If you’ve ever wished you could take a peek at some of your favorite designers’ off-the-cuff sketches and exploratory doodles, you’ll soon have your chance. At this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, the Italian National Trust and Moleskine will present an exhibition of 462 drawings by 150 international designers. Called The Hand of the Designer, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same title containing reproductions of the designers’ sketches; and, on May 13, the original drawings will be auctioned at Sotheby’s Milan. (All the proceeds from the book sales and the auction will go to the Trust—and, in particular, its maintenance activity for the Villa Necchi Campiglio.)

The doodling designers include the Bouroullec brothers, Michael Graves, Hella Jongerius, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun, and many others (a few of whom were also included in last year’s The Hand of the Architect.) Check out several examples after the jump. Read more…

Architecture-school crits are a famously bruising rite of passage for aspiring design professionals—unless, apparently, your professor is from the renowned Japanese firm SANAA. In the introduction to The SANAA Studios 2006–2008 (Lars Müller Publishers), the Dutch architect Florian Idenburg recalls a crit from his student days in Rotterdam, conducted by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima:

I remember Sejima sitting, quietly smoking, listening to an exhaustive argumentation to justify one of the less elegant proposals. After a long silence her response was liberating. Pointing first to a sketch and subsequently to a plan she spoke softly: “This … I like … this … I do not like.”

For Idenburg, steeped in the “paranoiac-critical method” of Rem Koolhaas, the directness, simplicity, and seeming intuitiveness of Sejima’s judgment came as a breath of fresh air. He ended up interning at SANAA’s Tokyo office and eventually became an associate at the firm. (He’s now a partner at SO-IL, in Brooklyn.) And, in 2006 and 2007, he helped bring the firm’s understated method to the United States, co-teaching the first two of its three spring studios at the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

But this slim volume—which Idenburg edited, and whose full title is The SANAA Studios 2006–2008: Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism—actually provides relatively few glimpses of Sejima and her partner, Ryue Nishizawa, in the classroom. Its focus is not so much what the Princeton students learned from SANAA, or how they learned it, as what the rest of us can learn from the firm’s work and Japanese architecture in general. Read more…

.

Last night, Project H Design founder and Design Revolution author Emily Pilloton appeared on the Colbert Report to talk about humanitarian design, the Spider Boot, Adaptive Eyecare, the “triple bottom line,” and more. Watch the complete interview above (or click here to see a larger-sized video).

Related: At the 2008 Metropolis conference at the ICFF, Pilloton spoke about social-minded product design. Click here to watch a video of her presentation.

.
Learning from Hangzhou
By Mathieu Borysevicz
Preface by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Timezone 8, 330 pp., $45

China is urbanizing at an astounding rate. Those of us who don’t live there might know this from statistics (like: the country consumes more than half the world’s concrete.) Borysevicz, an artist, writer, and filmmaker who splits his time between Shanghai and New York, knows from observation. He spent five years in the Chinese city Hangzhou, and here he collects thousands of color photographs from that tenure. Yet, for someone who communicates almost exclusively through pictures, Borysevicz seems relatively unconcerned with aesthetics—at least in the sense that many of his photos aren’t pretty or refined and, as presented in this book, are often cropped and jammed awkwardly on the page. But that may be the point. Hangzhou is one of many fast-developing cities in the Yangtze River Delta corridor; and as it accommodates an average of over 100,000 new residents per year, it’s facing the messy reality of ad-hoc urban growth. By refraining from aestheticizing that growth, and focusing instead on Hangzhou’s many recurring visual cues—highway billboards, graffiti, construction scaffolding—Borysevicz captures the essential, if sometimes unpleasant, markers of one burgeoning Chinese metropolis.
.

From Autos to Architecture: Fordism and Architectural Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century
By David Gartman
Princeton Architectural Press, 400 pp., $60

Gartman, an automobile enthusiast and a sociology professor at the University of South Alabama, marries those two disparate interests in From Autos to Architecture. The book  asks why the International Style developed where it did, in a post-war Europe whose manufacturing technology lagged far behind that of America and whose emphasis on traditional craft contrasted sharply with an American reverence of mass production. Not surprisingly, the key object in this history—and the product that most aptly symbolizes modernism and American culture in the middle of the last century—is the car. Gartman uses the aesthetics of “Fordism” and the evolving cultural reaction to that movement to explain why architects first embraced, and eventually rejected, automobile production as a philosophical and aesthetic exemplar.
Read more…

Who dares say what counts as “smart” when neighborhoods evolve? Look no further than the beige-and-black cover of The Smart Growth Manual. That’s the guide to repurposing American land use, not a guide.

Who could claim such authority? Look down the cover for the author credits: this is a volume “from the authors of Suburban Nation,” Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, whose indictment of sprawl in that book inspired legions of citizens to learn mind-numbing public review procedures in order to give their towns a center again. Now Duany and Speck (who is a Metropolis contributing editor) say that this book is a go-to resource for citizens who have enlisted in that fight, complete with rounded corners for easy thumbing. Actually, they say it’s the go-to resource. It situates places along a rural-urban continuum and lays out how people should plan, circulate, live, and work in those places for a healthier life and climate.

Unsurprisingly, the authors easily defend their claims. We caught up with them via conference call with Speck in Washington, D.C., and Duany in Miami. An uninhibited discussion, with stirrings of a sequel, followed.

Who’s the audience?

