Fait de 3500 livres d’occasion, le Numa Bookface prend forme à l’Institut de Design Ikejiri de Tokyo. Pensée par l’éditeur Numa, cette installation permet de questionner la place du livre et de l’éditeur aujourd’hui. Une création inattendue à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
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A rare book of the pioneering pop artist’s legendary photo strips
When Harper’s Bazaar commissioned Andy Warhol to do a layout for a feature on the arts in 1963, the artist turned to photobooths. The project launched a three-year obsession with the machines, resulting in images of himself, people he knew and famous faces of the era, as well as one of Warhol’s first commissioned portraits. Still the most cohesive reference on this period, “Andy Warhol Photobooth Pictures” was published in 1989 by the Robert Miller Gallery of New York to accompany an exhibition of the photo strips.
We recently rediscovered the rare book, a tall octavo that’s the perfect format for showing the long photographic images—various known members of The Factory, as well as many unidentified faces—against clean white backgrounds. The gallery-like design puts the focus on the subjects. Legends like Edie Sedgewick positioned smack in the middle of the page highlight Warhol’s own fascination with these personalities, as well as the Muybridge-like effect of his medium. Rounding out the iconic images with memories of Warhol, his reign as pop art’s king and personal experiences, American artist Gary Indiana leads an oral history through conversation with Tina Lyons and David Rimanelli.
For fans of Warhol, photography and pop art, this engrossing first edition sells from Amazon as well as Peter Harrington.
Musician Moby‘s first book of photography, Destroyed, was released at the end of May, accompanying the launch of his latest album of the same name. Upon its launch, the British Journal of Photography‘s Olivier Laurent sat down with Moby to discuss his work, the new book and photobooks in general. Here’s the first video, with the second part (the portion about the business and purpose of photobooks) after the jump:
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Competition: we have teamed up with Rafael Viñoly Architects to give away five copies of their new monograph, written by Rafael Viñoly and critic Philip Jodidio.
Carrasco International Airport , Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo copyright Daniela Mac Adden.
The hardcover book contains photographs, sketches and renderings from Viñoly’s earliest projects to the firm’s most recent work.
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Boston, USA. Photo copyright Brad Feinknopf.
Read all our stories about Rafael Viñoly Architects on Dezeen »
Tokyo International Forum. Tokyo, Japan. Photo copyright Kawasumi Architectural Photography.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Rafael Viñoly Architects” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.
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Center for Science and Computation, Bard College, New York, USA. Photo copyright Brad Feinknopf.
Competition closes 12 July 2011. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
The following is from the press release:
Rafael Viñoly Architects
By Rafael Viñoly and Philip Jodidio
Publication Date: May 2011
The definitive monograph highlighting the global works of this leading contemporary architect.
For nearly half a century Rafael Viñoly has been driven by the belief that the responsibility of architecture is to elevate the public realm. While his early work in Argentina transformed the landscape of the country, his first major international projects – the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the International Forum in Tokyo – established Viñoly as a global presence in architecture, whose buildings sustain a structural originality that transcends passing fads. This monograph features a chronological sampling of Viñoly’s best work in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The large and small-scale projects encompass courthouses, private residences, athletic facilities, performing arts centres, museums and educational buildings. Illustrated with photographs, plans and drawings, and accented by Viñoly’s personal reflection on his career, this volume brings together the achievements of one of today’s most internationally acclaimed architects.
The Author
Rafael Viñoly was born in Uruguay and by the age of twenty was founding partner of Estudio de Arquitectura, which would become one of the largest design studios in Latin America. In 1983 he founded Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, a New York based firm that now has offices in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Abu Dhabi. Philip Jodidio has published numerous books on contemporary architecture, including Architecture: Art and Architecture: Nature (both by Prestel). He lives in Grimentz, Switzerland.
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(in association with amazon.co.uk)
A fantastical mobile library with a conceptual twist
No offense to bookmobiles, but Numabookface—part installation, part bookstore—ups the ante on mobile libraries. A collaboration between design collective Nam and specialty publisher Numabooks, the whimsical pop-up shop launched earlier this year as part of Nam’s “A Fantasy in Life” solo exhibition at Public/Image 3D in Toyko.
Made of 3,500 used books that fall under the keyword “fantasy,” the face-shaped bookshelf took one day to build. “We’d love to make this small, fantastic shop like a touring project, visiting various places and being observed as a graphic artwork as well as considered as a place to meet unexpected books,” says Takayuki Nakazawa, co-founder of Nam. “This is a little presentation against the severe situation the publishing business is facing.”
The artfully-arranged stacks are not intended for browsing and page-flipping, but none of that’s necessary. In a surprise for readers, Shintaro Uchinuma of Numabooks choses titles for each individual customer based on how he or she answers the question, “Please tell me about yourself.” Available in sets of five for ¥1,800 ($22) or 50 for ¥9,800 ($122), purchases will be delivered after the installation’s run. “I love this rather surrealistic method of selling, as this seems to provide the customer with a chance to meet with new books that they cannot imagine,” says Nakazawa.
