Hasta La Ideas

The 30-year old Princeton Architectural Press has long been affiliated with the much larger Chronicle Books, who more than 15 years ago began acting as the Press’ distributor. Now they’re set to become even closer as Publishers Weekly reports that the McEvoy Group, who owns Chronicle, along with Spin magazine and publisher becker&meyer!, has purchased Princeton for an undisclosed sum. McEvoy told PW that is has no plans to alter anything within the publisher’s operations, and now-former owner Kevin Lippert will continue to run Princeton and Chronicle will keep their role in sales and distribution. “We believe taken together, Princeton and Chronicle will be the category leader in some key subject areas, “McEvoy Group president Jack Jensen told Publishers Weekly.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A retrospective book of Masamichi Katayama’s beautiful design “experiences”

From A.P.C.’s bungalow-style boutique in Tokyo to Hong Kong’s freezer-like Ice Cream store, Wonderwall, the interior design firm founded in 2000 by Masamichi Katayama, has made its name by creating a diverse range of spaces throughout Asia, the U.S. and Europe. A monograph of the studio’s work to date, Wonderwall Archives 01, is now available from Parco Publishing.

Containing some 50 examples of Wonderwall’s commercial projects, from Uniqlo shops in New York and Paris to Nike’s Harajuku, Tokyo outpost (check out our 2009 video on the project here), the volume showcases Katayama’s fresh take on contemporary architecture and design. The featured spaces represent his vision of places that foster an exchange between the consumer and their respective brands, based on his notion that such locations are “only complete with people and products inside.” With no set expectations on that which a final product should consist or a standard process for his design, Katayama takes each project individually, with “no rules that bind him.”

“Interior design,” Katayama says, “needs to be something that can be communicated without words.” As such, he bears responsibility for producing an experience—rather than just a physical atmosphere—in his designs, ranging from retail spaces to restaurants/bars to offices and building complexes. He finds inspiration in his own experience as a consumer, and tends to blend traditional and modern styles as well as luxury and “cheap chic.”

Wonderwall Archives 01, which includes descriptions of Katayama’s projects in both English and Japanese, is available now from Colette or in Japan from Wonderwall’s online store.

We’ve teamed up with Zaha Hadid Architects to offer our readers the chance to win one of five copies of The Autopoiesis of Architecture by Patrik Schumacher, a partner at the firm.

The first of two volumes, the 478 page book contains only 18 illustrations and offers a unified theory of architecture, suggesting a framework for the discipline’s next phase of development.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Autopoiesis of Architecture” 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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Competition closes 22 February. 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.

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Here are some more details from publishers Wiley:

The Autopoiesis of Architecture; Vol 1 A New Framework for Architecture
By Patrik Schumacher

In recent years, architectural theory has remained tentative and even sceptical. A bold new two-volume treatise by Patrik Schumacher, one of the leading international architects and architectural thinkers of our time is set to change all that. The first volume of The Autopoiesis of Architecture provides a wholly new approach and framework for thinking about architecture.

The impact of this is far reaching. Architecture is presented as having its own unique logic, asserting architecture’s role as a discipline and its place in contemporary society. On  Tuesday 7th December at the Architectural Association in London, Patrik Schumacher will launch the publication of The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 1: A New Framework for Architecture with a lecture outlining his new unified theoretical system for architecture.

He will describe how this wider structure accommodates further theories, such as that of architecture’s social function, a theory of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and media and process theory. Most significantly, architecture is conceived for the first time as a system of communication comprising artifacts, knowledges and practices.

What is Autopoiesis?

The ‘Autopoiesis’ of the title refers to self-production: the term having first been introduced in biology during the 1970s to describe the essential characteristic of life as a circular organization that reproduces all its specific components out of its own life-process. Once transposed into the theory of social systems, autopoiesis came to be understood as a system of communication capable of producing all its specific communication structures within their own internal process. It is this autopoietic system of communication that is applied by Schumacher to an architectural context.

About the author

Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects and founding director of the influential AADRL (Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory). He studied philosophy and architecture in Bonn, London and Stuttgart, and completed his PhD at the Institute for Cultural Science in Klagenfurt. His contribution to architectural theory is evident in his published writings collected at www.patrikschumacher.com

Paperback: 478 pages
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; Volume 1 edition (3 Dec 2010)
Language English
Product Dimensions: 22.2 x 17.2 x 3.2 cm

Publication details

The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume I: A New Framework for Architecture,
ISBN 9780470772980, Paperback Original £29.99 , is published by John Wiley & Sons in December 2010.

The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume II: A New Agenda, ISBN 9780470666166, paperback original £29.99, is published by John Wiley & Sons, autumn 2011.

