This stylish publication celebrates the impact of contemporary Nordic style on interiors, furnishings and product design. Its attractiveness lies in the simplicity, attention to detail and high quality of materials that have long been associated with Scandinavian design. This book features fifty notable interior and product designers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. Whether they are well established or up and coming, the designers all share a passionate commitment to an elegant design style with widespread international appeal. New Nordic Design builds on the success of the author's earlier Fashion Scandinavia, in the same format, while also being completely new with great potential to reach a wide, global audience for whom Scandinavian living is a dream and an aspiration.

Today, Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (1905-73) is known chiefly for his furniture designs. He is famous also for his erotic polaroid photography of the 1960s, which has been subject of many exhibitions and has lost nothing of its great appeal to the fashion world today. Much less attention has so far been given to Mollino's architecture, and a comprehensive critical study of his work in this field has been lacking. Yet his built work, although relatively small, constitutes a seminal contribution to modernism that is uniquely marked by a strong relationship with Surrealism. Based on years of research and drawing on rich archival material as well as on Mollino's own writings, this new book is the overdue tribute to an extraordinary personality in 20th-century architecture. It features an exemplary selection of his key designs, both built and unrealised, lavishly illustrated with images and reproductions of previously unpublished plans, drawings, and documents. Rounded out with scholarly essays by expert authors, this is a long-awaited addition to the library of architecture lovers, professionals, and scholars.

In 2019, the Vitra Design Museum will publish the Atlas of Furniture Design, the definitive, encyclopedic overview of the history of modern furniture design. Featuring over 1700 objects by more than 500 designers and 121 manufacturers, it includes approximately 2800 images ranging from detailed object photographs to historical images documenting interiors, patents, brochures, and related works of art and architecture. The basis for the Atlas of Furniture Design is the collection held by the Vitra Design Museum, one of the largest of its kind with more than 7000 works. The book presents selected pieces by the most important designers of the last 230 years and documents key periods in design history, including early nineteenth-century industrial furniture in bentwood and metal, Art Nouveau and Secessionist pieces and works by protagonists of classical modernism and postwar design, as well as postmodern and contemporary pieces. The Atlas of Furniture Design employed a team of more than 70 experts and features over 550 detailed texts about key objects. In-depth essays provide sociocultural and design-historical context to four historical epochs of furniture design and the pieces highlighted here, enriched by a detailed annex containing designer biographies, glossaries, and elaborate information graphics. The Atlas of Furniture Design is an indispensable resource for collectors, scholars and experts, as well as a beautifully designed object that speaks to design enthusiasts.

Moving Objects deals with emotive design: designed objects that demand to be engaged with rather than simply used. If postmodernism depended upon ironic distance, and Critical Design is all about questions, then emotive design runs hotter than this, confronting how designers are using feelings in what they make. Damon Taylor's original study considers these emotionally laden, highly authored works, often produced in limited editions and sold like art - objects such as a chair made from cuddly toys, a leather sofa that resembles a cow, and a jewellery box fashioned from human hair. Tracing the phenomenon back to the 'Dutch inflection' that began with Droog designers like Jurgen Bey and Hella Jongerius, Taylor conducts an analysis of the development of Design Art and looks for its origins in the uncanny explorations of surrealism. Offering a critique of Speculative Design, and an examination of the work of designers such as Mathias Bengtsson, whose work involves 'growing' furniture inside computers, Taylor asks what happens when the tangible melts into the datascape and design becomes a question of mobilities. In this way, Moving Objects examines contemporary issues of how we live with artefacts and what design can do.

Luke Hughes & Company's enduring and meticulously engineered furniture, an eloquent response both to the architecture it inhabits and to the true Arts and Crafts spirit, has been placed at the forefront of the 'craft-led renaissance in British manufacturing.' Flexible in use, commercially viable and environmentally sustainable, the work furnishes many of the world's most distinguished buildings, from Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and most of the Oxford and Cambridge University colleges to the Keystone Academy in Beijing and one of New York City's most vibrant synagogues. Through an introduction to the studio and 25 case studies, Furniture in Architecture explores the company's place in the Arts and Crafts tradition and examines the philosophy and work of founder Luke Hughes. Aidan Walker sheds light on how the studio balances modern manufacturing technologies with abiding craft values, rendering the small furniture workshop a relevant and profitable proposition even when fulfilling large-scale commissions. This fascinating survey defines the elements of successful design and addresses the meaning of craft and craftsmanship in the digital age.

Covering the period from the publication of Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers' Director (1754) to the Great Exhibition (1851), this book analyses the relationships between producer retailers and consumers of furniture and interior design, and explores what effect dialogues surrounding these transactions had on the standardisation of furniture production during this period. This was an era, before mass production, when domestic furniture was made both to order and from standard patterns and negotiations between producers and consumers formed a crucial part of the design and production process. This study narrows in on three main areas of this process: the role of pattern books and their readers; the construction of taste and style through negotiation; and daily interactions through showrooms and other services, to reveal the complexities of English material culture in a period of industrialisation.

