Not only is he one of the world's preeminent architecture photographers, Robert Polidori is also--as his popular book Havana proved--a master of urban portraiture. The Montreal-born photographer has made haunting studies of bombed-out buildings in Beirut, decaying New York tenements, Versailles rooms in dusty disarray, Brasilia's paean to spare 1950s modernism, and, most recently, the abandoned, contaminated cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Taken together, they add to his ongoing project: the interpretation of the interrupted urban landscape. This new monograph combines the eye of a celebrated photographer with the distinctive voice of an artist and adventurer. Each breathtaking image--meticulously selected by the photographer from his own personal archive--is accompanied by a compelling first person account, based on interviews conducted by Martin C. Pedersen, executive editor of Metropolis magazine. Polidori tells behind-the-scene stories about the making of his photographs, takes us to war-torn Beirut and Brasilia and other world capitals, talks about what makes a building photogenic, how he shoots buildings he doesn't like, his favorite architects, and his love of mosques. A look at the world's great cities as seen through the eyes of a sharp social observer--and a great photographer.

Robert Polidori's Metropolis

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Metropolis Books

Loved, hated, revered, scorned, real, imagined: this is Los Angeles. Looking at Los Angeles is a fascinating journey into the center of the city's heart and soul. Pictured within its pages is a Los Angeles of powerful dreams and startling realities. Editors Marla Hamburg Kennedy and Ben Stiller have gathered pictorial representations of Los Angeles from the last three-quarters of a century, resulting in this selection of more than 200 stunning, beautifully reproduced color and duotone depictions of the city from different eras and different points of view. Along with the carefully chosen images by approximately 100 photographers who have time again turned to Los Angeles for inspiration, a preface and foreword by the editors describe their great affection for the city, while David L. Ulin's essay offers a critical and loving look at Los Angeles. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Los Angeles Conservancy, and the organization provides an essay about the importance of saving this city's rich architectural heritage. Looking at Los Angeles is at once a lesson in history, architecture, style, and culture, and a remarkable visual and written tribute to one of America's greatest cities. Includes photographs by: Robert Adams, John Baldessari, William Claxton, Will Connell, Joe Deal, John Divola, William Eggleston, Sam Fentress, Anthony Friedkin, John Humble, Dennis Keeley, Florian Maier-Aichen, Grant Mudford, Karin A. Mueller, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Julius Schulman, Joel Sternfeld, Timothy Street-Porter, John Swope, Andy Warhol, Julian Wasser, Robert Weingarten, Garry Winogrand, Max Yavno and others.

Looking At Los Angeles

Craig Krull

Jane Brown

Photography & Video

What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and others' experiences that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination of: a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refrigerator, a mailbox, a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects. Each of the 12 chapters is accompanied by a four-color drawing.

The Uncommon Life Of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday

BUSCH, Akiko

Szenasy, Susan

Biographies & Memoirs

In Chasing the Perfect writer/designer Natalia Ilyin delivers her astute, incisive and humorous observations on design and the world it has molded. According to Ilyin, “Modern design is based on deeply idealist notions, and its inherent perfectionism has dovetailed beautifully with our commodity-based economy's need to keep people itching so that they will buy things and keep the society chugging along. I began Chasing the Perfect because I started to become aware of this collusion, this silent pressure that a language of design based in perfectionism had brought to bear on how I developed as a person.” Chasing the Perfect is especially relevant in our times as interest in graphic, industrial and architectural design moves more and more into mainstream culture. Each of the ten chapters features Ilyin's accessible and often hilarious writing, which is highlighted with a broad range of images--some quite unexpected--from the designed world around us. An excerpt: “The choices that designers and architects have made in the last hundred years silently mold us, silently direct us through the tunnels of Penn Station or up to the fifty-third floor of the Sears Tower. But they direct more than our movements. They direct us to notice one thing and not another, to value one thing over another, to identify with one thing rather than with another. Modernism, the guts of it, the strength of it, the egotistic beauty of it, carries with it effects we did not expect and fosters attitudes about ourselves and others that may have been dandy in a utopia, but do little good in our world. Why have we not changed this idea, moved on with our thinking? For even after the disbanding of the Bauhaus, the disintegration of the International Style, the exhausting of postmodernism, we're all still chasing the perfect.”

Chasing The Perfect: Thoughts On Modernist Design In Our Time

Ilyin, Natalia

Reference

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center's aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day "Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void" by bus and the exhibit Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America. This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio ("the most all-American state"); through scale shifts in model landscapes, exemplified in the three largest hydraulic models in the world; and law-enforcement training environments that "simulate" public space. Readers can dive into the hidden and enchanting world of show caves, where America is on display underground; and come up into the Great Basin, a zone covering most of Nevada, and portions of Utah, California, Oregon, Idaho and Mexico, whose network of watersheds has no outlet to the ocean. Following lines and edges, through cities, suburbs, small towns and wide-open spaces, the Center guides us upstream, toward the heart of another America--the same, but different.

Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. It was initiated by architect and artist Fritz Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in the geographic center of the United States, Salina, Kansas. Since then three more prototype gardens have been created, in Lakewood, California; Maplewood, New Jersey and London, England. Edible Estates regional prototype gardens will ultimately be established in nine cities across the United States. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn documents the first four gardens with personal accounts written by the owners, garden plans and photographs illustrating the creation of the gardens--from ripping up the grass to harvesting a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs. Essays by Haeg, landscape architect Diana Balmori, garden and food writer Rosalind Creasy, author Michael Pollan and artist and writer Lesley Stern set the Edible Estates project in the context of larger issues concerning the environment, global food production and the imperative to generate a sense of community in our urban and suburban neighborhoods. This smart, affordable and well-designed book also includes reports and photographs from the owners of other edible front yards around the country, as well as helpful resources to guide you in making your own Edible Estate.

