material, use and shape, and above all, a sense of delight in the look and fell of very ordinary, humble things.”
- George Nelson

How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging, Edited by Hikeyuki Oka.
Buy it here: Amazon
via: dwell

Books: 3deluxe Design Collective

Expansive projects accomplished by the interdisciplinary design collective 3deluxe over the last five years. Their skillful interplay graphics, interiors and architecture to create powerful spatial situations and graphics that combines a sensitive intellectual and sensual balance. The multi-media theme world Cyberhelvetia, the interior and corporate design for the CocoonClub in Frankfurt, events and exhibitions for the 2006 FIFA World Cup as well as the corporate architecture for Leonardo are only but a few of the multitude of projects featured in this luxurious volume.

3deluxe, Transdisciplinary approaches to design, by Frame Publishers.
Buy it here: Amazon

Books: New York—The Magnum Edition

Magnum will launch a towering book: New York—The Magnum Edition, on november 5th with an event at the National Arts Club in New York City.
Published by Gloria, this giant of a book, weighing in at 12Kg is book as architecture: it comes with its own base and skeletal frame. 1500 images, 756 pages, and features the most iconic images of New York by some of the most respected photographers of our times - including 28 Magnum photographers. The editon includes a silver gelatin print by Leonard Freed (estate stamped). There are only 25 of prints available worldwide.

New York contains thirty three chapters covering every aspect of the New York story, including history, architecture, design, art, fashion, music, film, television, dance, sport and 9/11.
28 Magnum photographers have work featured in the book. Some of the photographers featured in this book include Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, David Bailey, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Patrick Demarchelier, Elliott Erwitt, Philippe Halsman, Evelyn Hofer, Annie Leibovitz, Steve McCurry, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, Jacob Riis, Jerry Schatzberg, Edward Steichen, Dennis Stock and Weegee among others.
Chapters have been written by the cream of New York literary talent including Ric Burns, Anthony DeCurtis, Don DeLillo, Paul Goldberger, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Michael Kantor, David Remnick, James Sanders, Gay Talese, John Updike, EB White, Colson Whitehead and Tom Wolfe.

New York—The Magnum Edition, $4000, Limited Edition of 25, Published by Gloria, for Magnum

Books: House of Concepts: Design Academy Eindhoven

House of Concepts presents the legendary Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands’ leading institution for developing design talent that has produced a veritable who’s who of the country’s creative scene. The book not only features the school’s graduates and their work, but also gives insight into the conceptual design for which the Netherlands is famous. The exciting visual content is complemented by extensive interviews with renowned alumni such as Jurgen Bey, Richard Hutten, Joris Laarman and Judith de Grauw as well as Jeroen and Joep Verhoeven.

House of Concepts: Design Academy Eindhoven, Edited by Louise Schouwenberg, Gert Staal, Joost Grootens
Buy it here: Amazon

Books: Andreas Gefeller: SOMA

In his disconcerting photographs, the Düsseldorf-based artist Andreas Gefeller has turned holiday sites on Gran Canaria into bleak Utopian backdrops. Although taken in a conventional, analogue way, the pictures look as if they have been digitally altered. In an age of cyberspace where virtuality and reality permeate each other, this work raises a number of questions: How real is reality and how true are its representations?

Andreas Gefeller: SOMA
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Books: Typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher

As both artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are among the most important figures in postwar German photography. For the last thirty years, the artists have examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers’ houses. Photographing against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, the Bechers treat these forgotten structures as the exotic specimens of a long-dead species. Best known for their “typologies”— grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure.

Typologies of Industrial Buildings, by Bernd and Hilla Becher
Buy it here: Amazon

Books: Walter Gropius

Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.

Walter Gropius, 1883-1969: The Promoter of a New Form, Edited by Peter Gössel.
Buy it here: Amazon

Books: Andrew Zuckerman: Creature

Andrew Zuckerman writes in his second book Creature, published by Chronicle Books “…when a subject is stripped from its context, its behavior, rather than its purpose, is all that remains.”
For the last five years, Zuckerman has been photographing a variety of creatures such as beetles, goldfish, doves, and elephants in a seamless, shadowless void. The photographs give no clue to habitat, habits, or even size: The animals Zuckerman portrays are pure form and presence, both exemplars and unique individuals. But unlike museum exhibits, these creatures are in motion. With the same high-speed technology he uses to capture a splash of liquid, Zuckerman freezes an instant in each animal’s life. The result is a portrait of motion without a trace of movement—no blur, no ambiguity.

Andrew Zuckerman: Creature, Buy it here: Amazon