By what means did so much beauty and ingenuity appears in articles of everyday rural life in Portugal? How did the shape of these objects balance necessity and formal perfection so skillfully? This book explores the effect that generations of trial and error, individual craftsmanship, and an instinct to carve out the essential with the slenderest of means brought to objects that made life both livable and meaningful to a pre-industrial society. The objects photographed and described by designer Jasper Morrison may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest.

Following the huge demand in contemporary societies to decorate homes in a "green" style, this book offers a more environmentally conscious approach to design and production processes by presenting a wide range of eco furniture products made with natural materials as well as using recycling and more environment respecting technologies. It presents the latest eco-furniture pieces from the world's leading design teams, and aims to encourage more people, especially professional designers to consider a more environmentally conscious approach to their design ideas and processes. * A showcase of the most striking examples of product design in furniture. * A response to an increasing demand concerned with home interiors. * An excellent and inspiring resource for designers and artists. * Few competitor titles in the market: most books are focused on architecture, this one offers an in-depth study of a quite new area of eco-product designing.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in 'design classics', both in their increased availability and affordability through re-issues, and in their widespread re-interpretation by contemporary designers and artists. Focusing on chairs, this book examines this significant aspect of contemporary design practice. It does so, not only in terms of works by well-known designers, but also relative to ubiquitous designs such as the monobloc, Thonet number 14, and Ming chairs. These varied examples of re-imagining and re-working are examined from an international perspective as designers and artists across the globe seek to bring new formal, material, and narrative interpretations to these iconic designs. Renewed interest in do-it-yourself, together with the growth of hacking, open-source design and digital fabrication, have all contributed to an expansion of the concepts of re-imagine and re-make in the new millennium. Embraced by professionals, amateurs and companies alike, these developments further attest to the diverse practice of re-interpretation in contemporary design. Bringing together key examples of the re-issuing, re-imagining and re-making of design icons, the book draws on observations from designers, artists and manufacturers in order to understand the varied motivations behind these activities. It places the works within their historical and cultural context, and considers the boundaries between art and design. Further, the book interrogates the issues of authenticity and authorship and the ethical and legal rights to copy and to alter iconic objects that are raised by these re-interpretations.

More than any other piece of furniture, the chair has been subjected to the wildest dreams of the designer. The particular curve of a backrest, or the twist of a leg, the angle of a seat or the color of the entire artifact; each element reflects the stylistic consciousness of an era. From Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto to Verner Panton and Eva Zeisel, from Art Nouveau to International Style, from Pop Art to Postmodernism, the history of the chair is so complex that it requires a comprehensive encyclopedic work to do it full justice. They are all here: Thonet's bentwood chairs and Hoffmann's sitting-machines, Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair and Ron Arad's avant-garde armchairs. Early designers and pioneers of the modern chair are presented alongside the most recent innovations in seating. This dedicated compendium displays each chair as pure form, along with biographical and historical information about the pieces and their designers. An illuminating tome for design aficionados and an essential reference for collectors! About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Maria Campos Carles de Pena, a leading expert in furniture history, has undertaken an exhaustive project of research into the large and varied production of furniture made in Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the colonial period - for churches, convents, monasteries and private collections. Over eleven chapters she provides a thorough description of this type of furniture, which was inspired by artistic styles ranging from Mannerism to Neoclassicism, with their many variants and creators. Her analysis allows for an appreciation of the way vice-regal furniture in Peru is a valuable witness to its time: an example of a syncretism of varied and different cultures, endowed with symbolism, iconographic meaning and enormous beauty."

Upholstered pieces of furniture are familiar to all of us as more or less constant companions of everyday life. Upholstery is comfortable, it conveys security and promises comfort, it has a specific design, asserts or creates status and tells a (hi)story. We rarely consider its interior. At the same time, a view into the hidden content of chairs and armchairs is a journey into secrets, into lashed and sprung constructions that prove to be unknown masterpieces of craftsmanship. Deep-Seated. The Secret Art of Upholstery explores furniture and its interiors and explains why upholstery is always also a part of cultural and social history. With contributions by Thomas Andersch, Maximilian Busch, Cordula Fink, Thomas Rudi, Stefanie Seeberg, Thomas Schriefers, Xenia Schurmann, and a foreword by Olaf Thormann. Text in English and German.

Peter and Gerard make clothes for ten years. Each season's outfits are inspired by the fantastic excesses of their muses: Artist Gertrude Stein's dinners, Tonya Harding's attack on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan, the request of Christina of Denmark to marry Henry VIII only when she'll have a head to spare, the freckled eternal teen face of Sissy Spacek (covered in pig blood in De Palma's Carrie or murderously innocent in Malick's Badlands), the delusional Shelley Duval, the Guardian-reader-type righteous Candice-Marie from Mike Leigh's Nuts in May etc. They are strong, they make mistake, they dress well. Also contains essays by Emily King and Susannah Frankel.