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, First Edition

Expanding Architecture presents a new generation of creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good. Questioning how design can improve daily lives, editors Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford map an emerging geography of architectural activism--or "public-interest architecture"--that might function akin to public-interest law or medicine by expanding architecture's all too often elite client base. With 30 essays by practicing architects and designers, urban and community planners, historians, landscape architects, environmental designers and members of other fields, this volume presents recent work from around the world that illustrates the ways in which design can address issues of social justice.

Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism

Bryan Bell

Katie Wakeford

Steve Badanes

Roberta Feldman

Sergio Palleroni

Katie Swenson

Thomas Fisher

Architecture

In January of 2008, with a thousand dollars, a laptop and an outsized conviction that design can change the world, rising San Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton launched Project H Design, a radical non-profit that supports, inspires and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design. "We need to go beyond 'going green' and to enlist a new generation of design activists," she wrote in an influential manifesto. "We need big hearts, bigger business sense and the bravery to take action now." Featuring more than 100 contemporary design products and systems--safer baby bottles, a high-tech waterless washing machine, low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, wheelchairs for rugged conditions, sugarcane charcoal, universal composting systems, DIY soccer balls--that are as fascinating as they are revolutionary, this exceptionally smart, friendly and well-designed volume makes the case for design as a tool to solve some of the world's biggest social problems in beautiful, sustainable and engaging ways--for global citizens in the developing world and in more developed economies alike. Particularly at a time when the weight of climate change, global poverty and population growth are impossible to ignore, Pilloton challenges designers to be changemakers instead of "stuff creators." Urgent and optimistic, a compendium and a call to action, Design Revolution is easily the most exciting design publication to come out this year. Emily Pilloton is the founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, a global industrial design nonprofit with eight chapters around the world. Trained in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and product design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pilloton started Project H in 2008 to provide a conduit and catalyst for need-based product design that empowers individuals, communities and economies. Current Project H initiatives include water transport and filtration systems in South Africa and India; an educational math playground built for elementary schools in Uganda and North Carolina; a homeless-run design coop in Los Angeles; and design concepts for foster care education and therapy in Austin, Texas. Allan Chochinov is Editor in Chief of Core77.com, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.

Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People: By Emily Pilloton

Business & Money

Pilloton, Emily

Economics

Since the first edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn was published in 2008, interest in edible gardening has exploded across the United States and abroad. Even First Lady Michelle Obama is doing it! This greatly expanded second edition of the book documents the eight Edible Estates regional prototype gardens that author Fritz Haeg has planted in California, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and England, and includes personal accounts from the homeowner-gardeners about the pleasures and challenges of publicly growing food where they live. Ten “Reports from Coast to Coast” tell the stories of others who have planted their own edible front yards in towns and cities across the country. In addition to essays by renowned landscape architect and scholar Diana Balmori, edible-landscaping pioneer Rosalind Creasy, bestselling author and sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan and artist and writer Lesley Stern, this edition features updated text by Haeg (including his observations on the Obama White House vegetable garden); a contribution from Mannahatta author Eric W. Sanderson; and Growing Power founder, MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer Will Allen's never-before-published Declaration of the Good Food Revolution. This is not a comprehensive how-to book, nor a showcase of impossibly perfect gardens. The stories presented here are intended to reveal something about how we are living today and to inspire readers to plant their own versions of an Edible Estate. If we see that our neighbor's typical grassy lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden, perhaps we will begin to look at the city around us with new eyes. Our private land can be a public model for the world in which we would like to live.

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 2nd Revised Edition: A Project by Fritz Haeg

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pollan, Michael

Creasy, Rosalind

Balmori, Diana

Stern, Lesley

Allen, Will

Haeg, Fritz

Sanderson, Eric

Gardening & Landscape Design

In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and a professor at Harvard’s new Graduate School of Design, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. There, he and his wife, Ise, hosted a festive reunion of Bauhaus masters and students who had recently emigrated from Europe: Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky and others. Together they feasted, swam and planned their futures on a new continent, all sensing they were on the cusp of a momentous new phase in their lives. Yet even as they moved on, the group never lost its connection to the Cape Cod coast. Several members returned, when they had the means, to travel farther up the peninsula, rent cabins, buy land and design their ideal summer homes. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture that has never been told--until now. The flow of talent onto the Outer Cape continued and, within a few years, the area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the country’s top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here. In this story, we meet, among others, the Boston Brahmins Jack Phillips and Nathaniel Saltonstall; the self-taught architect, carpenter and painter Jack Hall; the Finn Olav Hammarström, who had worked for Alvar Aalto; and the prolific Charlie Zehnder, who brought the lessons of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Brutalism to the Cape. Initially, these designers had no clients; they built for themselves and their families, or for friends sympathetic to their ideals. Their homes were laboratories, places to work through ideas without spending much money. The result of this ferment is a body of work unlike any other, a regional modernism fusing the building traditions of Cape Cod fishing towns with Bauhaus concepts and postwar experimentation.

Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape

History

Americas

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