His works—among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum—earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.

    It’s a birthday book! It was born from the simple idea that birthdays provide the perfect annual opportunity to preserve a sweet moment in time as your child changes from year to year. So it’s a multi-layered confection: annual touchstone, cherished ritual, and eternal keepsake. This journal provides fun, fast, and casual birthday activities for ages 1-18 as well as space to stick birthday photos and a random picture from each year, amusing and thought-provoking questions to ask your kid, and a time-capsule envelope for stashing away odds and ends (artwork, school papers, hand tracings, birthday cards, invitations, and other memorabilia).From toddler hood to young adulthood to every hood in between, you’ll return to the same four activities for each birthday. The questions prompts, and tone may shift each year, but the essence intentionally remains intact.

    Strong, clever, intelligent advice with soul.’Mary Portas‘A wonderful look at how to transform our homes to be more mindfully aligned with our true nature and a reflection of who we are.’Fearne Cotton‘A happy home is a fundamental building block of happiness, and Michelle’s book is an essential, step-by-step guide to creating a home we love.’Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global‘A must-have read for anyone looking to improve not just their home but also their quality of life within it.’Matthew Williamson Be happier, healthier and more empowered with Michelle Ogundehin’s step-by-step practical guide to creating a home that supports your well-being.Whether that home is owned or rented, small or large, and regardless of how much money you have, Happy Inside shows you how to harness its potential in pursuit of becoming your best self. If you want to feel calm, content, soothed or energized, you must begin with what surrounds you.This comprehensive guide covers everything from how to create more light and space to how to get a good night’s sleep; the path to a perfect sofa and why a dining table is your most vital piece of furniture. Plus, how to decorate to promote joy; the importance of play (and circular side tables); your definitive capsule kitchen kit; and why your hallway is where it all starts. Combining Michelle’s knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness, colour psychology and good design, Happy Inside is your one-stop guide to living well.Welcome to the healthy home revolution!

    Among significant mid-century interiors, none are more celebrated yet underpublished as the homes created by architects and interior designers for themselves. This collection of newly commissioned photographs presents the most compelling homes by influential mid-century designers, such as Russel Wright, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel, among others. Intimate as well as revelatory, Williamson’s photographs show these creative homes as they were lived in by their designers: Walter Gropius’s historic Bauhaus home in Massachusetts; Albert Frey’s floating modernist aerie on a Palm Springs rock outcropping; Wharton Esherick’s completely handmade Pennsylvania house, from the organic handcarved staircase to the iconic furniture. Personal and breathtaking by turn—these homes are exemplary studies of domestic modernism at its warmest and most creative.

     Out of nowhere, a brand like Red Bull, The Blair Witch Project, or even the Howard Dean campaign takes off with little or no conventional marketing. How do these “accidents” really happen, and why do they ultimately succeed or fail? Welcome to marketing without marketing: the emergence of the hijacked brand. Don’t let the all- too-clever subtitle fool you. Far from representing the absence of marketing, this book describes the most complex sort of marketing possible, as well as the least understood. Brand Hijack offers a practical how-to guide to marketing that finally engages the marketplace. It presents an alternative to conventional marketing wisdom, one that addresses such industry crises as media saturation, consumer evolution, and the erosion of image marketing. BACKCOVER: “Alex Wipperfürth comes from the same zone that trend-starters and iconoclasts come from: the (slightly lunatic) fringe.The ideas in Brand Hijack are stern stuff and not for the fainthearted. But they work, which is more than you can say for perhaps 90 percent of marketing communications.” —John Grant “Mr Wipperfu¨rth makes an intriguing case for abandoning traditional techniques.” —Stefan Stern, Financial Times “This is not your ordinary marketing manual. With casual humor and a laid-back tone, Wipperfürth . . . offers a glimpse into America’s consumer- and ad-driven culture.” —Publishers Weekly “Brand Hijack is a smart…argument for letting customers define a brand.” —Fast Company

    It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

    They are world-famous for their inimitable, democratic designs which bridge the gap between crafts and industrial production. The marriage of beautiful, organic forms with everyday functionality is one of the primary strengths of Scandinavian design and one of the reasons why Scandinavian creations are so cherished and sought after. This guide provides a detailed look at Scandinavian design from 1900 to the present day, with in-depth entries on featured designers and design-led companies, plus essays on the similarities and differences in approach between Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark.