Andres Duany: This is a response to the empowerment of citizens in planning. The public process has become very broadly based—it’s expected now [that citizens will participate in charettes] and often the outcome is questionable. That has to do with expertise. So this manual is for elected officials and for citizens who participate in the [planning] process.

Jeff Speck: You can read it in the public hearing, while you’re waiting for your project to come up. Read more…

A bit belated, perhaps, but here it is: your guide to the gifts guaranteed to impress the design devotees and architecture aficionados in your life, organized into four convenient categories:

For Kids, or Kids at Heart
Workaholic Chic
Books (and One DVD)
For the Proverbial “Person Who Has It All”

.

For Kids, or Kids at Heart

Muji’s City Stencil Set lets youngsters construct their own elaborate cityscape with world monuments from New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. It’s $14.75 at the Muji USA online store. Pairs nicely with the appropriately named 36 Color Pencils in Tube ($16.75).
.

Technically, these Frank Lloyd Wright Lego sets are intended for children, but no doubt many architecture-minded adults would love nothing more than to spend a few hours putting together their own miniature Guggenheim ($39.99; ages 10+) or Fallingwater ($99.99; ages 16+). Note: these sets are currently on back order at Lego.com, but ShopWright.org has them in stock as of Dec. 8.

Read more…

This fall, Aperture has released three photography books that, each in its own way, talk about development, the environment, and the human relationship to the landscape. This last point in particular—the way the landscape is both affected and perceived by human beings—struck me as the connecting thread among three otherwise quite different books. While each body of work tells a different story, they all made me think about my own environment, both local and global.
.

In Sawdust Mountain, Eirik Johnson presents us with the familiar struggle between humans and the natural environment upon which they depend. His subject is the logging and salmon fishing industries of the Pacific Northwest, and the way these industries must adapt as the landscape changes. The photographs refer clearly to the history of landscape photography—calling to mind, particularly, early American photographs of the West by such greats as Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson. But Johnson does not herald triumph in his images; rather, his pictures are quiet—nearly silent, in fact—and his palette is dominated by the subdued, rain-washed blues and greens of the Pacific Northwest. Here, the sun never blinds us, but rather appears as through gauze. These muted hues complement the subject matter—the industries and the towns that serve them are in transition as the old-growth trees and wild salmon grow more and more scarce. Read more…

This is part one of our fall roundup of new and notable books on architecture, culture, and design. Stay tuned for the second installment later this month.
.

Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture
Edited and designed by Ian Luna and Lauren A. Gould
Cover design by Kenya Hara
Rizzoli, 232 pp., $65

Having outlined the architect’s key design principles in its introduction (an emphasis on humanitarian design “pressed into service”) Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture follows the relatively linear evolution of Ban’s constructions in paper, a building material that he has championed and a typology he’s developed over the past 20 years. Ban’s achievements are nothing short of remarkable—he builds cheaply and with minimal environmental impact, which, in particular, makes his architecture ideal for temporary relief structures. But it remains to be seen how structurally complex the buildings can get, since the largest and most sophisticated architecture in Shigeru Ban tends to be elaborately constructed roofs and open-air exhibition spaces. (By no means should that diminish the architect’s success to date.) Ban excels at exceeding expectations, and recent projects, like the unbuilt Georges Pompidou Centre in Metz, France, hint at interesting new possibilities for his paper creations.
.

Once Upon a Chair: Design Beyond the Icon
Edited by Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, Andrej Kupetz, and Shonquis Moreno
Designed by Floyd Schulze
Gestalten, 272 pp., $65

Once Upon a Chair: Design Beyond the Icon is not really about chairs, and only superficially about post-iconic design. Nor, as is implies in its introduction, does the book ever explain what’s so “progressive” or “responsible” (its words) about the work it showcases: pieces like the Rockin’ Chair, which comes equipped with built-in microphone and headphone jacks, or the PING-PONG Dining Table—whose name pretty much says it all. The chairs (and tables, stools, lamps, bookshelves, vases, kitchenware, and rugs) showcase the avant-garde in product design, and they’re often refreshingly whimsical and innovative in their use of material and technology. What they’re not—and this is a problem only because the book claims it as its guiding principle—is either socially impactful, or representative of identifiable trends in the world of furniture making. Read more…

Yesterday, I attended the New York launch of Emily Pilloton’s new book, Design Revolution (Metropolis Books). The party was hosted by Anne Kennedy, Peter Nadin, and Amy Novogratz, at Anne and Peter’s beautifully-restored Federal Style house in the West Village. A good cross section of the design world showed up for light conversation and drinks, including Core 77’s Allan Chochinov, architect Charles Renfro, graphic designers Stefan Sagmeister and Scott Stowell, architectural historians Gwendolyn Wright and Beatriz Colomina, deans Stan Allen, Bill Morrish, and Mark Wigley, and just about everybody from the Cooper Hewitt’s education department. Emily stood on the back porch to update the crowd on her latest venture, which will now include improving design education and building bus shelters in North Carolina. You can hear Emily speak at the Cooper Hewitt tomorrow night. In the meantime, here are some party photos from yesterday’s event.

Photos: Alex Galan
Left to right: Allison Walker, an Emily design fan, Stefan Sagmeister, and TED Prize director Amy Novogratz Read more…

Tim Brown admits things that many in his field won’t, including:

1. That designers often produce things that people don’t really need; and,
2. That laypeople can often design solutions to their problems better than the professionals.

Unusual thinking for a designer, yes, but Tim Brown doesn’t think like an ordinary designer. Read more…