March 1, 2011
Bookshelf
Notable new releases on contemporary architecture, design, and culture.
The Structure of Light:
Richard Kelly and
the Illumination of
Modern Architecture
EDITED BY Dietrich Nuamann
DESIGNED BY Jena Sher
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 214 pp., $42
Even architecture enthusiasts sometimes overlook one crucial aspect of any building: lighting. Advancements in electric illumination and the postwar economic boom combined to create a prestigious career for Richard Kelly, an early pioneer in lighting design. Integrating lighting from the very beginning of a project, Kelly experimented with the way it could affect not only interiors but how a building is viewed from the exterior. Working with Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, and Mies, among others, Kelly created works of remarkable vision and feats of lighting ingenuity—unsung until now. —K.Y.
The New Modern House
WRITTEN BY Jonathan Bell and Elle Stathaki
DESIGNED BY Sarah Douglas and Lee Belcher
LAURENCE KING PUBLISHING, 240 pp., $50
Using 50 case studies, Bell and Stathaki look at new forms of and approaches to contemporary residential design. The authors assess how an emerging “anti” aesthetic has created a new brand of straightforward, sustainable, and functional modernism. The book includes images of models, sketches, and diagrams that give the reader insight into the design process. The idea of “redefining functionalism,” the subtitle of
the book, refers to a mind-set. It describes the way in which
these homes are united by the age-old sensibility of form fol-lowing function, and in doing so it tells the story of an evolving modernism. —I.H.
Hella Jongerius—Misfit
EDITED BY Louise Schouwenberg
DESIGNED BY Irma Boom and Sanne van de Goor
PHAIDON PRESS, 308 pp., $49.95
This exhibition catalog of a show mounted earlier this year at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, collects the entire output to date of one of the most innovative product designers of our time. Jongerius’s work—textural, organic, and beautiful in its imperfection—is organized by color rather than product. In that unusual presentation, alongside illuminating conversations between the designer and the author, a real sense of Jongerius’s aesthetic emerges, one that ties industrial manufacturing to craftsmanship. —I.H.
Clip Stamp Fold: The Radical
Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X
EDITED BY Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley
IMAGES EDITED BY Urtzi Grau
ACTAR, 672 pp., $54.95
From the start, Clip Stamp Fold promises big things. Actually, what it promises is: “This book has it all.” If that means architecture zines from the 1960s and ’70s, it delivers. Unlike their widely circulated, ad-dependent counterparts, the little magazines pushed the limits of design and covered the more radical practitioners of the time. In more than 600 pages, Clip Stamp Fold relates the history and importance of these publications with interviews, discussions, pictures, and complete reproductions of many of the zines themselves. —K.Y.