    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

    Appropriated, chewed up, mulled over, digested, contemplated, and contorted - gathering up along the way fashion, ecology, politics, and art - architectural concepts become veritable things unto themselves in the present tense. As astoundingly diverse as contemporary architecture is, most importantly it is a reflection of what's happening right now all over the world, in people's minds and in the global collective consciousness. The many faces of world architecture today make for a mind-expanding book. Here you'll find the most recent work of over 60 architects and firms, including familiar names such as O. Gehry, Meier, Ando, Foster, and Starck, as well as a host of newcomers sure to be the architecture-celebrities of future generations. Highlights include Jakob & MacFarlane's morphological Restaurant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Diller & Scofidio's "Blur Building" proposal for the International Expo 2001 in Switzerland (an ovular structure suspended over a lake, encapsulated by a fine mist of water, creating the look of a cloud hovering over the lake), and Herzog & de Meuron's remarkable Tate Modern. Proving that contemporary architecture is not limited to physical building design, New York firm Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum is also included, a place where visitors can take a cyber-stroll through rooms that are designed to be "compelling spatial environments." Presented alphabetically by architect or firm, Architecture Now! can be used like a reference guide, with extensive photographs and illustrations, biographical and contact information for designers, and a careful selection of today's most influential architects.

    It also contains the easy to follow instructions on how to analyze and compute the structural design of critical building parts such as: reinforced concrete slabs, beams, columns and footings. There are also simple designs and floor plans for a variety of building types to be found in this book.BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION should be of interest to architects, engineers, contractors, developers and allied professionals who are engaged in building design, planning and construction. Students and graduates reviewing for the board examinations for architects and engineers would find in this book valuable practical knowledge to supplement the theories learned in their classrooms.Project owners studying this book would appreciate and get a clear understanding of how their envisioned pet project, which sprang only from a mere idea - is transformed slowly step-by-step - into concrete form.Explanations and instructions in BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION are conveyed in direct and simple language for easy understanding even by the layman. Plans and drawings are clearly presented, to be easily interpreted by construction workers.

    Longtime skateboard artist Sean Cliver put together this staggering survey of over 1,000 skateboard graphics from the last 30 years, creating an indispensable insiders' history as he did so.Alongside his own history, Sean has assembled a wealth of recollections and stories from prominent artists and skateboarders such as: Andy Howell, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Steve Caballero, and Tony Hawk.The end result is a fascinating historical account of art in the skateboard subculture, as told by those directly involved with shaping its legendary creative face.

    Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972. M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    Studioilse, the award-winning design studio founded by Ilse Crawford, bridges the worlds of interior design, architecture, and product design with the philosophy of putting the human being at the center. Fascinated by what drives us and makes us feel alive, Crawford says: "When I look at making spaces, I don’t just look at the visual. I’m much more interested in the sensory thing, in thinking about it from the human context, the primal perspective, the thing that touches you." Featuring Studioilse’s work to date, from private residences to hotels, restaurants, and retail projects, this book illustrates the effectiveness of design grounded in human needs and desires. Layering materials and textures, combined with her understanding of human behavior, Crawford’s designs are sensual and accessible. A forerunner of the holistic design movement a decade ago, her humanistic approach has now become the norm. This volume illustrates why Crawford’s design philosophy is so seminal—her work has influenced not only a generation of Dutch and European designers, but also Americans due to her acclaimed Soho House New York. With new photography and essays by Crawford and design critic Edwin Heatcote, this inspirational volume is sure to be one of the most important design books of the year.

    From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

    For seven years, Maeda and his students—several of whom are already internationally celebrated—have created some of the most digitally sophisticated and exciting pieces of design to emerge anywhere. Little of this research has been seen outside the laboratory.This book presents the most fascinating work produced by the group, arranged into themes that apply to today's design issues: information visualization, digital typography, abstraction, interaction design, and education. Each section also features brief essays by leading names in the field of interaction and digital design—Casey Reas, David Small, Yogo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, and Gillian Crampton-Smith.Deftly bridging the chasm between art and science, John Maeda, a true pioneer in the digital realm, leads the way to a greater understanding and richness of experience.