Lars Müller Publishers Joins The Eames Institute

The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of “super normal design”: alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable peeler or a simple plastic bag, there are design classics like Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel side table, Dieter Ram’s 606 shelving system,...

Andrea Palladio’s villa architecture is still admired for its elegance and harmony, but little is known about the person behind the buildings. Experienced Palladio researcher Guido Beltramini has worked meticulously on material from historical documents about Palladio’s person and life, and assembled a full picture of the architect. Palladio in...

All three publications by Klaus Merkel—The Reading of Time in the Text of Nature, Album of Stones and Trees like Stones—are available in the exclusive Trilogy of Stones and Time. Presented in a premium cardboard slipcase, this limited edition is numbered and signed by the artist and will be a...

The Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean are often called “California’s Galapagos” and are home to one of the world’s largest colonies of nesting seabirds. Felzmann looks at what the birds bring here from afar: swallowed objects they carry in their stomachs halfway around the world. Gull Juju presents an...

For over thirty years Klaus Merkel has been photographing stones, rocky landscapes, and trees that he pairs up in double pictures. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous publication Album of Stones featured Milan Cathedral’s forest of figures...

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Villa Foscari in Venice, better known as La Malcontenta, became a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, and members of the nobility such as Sergei Diaghilev, Boris Kochno, Serge Lifar, Winston Churchill, Robert Byron, Diana Cooper, Bruce Chatwin, and Le Corbusier. It was an era...

In a globalized world, Asian, Latin and Arabic characters and visual cultures appear side by side and woven together. The coexistence of different visual cultures is now part of our daily lives and a given feature of our communication systems. But how do we best present information, structures and designs...

Ornaments are omnipresent: they can be found on buildings, fabrics, jewelry, tiles, ceramics and wallpaper. Scorned at the outset of the modern age, ornament has long since returned to architecture and influences design drafts as much as tattoo motifs. In New Grammar of Ornament, German architect and designer Thomas Weil...

Rooms You May Have Missed: Bijoy Jain, Umberto Riva is an unexpected story of architectural attitudes that starts unfolding from the interior. The book pairs two architects operating in distinctive contexts, Mumbai and Milan, in order to uncover new possibilities for ways of conceiving and producing space.

Through a personal...

As health becomes a central focus of political debate, are architects, urban designers, and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda to address these concerns? Imperfect Health looks at the complexity of today's health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret...

If there is no such thing as nature as a whole, perhaps there is landscape as a cabinet of curiosities. Thereby, in the best of cases, this lack of wholeness seems to be a gain rather than a loss. What is required for this kind of reinterpretation is an attentive...

In the 1890s, the Berlin artist, sculptor and teacher Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) started to photograph plants, seeds and other illustrative material from nature for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. His close-ups of the smallest plant parts, magnified up to 30...

100 Years of Swiss Graphic Design takes a fresh look at Swiss typography and photo-graphics, posters, corporate image design, book design, journalism and typefaces over the past hundred years. With illuminating essays by prominent experts in the field and captivating illustrations, this book, designed by the Zurich studio NORM, presents...

Shanshui City is the latest book from MAD Architects’ founder and principal partner, Ma Yansong. The English edition features art direction from Kenya Hara with essays by key Western and Eastern contributors, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist & Lorenza Baroncelli, and Wang Mingxian. The publishing of Shanshui City coincides with...

The most “African” of the Brazilian villages in the south of Bahia bears a Swiss name. Helvécia was founded 200 years ago by Swiss and German colonists, and the coffee grown on its vast estates produced great wealth for them. This would not have been possible without exploitation: in the...

Portman’s America & Other Speculations takes an unconventional and speculative approach towards the understanding of the work of one of the world’s most creative, controversial, daring, and prolific architects, John Portman. Combining the talents of an architect, artist and developer, he was able to embark on a series of large-scale...