Numabookface is open through 31 July 2011 at the Ikejiri Institute of Design in Toyko (closed on Mondays).
Screening at the Open City festival in London this Friday is last year’s film about the German printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl and his intimate work with some of the best photographers in the world…
Gerhard Steidl is a fascinating character and a formidable businessman as printer, publisher and founder of Steidl in Germany. His love of the physicality of books saturates Gereon Wetzel and Joerg Adolph’s 2010 film (the trailer is here), but this doesn’t obscure his interest in where digital technology has taken photography.
Joel Sternfeld’s iDubai book, for example, is a series of iPhone photos of the city (spread shown, above) and it’s the production of this title that we see most of in How To Make A Book With Steidl, following its gestation from initial artwork meetings to the final, brilliantly garish binding.
The rest of the supporting cast aren’t bad either: Martin Parr, Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha (his handsome take on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road shown, below), Khalid Al-Thani, Robert Adams and Jeff Wall are all filmed in discussion with Steidl. Interestingly, we also see his work with author, Günter Grass, on a new edition of The Tin Drum.
What is evident throughout is Steidl’s restless drive to produce the best book he possibly can with each photographer; be it in deciding on the tackiest type of leather for the cover of Sternfeld’s iDubai, or which colours from the Qatari desert best suit the spines of Al-Thani’s ten volume paen to the landscape of his country.
Meeting up with Robert Adams at his home in Astoria, Oregon, Adam’s recalls a line by the critic John Szarkowski, where he compared photography to playing billiards: it’s what bounces off the edges that’s important, how it all interacts.
The image is resonant of Steidl himself, who can spend three or four days on the road, travelling back and forth to various meetings, which then generates many months of work back at the studio in Göttingen. Just how much he moves across the globe is hinted at in shots of his five iPods lined up on various airline’s fold-up trays.
How to Make a Book with Steidl, directed by Gereon Wetzel and Joerg Adolph (2010, Germany) will be screened at Open City, Malet Place in Bloomsbury, London at 1.30pm on June 17 (Screen 3; 88′). It is also showing with Doyald Young: Logotype Designer (see details below). Tickets are £5 and available to book here.
Other highlights of the festival include (texts are taken from the programme):
Steel Homes, Eva Weber, 2008, UK
8pm, June 16, Screen 1 (9’50”)
Self-storage units are windows into human histories: the silent cells with their discarded objects and dust-covered furniture are inscribed with past dreams, secret hopes and lives we cannot let go of. A poetic portrait of life at a self storage warehouse, Steel Homes explores the fragmented nature of memories, set in the starkly beautiful aesthetic of our modern industrial world. Showing as part of a UK Shorts Programme.
Utopia London, Tom Cordell, 2010, UK
5.30pm, June 17, Screen 1 (82′)
Today, London’s architectural icons are banks and office blocks that radiate their wealth. But there was once a group of idealistic architects who wanted to shape an egalitarian society through a concrete utopia. Now many of their buildings are being left to decay or are slated for demolition, but they remain extraordinary testaments to an attempt to an idealistic if controversial attempt to change the way people lived in our city.
Doyald Young: Logotype Designer, Scott Erickson, 2010, US
1.30pm, June 17, Screen 3 (41′). UK premiere
From humble beginnings in a small Texas town eight decades ago came legendary typographer, logotype designer, author and teacher Doyald Young. As elegant as his script fonts and as wise as his set of Oxford English dictionaries, Young sets the standard for his craft. He recalls the hundreds of iterations he went through in creating the logo for Prudential, and he puts pencil to tissue creating the pages for his next book about script lettering, Learning Curves. Young’s story is compelling, captivating, and most of all, inspiring. (Screening with How To Make A Book With Steidl.)
The full Open City programme is here.
Its silver vault doors sport an embossed image of two moons setting over the rounded edge of a nearby planet and two hands clutching a lightsabre… Press the button on the bottom and, in a wash of blue light and sound effects, the doors slowly open and the book within rises on a platform. Yes, folks it’s the packaging for The Jedi Path, a limited edition book, created collaboratively by print production company Imago, publisher becker&mayer! and, of course, Lucasfilm.
“The biggest challenge for us was that George Lucas (no relation to CR’s Gavin) did not want the opening mechanism to be activated electronically,” explains John Hine at Imago. “The only electronics present are to power the blue lights on the book platform and the sound effects that are generated on opening,” he adds. “The internal mechanism operates entirely through springs and levers – the challenge being, to get a smooth action, with both left and right drawers consistently opening in unison and at such a speed to be fully opened before the book is revealed on its raised platform. This fine tuning took many rounds and tweaks to the engineering, before the required brief was realised & satisfied. Further use of Imago’s creative experience was to produce the metallic look of the injection moulded vault and the authentic, time worn manual contained within.”