This book explores the history of the furniture manufacturer Harris Lebus from 1840 to 1970. Four generations of the Lebus family were engaged in the business which evolved from a family partnership into a public company. Oliver Lebus was chairman when the company ceased cabinet furniture manufacturing at Tottenham Hale in 1970. Using personal testimonies from those who were there, aspects of the story of 'the largest furniture factory' in the world are told through their eyes and using, in as far as possible, their own words. On a relatively, unremarkable North London Street, at Tottenham Hale, a set of railings stops short at a bricked wall on which a metal gatepost is affixed - this was the Ferry Lane entrance to Harris Lebus 'the largest furniture factory in the world'. Beyond the solitary post, a sloped, grass verge leads to a pleasant, low-rise housing built in the 1970's - Ferry Lane estate, and it is hard to imagine that this was once a bustling, energised furniture manufacturing hub. For seventy years furniture flowed on conveyor belts, and through a tunnel under Ferry Lane as the factory expanded in the fifties to occupy what is now Hale Village. During both World Wars the parts for wooden aircraft were made and assembled in huge workshops that were shrouded in secrecy. With the discovery of the factory underground war shelters in 2008 under what is now Hale Village and a subsequent Lebus exhibition curated by Haringey Local History Archives, interest was generated in this aspect of history and which has subsequently gathered momentum. Thousands of workers, each living individual lives came from near and far to spend their working days at Lebus. Many formed lifelong friendships, and just as four generations of the Lebus family spent their working lives in the factory, so too did successive generations of other families. Seemingly forgotten in the passing of time, they all left an indelible mark in this history. And in the case of some, their identities now emerge as their stories are explored; they are brought back to life telling their experiences in their own words. This is Paul Collier's first foray into authorship. In 2008, shortly after moving to Ferry Lane estate, Paul made a connection with Oliver Lebus, then in his nineties and who was the last family member of four generations at the company. They formed a special friendship and over several afternoons at his home in Kensington, Oliver introduced the author to his personal archives on which the foundations of this book were laid. Fully supported by both Haringey Local History Archives and members of the extended Lebus family, Harris Lebus - A Romance with the Furniture Trade, fully illustrated with over 200 photographs and images is a must read! His debut book appeals to a wide audience - interest in this history extends far beyond the locality of Tottenham Hale and Haringey, and will delight social historians and those with connections to the furniture trade, past and present.

Unique in style, Chinese furniture has long been celebrated for its elegant, artistic lines and strong, durable structure. Ranging from pieces designed simply to display the beauty and texture of natural woods, to magnificent pieces decorated with lavish carvings, lacquer or precious metals and stones, Chinese furniture is an outstanding representative of the oriental arts. This book provides an accessible, illustrated introduction to the history, production techniques and rich variety of Chinese furniture, revealing the important part that this furniture has played in the development of China's culture.

Add a touch of retro appeal to your stationery rotation with this off-beat refrigerator journal, featuring classic-cool colors, adorable illustrations, and a split binding that gives two distinct areas for writing! Everyday tasks, notes, and to-do lists can be recorded in the lower refrigerator section, while long-term plans and goals can be kept "on ice" in the freezer compartment. Show off your mid-century aesthetic and keep everything organized with the cheeky, on-trend Vintage Refrigerator Journal. This journal features: Split hardcover binding treatment; journal cover and interior pages are divided into two distinct sections that can be opened independently. Full-color illustrations throughout the interior. Matte laminate cover with spot gloss on "metal" elements.

Joe Colombo (Milan, 1930-1971) was one of the greatest designers of the last century, visionary and ingenious, capable of giving shape to ideas that retain a striking relevance to this day. Trained first at the Brera Academy and then at the Polytechnic of Milan, Joe Colombo has expressed, in just 20 years of work, an absolutely innovative world view, placing man and his life at the centre of reflection, imagined a dynamic and transformable habitat both on a domestic and urban scale. A design in the round, aimed at satisfying every need - also thanks to technology and new materials - and to shape the space and its objects according to the different activities of the moment, be they working or social interactions. From here, the modular and dynamic furnishing accessories with futuristic lines, among which some pieces that have become iconic of Italian design stand out such as the Tube Chair, the Spider lamp (Compasso d'Oro 1967) or the Boby trolley (now at the MoMA in New York), the "monoblocks", such as the Mini-Kitchen or the Total Table with integrated dishes, up to the global housing unit, a visionary "machine", which encompasses all the needs of living. This volume constitutes the first catalogue raisonne of his work, of which about 180 projects are documented, divided between works still in production and historical works; introduced by the essays by Ignazia Favata - his historical collaborator - and Domitilla Dardi, it is completed by a critical anthology. Text in English and Italian.

From the white plastic bed for the Prisunic catalogue (1966) to the Culbuto armchair issued by Knoll, and from the Lip watch to the private apartments of the Elysee Palace, Paris, (1983), the furniture and objects conceived by Marc Held have been emblematic of the renewal of French design, following the line of Scandinavians such as Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen...With his gallery L'Echoppe on the rue de Seine, Paris, and then with his agency, the designer and architect Marc Held also took part in major projects for IBM and Renault. This book traces fifty years of design, whose success with the public at large has contributed to a great liberation in our style of life. The generosity of his vision has remained faithful to the humanist values that guided his childhood in Bagnolet, where he was born in 1932. Having settled in Greece, on the island of Skopelos, over twenty years ago, Marc Held still continues to build houses and furnish them with his creations, working closely with Greek craftsmen.