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(in association with amazon.co.uk)

More than likely, judging from the fact that you’ve landed on this site, you like both designers and reading. So why not combine the two (well, more than reading great UnBeige content each and every day)? So has happened with the launch of the new collaborative project, Designers & Books. Founded and edited by Archetype‘s Steve Kroeter, along with Stephanie Salomon, and helped brought to life by a team of others, the site says it “is devoted to publishing lists of books that esteemed members of the design community identify as personally important, meaningful, and formative.” As of their launch this week, we’d say that they’re off to a pretty amazing start, collecting book picks from 50 of the top names in the business, including Robert Venturi, Elizabeth Diller, Peter Eisenman and Paula Scher (who was likely one of the easier gets, along with Michael Bierut, considering Pentagram handled the site’s design). While there are a small handful of essays available on the site, it’s largely lists of books and no more than that. What’s more, the books picked by these famous designers aren’t all design-related either. They’re just their favorites, or ones that influenced their work in some way. Though there is some sparse commentary about selections here and there, by and large, most participants haven’t added notes explaining their choices. And this won’t hinder your browsing in the least. If anything, it makes you feel a little more connected to these industry luminaries. “Hey, I’ve read that book and so has Norman Foster!” we thought to ourselves more than a couple of times while scanning his picks. It’s early days for Designers & Books, and we’re looking forward to watching it grow.

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Our interview with ink doyenne Marisa Kakoulas on her grayscale tattoo magnum opus

Originating on the streets and in prisons, tattooing’s shades-of-gray genre initially often told the stories of tribal affiliations and conquests or were homages to the deceased. Methods of inking spanned readily available tools and homemade machines could be as random as “a guitar string, cassette motor, Bic pen tube and India Ink,” explains Marisa Kakoulas, co-author of the heavyweight book on the subject “Black & Grey Tattoo“.

The three-volume tome explores how the artform evolved in technique, materials and popularity, as well as how scale and scrutiny increased with time. Released several months ago, the box-set took a year to put together, which Kakoulas says was mostly spent “researching artists and attending international tattoo conventions,” a process that was “exhausting but lots of fun.”

We asked Kakoulas—who also founded the tattoo blog Needles and Sins—to lend a little more insight into the style she describes as “art that has a buttery shading on the skin that can appear almost organic on the body.”

What schools of Black & Grey tattoo exist today?

There are various sub-genres of the Black & Grey style, and we rather unscientifically broke down the material we collected into three volumes: “Traditional Black & Grey,” “Dark/Horror” and “Realism.” It’s not a particularly easy division as there’s cross-pollination among them. The reason we divided it this way is to show how tattoos with similar stylistic elements are interpreted differently by artists around the world.

The first volume, “Traditional Black & Grey,” is somewhat of a misnomer as it’s simply called “Black & Grey” in the tattoo community. But now that greyscale tattooing has moved in different artistic directions, the “traditional” label is used to set it apart from its offshoots. It’s been referred to as “LA style” as many credit the city as the birthplace of the style as an art form. It’s other street name has been “fineline” or “single needle” because a sole ink-dipped tip is used to create anything from three small dots ([signifying] “Mi Vida Loca”) to full back pieces of religious iconography. And there is indeed a lot of Christian imagery among these tattoos. Jack Rudy is one of the godfathers of this style who, with his mentor Good Time Charlie, refined black and grey and brought it to a higher level of artistry.

“Dark/Horror” delves into personal demons relayed on skin. “Paul Booth“, the “Dark Lord of Tattooing,” is considered one of the great masters of this style. An interview with Paul is featured in this volume, and in it he discusses why people get these tattoos as well as how his own demons have driven his art. Other tattoos here pay homage to horror in pop culture—everything from Frankensteins to even famous tattoo artists (including Paul himself) rendered as zombies.

“Photorealism” encapsulates work that takes photorealistic art and translates it on the body. While the other volumes also feature realism, this chapter concentrates on portraiture, scenery, and even fantastical images rendered in true-to-life tableaux. This style of tattooing has really invigorated the tattoo community with the possibilities of mastering a difficult art on a difficult canvas.

What other projects are you working on?

My next project for Edition Reuss is another large-format hardcover on comic and cartoon tattoos, and the work we’re amassing now is wild. A lot of art that looks like it was ripped from a child’s nightmare, plus tons of sexy cheesecake illustrative work. Very trippy. That will be available Spring 2011.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to all the superb artists and collectors in these books. The work is part of a collective mission to present tattoo as a fine art, in the most artful way. I’d also like to say, on behalf of this tattoo collective that, “Yes, we have a good idea of what we’ll look like when we’re old and wrinkly—and we’re okay with that.”

Co-authored by Kakoulas and Edgar Hoill, “Black & Grey Tattoo” sells online from Edition Reuss either as individual volumes (€98 each) or as one massive collection for €248. In the U.S. the book is available directly from the author (contact marisa [at] needlesandsins [dot] com) for $350 including shipping.