The book itself is no simple production. The very premise for the book is explained on the belly band that wraps the vault when you buy it: “This venerable text. crafted by the ancient Jedi Masters, has educated and enlightened generations of Jedi. Through wars and rebellion, a single copy has survived, annotated by those who have held it, studied it, and lived its secrets. It is now passed on to you.”
It sports an embossed, pseudo leather cover that’s soft to the touch, there are hand torn pages and no fewer than eight removable “artifacts” within the pages that include a coin-like charm, a material patch and even a drink-stained napkin. The printed text is also “annotated” with handwritten notes by the book’s supposed previous owners, each of whom thankfully happens to have their own distinctive handwriting. Here are a few shots of the book…
The book has been available in the US for a few months, but we’re told the publishers are finally allowed to talk about it to press in the UK.
Above, the vault complete with belly band, as packaged. As you might expect from a Lucasfilm production, the book has an “official trailer”…
And also check out this excited appraisal of the book by a Star Wars fan:
COMPETITION GIVE AWAY! Print production company Imago has very kindly offered us a brand spanking new boxed copy of The Jedi Path to give away to one of our readers. To win, simply tell us your favourite quote from any one of the six Star Wars films in the comments below. We will pick one we feel is the most worthy of a true Jedi THIS FRIDAY JUNE 17 and reward whoever submitted it with the prize. Wisely must you choose…
Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading Creative Review in print, you’re missing out.
The June issue of CR features a major retrospective on BBH and a profile piece on the agency’s founder, Sir John Hegarty. Plus, we have a beautiful photographic project from Jenny van Sommers, a discussion on how illustrators can maintain a long-term career, all the usual discussion and debate in Crit plus our Graduate Guide packed with advice for this year’s college leavers.
If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30%.
A new book delves into the future of urban development through three of the world’s fastest growing cities
Among all the chatter about the future of urban development, “Living in the Endless City” stands out as a refreshing voice with its collection of clear-eyed info designed to help grapple with the some of the big questions facing today’s cities. Culled from the London School of Economics’ “Urban Age” conferences, the massive book may seem like a daunting academic read meant only for architects and city planners, but extraordinary photographs and comprehensive infographics make for a thoroughly engrossing book picking up where the ideas in “The Endless City“—which examined NYC, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin—left off. “Living,” edited by the same team of London Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic and London School of Economics professor Ricky Burdett, continues with an in-depth look at the world’s three most rapidly expanding cities (Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul), using them as examples for a deeper discussion about urban sprawl and the value of the city in its potential to shape our culture and way of life.
The weighty book is filled with astonishing statistics, like that only 2% of the Earth’s surface is covered by cities but 53% of the world’s population currently occupies those areas (a number that will grow to 75% by 2050). Thoughtful essays on transportation, emergency aid and grave economic shifts detail how to prepare for these numbers.
A rational look at urban dwelling in the twenty-first century, the book is a gainful read for anyone interested in how the increasingly global world will fare during such rapidly developing times. “Living In The Endless City” sells from Phaidon and Amazon.
All images courtesy of Phaidon
Artist Jake Tilson’s latest book In at the Deep End, Cooking Fish, Venice to Tokyo, is out in September. And he’s promoting it with this rather lovely pack of food-related goodies
Jake Tilson has always been one of the more original voices in graphic design, his playful, multilayered work defying both convention and easy description. In recent years much of his work has centred around food – many readers will no doubt have seen A Tale of 12 Kitchens, his part travelogue, part recipe book.
His new book deals with a lifelong squeamishness about eating fish. To get over it, Tilson sent himself on “a quest to buy, prepare and cook fish and seafood” around the world. As with 12 Kitchens Tilson has created everything in the book himself, including four new food-inspired typefaces which are revealed on a series of cards in the pack.
Also in the book is a magic fortune-telling fish that can advise the user on how to cook their fishy dinner – a moving head means you should steam it, if it curls up entirely, it’s time to fire up the barbecue
Plus there’s a little bottle of beautifully packaged soy sauce
and some rather nice piscine postcards
and a pack of Jake Tilson Trading Cards
all of which, as well as being a very pleasant thing to receive in the post, hint at the incredible invention and level of detail to be found in the finished book which is published by Quadrille in September.
After the great Home Depot hoax debacle from earlier this year, wherein we’re still removing the egg from our face and our cheeks are still slightly red, we’ve decided to approach this post very carefully. ZDNet‘s blog SEO Whistleblower blog has claimed that they’ve received a copy of the internal guide Apple passes out to its designers to promote healthy living. Included is everything from how to properly sit while working at your desk, how to exercise efficiently, and so on. All these instructions come packaged together in a very Apple-looking box designed by Carl Jeffers (you can see much more of it on his personal site as well). Being as we’re already models of health, we haven’t read through all of the many scanned pages the site has posted, but even if it is just a scam or simply a design mock-up to help show off in a portfolio, it’s nice to look at and seems to have some useful advice. And hey, fake or not, we’ve seen our fair share of designers who could do worse than heeding some of the advice therein.
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