As sustainability becomes a greater concern across all fields, advances in materials technology and design mean aesthetics are no longer sacrificed for a reduced carbon footprint. Just in time for Earth Day, “Prefabulous World”…
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According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, an estimated 14.3 million tons of textiles waste were generated in 2012—that’s not necessarily something you think about when trying to wiggle into a pair of jeans in the fitting room. There have been great creative…
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Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with publishers MIT Press to offer readers the chance to win one of five copies of a new book about developments in synthetic biology.
Synthetic Aesthetics explains the emerging discipline of synthetic biology, which looks at adapting natural organisms and processes to create new products, materials and even lifeforms.
The first few chapters introduce the science, followed by examples of collaborative projects between artists, designers and biologists – a mix of speculative ideas and realised creations.
These include a proposal by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg to develop bacteria to excrete brightly coloured pigments that colour your poo when they detect disease inside your body, and samples of human cheese created by Christina Agapakis and Sissel Tolaas.
Synthetic Aesthetics is written by experts in the field: Ginsberg, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick and Drew Endy.
Published by MIT Press, the book will launch on 25 April to coincide with an evening programme of talks, installations and workshops at London’s V&A museum, from 6:30-10pm – more details here.
Competition closes 19 May 2014. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
The post Competition: five Synthetic Aesthetics
books to be won appeared first on Dezeen.
Once synonymous with New York, family-run pizza shops are an endangered species these days as more and more owners are force to shutter their stores to make room for the city’s ubiquitous (and stomach-turning) dollar-a-slice chains. In an effort to preserve and…
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Competition: Dezeen has partnered with publisher Particular Books to give away three copies of B is for Bauhaus – a “personal dictionary of design” by Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum.
Covering subjects that range from authenticity to Grand Theft Auto, Jorn Utzon, Dieter Rams and Postmodernism, B is for Bauhaus is described as Deyan Sudjic’s “essential tool kit for understanding the modern world”.
The book offers a highly individual take on various elements of modern culture from Sudjic, who has been the director of London’s Design Museum since 2006.
His career has included stints as a critic for the Observer and the Sunday Times, a period as editor of Domus, and curatorships in Glasgow, Istanbul and Copenhagen. He was one of the co-founder of Blueprint magazine in the 1980s and directed the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002.
B is for Bauhaus draws on all of this experience to create an “a highly eclectic, intensely personal dictionary of design”, said Particular Books.
Published this spring, the 480-page hardback book is “about what makes a Warhol a genuine fake; the creation of national identities; the mania to collect,” said the publisher.
“It’s also about the world seen from the rear-view mirror of Grand Theft Auto V; digital ornament and why we value imperfection. It’s about drinking a bruisingly dry martini in Adolf Loo’s American Bar in Vienna, and about Hitchcock’s film sets,” the publisher added.
Competition closes 15 May 2014. Three winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
The post Competition: three “design dictionaries”
by Deyan Sudjic to be won appeared first on Dezeen.
Iain Sinclair, American Smoke. Cover by Nathan Burton
Penguin Books has launched a partnership with WeTransfer where selected book covers for new titles will be showcased via the full screen backgrounds to the file transfer website…
The first series to be shown via the website is for the publisher’s Street Art Series of novels which feature covers by artists: ROA, gray318, Nathan Burton, Sickboy and 45rpm. The series actually launched last year – details on the ten participating artists are here – but today’s launch will pilot what looks to be an ongoing collaboration between the publisher and WeTransfer.
Zadie Smith, Embassy of Cambodia. Cover by gray318
For the Street Art series the covers are photographed as still lives, surrounded by objects which reflect the subject of the books. If users click on the image they are taken to Penguin’s online store.
While the project isn’t launching with an entire set of brand new cover designs (three from this series were released in June last year), the tie-up is an interesting way of promoting forthcoming editions. WeTransfer has 20m monthly users so the cover artwork – and the book, of course – has the potential to reach a wide audience. The next series of covers will be premiered on WeTransfer later this summer.
Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel. Cover by ROA
Zoë Heller, The Believers. Cover by Sickboy
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End. Cover by 45RPM
WeTransfer have also recently collaborated with the British Fashion Council, designer Nelly Ben and Where’s Wally.
The minimalist cover of Yale University Press’ new catalogue for artist Carl Andre uses a version of one of his text-based artworks from the 1960s to introduce the larger body of work inside…
Designed by Purtill Family Business, Sculpture as Place – 1958-2010, accompanies the first retrospective Andre has had since 1970 which opens at the Dia Art Foundation in May.
On the cover, the words that appear in the five line Preface to My Work Itself (1963) are simply arranged by length – from “in” to “interchangable” – and offer a playful way into Andre’s work.
The piece itself treats the words as objects of different sizes and – as a cover device – lets the reader arrange them into statements which may, or may not, be relevant to his wider body of work in abstract sculpture.
So “my art is made of the same stacked broken pieces; the work piled, interchangable” could be one way of ordering half of the words, for example.
It’s an interesting way of getting the reader to categorise Andre’s work – much of it having garnered its fair share of both positive and negative reaction over the fifty years he has been working (the controversy generated by The Sunday Times over the Tate’s acquisition of Andre’s firebrick piece, Equivalent VIII, in the 1970s being an infamous case in point).
In addition to ten essays, the book includes images of many of Andre’s sculptural pieces made from materials such as timber planks, concrete blocks and plates of metal, alongside concrete poetry, postcards, letters and documents relating to the installation of many of the artworks.
Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond is published by Yale University Press; £45. See yalebooks.co.uk. Details on the Dia Art Foundation exhibition in New York are here.
With the Tour de France starting in July, Yellow Jersey Press has reissued five classic cycling books with covers referencing some of the most famous colours in the sport…
Designed in-house by Matt Broughton, the series includes broadcaster Ned Boulting’s tale of becoming obsessed by Le Tour, How I Won the Yellow Jumper, and the first British winner Bradley Wiggins’ autobiography, My Time.
Three of the covers reference the colourways of the jerseys awarded to Le Tour cyclists – hence the yellow (worn by the overall time leader) on the aforementioned titles, the bright green of the jersey awarded to the winner of the points competition, and the red and white Maillot à Pois pattern for the ‘King of the Mountains’ – the rider who tops the climbing classification – on Richard Moore’s Slaying the Badger (the ‘Badger’ in question being French cyclist, Bernard Hinault).
The five stripes of the world champion jersey appear on William Fotheringham’s Put Me Back on My Bike, while writer Tim Moore’s retracing of the Tour de France route, French Revolutions, gets a tricolore treatment, complete with up-ended type evocative of the challenge he took on.
All the titles in the series are republished by Yellow Jersey Press (Vintage). More at vintage-books.co.uk.
Data is a powerful tool. Whether it’s used for education, research, policies or everyday decision-making, numbers hold power—and often a simple value doesn’t best convey their meaning. Portuguese-born and NYC-based designer, researcher and author Manuel…
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by Hugh Hart Joseph Ari Aloi graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 armed with dozens of sketchbooks, self-described ADD, a set of tattoo implements and a headful of eye-popping mythologies inspired variously by Star…
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