With all the hoopla surrounding last year’s 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death and the opening of his landmark Guggenheim Museum, readers may have overlooked a spate of new monographs about the American master. Among the most noteworthy are the second and third volumes of Taschen’s exhaustive three-volume Complete Works, covering the periods 1917–1942 and 1943–59, respectively (Volume I, covering 1885–1916, is due out in August), and a trio of titles by Rizzoli—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, an elegant catalog of last year’s Guggenheim exhibition; Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years, which focuses on the years 1920–1932, a bleak but exceptionally creative period in Wright’s life; and Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, a handsome overview of his career, featuring hundreds of new photographs.

There is, of course, no dearth of books about Wright. Amazon lists no fewer than 2,376 titles. While these five volumes may not blaze any new trails, each of them is well organized and finely crafted, and together they provide a rich, multifaceted picture of one of the titans of American architecture. Regardless of how one views Wright’s work, anyone perusing these books cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary scope and astonishing abundance of his creative output. From his modest Usonian houses for the middle class to his grand estates for corporate titans; from his inspiring and innovative buildings for work, worship, and culture to his grandiose schemes to reinvent the modern city, Wright was constantly expanding and refining his architectural vocabulary. Read more…

For this year’s Metropolis booth, we’re hosting the last stop of Emily Pilloton’s Design Revolution Road Show, which has been traversing the country since February, bringing a selection of products that empower people to high school and university students (and Stephen Colbert). Earlier today we caught up with Emily in the vintage Airstream trailer that has served as her traveling exhibition space—and living quarters!—for the past three months. Click the play button to watch her final Road Show appearance.

Video shot and edited by Eve Dilworth; text by Mason Currey.

The Grid Book wants to show us that the history of building, composing, computing, mapping, lending, painting, printing, trading, and writing—the history of modern existence, in other words—is really a history of the grid.

This is ambitious. By a bit too much, as it turns out. The author, Hannah Higgins, isn’t quite able to map out all the facts she needs, nor always plot a convincing narrative course between the ones she does locate. The result is a breezy survey, accessibly written and sometimes provocative, but lacking the rigor and regularity of the grid itself.

Still, The Grid Book deserves attention for its glimpses into the secret life of this ever-present meme, which is central to the image of modern networked society. Going “off the grid,” after all, is an act of cultural as well as technological subversion. And aren’t all grids made to be broken?

Higgins defines the grid as “an organized set of modules that allow for manipulation and creativity.” Her first chapters, which postulate brick walls and tablet writing as proto-grids that have been with us for thousands of years, suggest that this modularity has an instinctual appeal to humans. City plans and map projections formalized the grid as a field of intersecting lines, which gave us the Mercator projection. This gridded worldview is everywhere—and The Grid Book is at its most intriguing uncovering some of the less obvious manifestations. Read more…

At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything exemplary in the layout of Willets Point, Queens, with its jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards, and the cars, broken down and not, that litter the spaces between buildings. The city hasn’t built sidewalks there—neither has it installed sewers—so the main drag is both street and sidewalk, and the neighborhood looks more like Mumbai than Queens. When Roberta Brandes Gratz makes that observation in her new book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, she means the comparison as a kind of praise, a compliment to the neighborhood’s industriousness and gritty entrepreneurship. Willets Point, like the infamous Dharavi slum outside Mumbai, might be messy, but it’s also, in the best sense of the word, urban.

The reference to Dharavi is a rare instance where Gratz’s focus leaves New York City, if only briefly. The Battle for Gotham, as its subtitle suggests, is a book about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs and their storied clashes, but it’s also about how those conflicts defined the city in the years following Moses’s retirement and Jacobs’s departure for Toronto, in 1968. And, threaded into that public history, it’s an account of Gratz’s own life in New York: as a child in the city and a teenager outside of it, and as a mother, reporter, and preservationist. Those experiences, informed by a friendship with Jacobs that began in the late 1970s and continued until her death in 2006, ultimately make Gratz’s perspective both reportorial and deeply personal. Rarely is her tone equivocal; Moses, who some revisionist histories have sought to partially vindicate, she calls “undemocratic, arrogant, ruthless and racist.” Read more…

The New York graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has crafted some of the most memorable book covers of the last decade: the sprinkle-dipped hand of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; the red-graffiti (or is it blood?) silhouette on Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; the gleefully macabre illustrations for all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels since 1999—including his newest, Tell All, to be released in May. Based on that list, you might assume that Corral specializes in depicting American male angst, which is not entirely accurate; his most recent designs include a box set of Akira Kurosawa films and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Influence (two projects that, one suspects, have very little else in common.) Earlier this year, I caught up with Corral to ask him about his working methods, the changing face of the design profession, and the differences between designing for Chuck Palahniuk and the Olsen twins.

First, some history: how did you get involved with design and eventually end up with a New York design studio?

I’ve always loved to draw, but it’s been my fascination with popular culture that led me into design. I realize pop culture isn’t so exceptional these days—it’s everywhere and it’s hard to be inspired by it—but while I was growing up, I was affected by TV shows, advertising, and the ideas behind them. Mostly, I was interested in the way visual communication could reach and affect people during the seventies and eighties. TV was different then, and even sitcoms were more meaningful than they seem to be today. They did not feel as safe or politically correct.

At the School of Visual Arts, I learned more about the theories and processes of conceptual design, and I was able to learn on the job afterward in book publishing.  Read more…

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…

Last week, General Motors’ design manager, Susan Skarsgard, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York on her book Where Today Meets Tomorrow, a monumental tome devoted to Eero Saarinen’s design of the GM Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan. Before her talk, Skarsgard was kind enough to give me a close-up tour of what is literally a one-of-a-kind book: Skarsgard personally put it together for the 50th anniversary of the Technical Center, in 2006, and there is only her one original copy. Which is a shame, because after spending an hour immersed in the scores of archival photos, plans, and other documents—not to mention pop-up models of interior spaces and a sumptuous fabric lining borrowed from the interior of a 1956 Cadillac—I almost felt like I had visited the iconic campus in person.  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…

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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.

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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.
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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.
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