This publication looks back on the last thirty years of EOOS and documents its evolution from a classic, internationally renowned design studio to an organization that redefines the role of design and strives to inspire upcoming generations of designers. In the early 2010s, EOOS closed a successful chapter of shop...

Using a typological structure (landscape, park, square, garden, promenade, etc.), Günther Vogt describes the theoretical foundation on which the successful projects of Vogt Landscape Architects are based. In recent years the office has realized international projects in Europe and the United States, including a new type of city park for...

Zaha Hadid: Heydar Aliyev Centre is devoted to the new cultural center designed by Zaha Hadid in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. As one of the most important cultural centers in the country, the building houses a variety of institutions under one roof. With the design, the renowned architect won...

New insights into the cities and large-scale buildings planned by a pioneer of "Brutalist modernism.”

Marcel Breuer (1902–81) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from Hungary to the US in 1937. More recently historians, architects and―with the reopening in...

The second issue in the exciting and experimental cross-disciplinary series Findings on... by Astrid van Baalen and Hester Aardse from the Pars Foundation is centred on ELASTICITY in the broadest sense of the word.

What happens when one gives a simple rubber band to an architect, historian, choreographer, chemist, artist,...

How we deal with land has far-reaching implications for architecture and urban development. The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the privatization of urban land and in speculation. Many European cities that today find themselves under extreme development pressure have virtually no land left to build on. In...

Accounting for approximately 10% of the land mass of Planet Earth, the Antarctic is a global commons we collectively neglect. Far from being a pristine natural landscape, the continent is a contested territory which conceals resources that might prove irresistible in a world with ever-increasing population growth. The 26 quadrillion tons of ice accumulated on its bedrock, equivalent to around 70% of the fresh water on our planet, represent at once the most significant repository of scientific data available, providing crucial information for future environmental policies, and the greatest menace to global coastal settlements threatened by the rise in sea levels induced by anthropogenic global warming.

Antarctic Resolution advocates the rejection of the pixelated view of Antarctica offered to us by big data companies and urges the construction of a high-resolution image focusing on the continent’s unique geography, unparalleled scientific potential, contemporary geopolitical significance, experimental governance system and its extreme inhabitation model. Only the concerted determination of a transnational network of multidisciplinary polar experts―represented here in the form of authored texts, photographic essays and data-based visual portfolios―could construct such an image and reveal the intricate web of growing economic and strategic interests, tensions and international rivalries, which are enveloped in darkness, as is the continent for six months of the year.

Light is one of the most essential elements for the existence of life on earth. Plants, animals and humans depend on it. It’s the strongest and fastest form of energy. But what is it when we see light? How do we use it and what can it do? Findings on...

This rich collection of writings and criticisms by structural engineer and Princeton University professor Guy Nordenson, brings together previously published essays on structural engineering, architecture, design, and seismic research from 1973 to 2008. Decade by decade, Nordenson's essays provide the unique viewpoint of the structural engineer and design collaborator, adding...

A narrative companion to the buildings, structures and infrastructures that accumulate around borders.

If cities were the 20th century’s favorite playground, borders are the laboratory for globalized phenomena in the 21st century. Hotspots for migrants, barbed wire, green borders, checkpoints, go-slow for cross-border workers, crypto-currency mining farms, casinos, brothels, tax...

A classic of utopian literature, more urgent than ever: Buckminster Fuller's provocative blueprint for the future.

Composed of lectures given by Buckminster Fuller throughout the world in the 1960s, Utopia or Oblivion presents the thesis that humanity, for the first time in its history, has the opportunity to create a...

Celebrated architect Frida Escobedo’s meditation on how light transforms and shapes the built environment.

Perhaps as ubiquitous as smartphones today, the books of hours were a private necessity in Europe during the Middle Ages. These manuscripts contained collections of texts that were meaningful to each owner, as well as an...

Macao, a Special Administrative Region of China, is among the most densely populated regions in the world and a thriving metropolis marked by a dynamic blend of contrasting urban typologies. The city’s urban complexity, resulting from rapid growth and high-density construction, cannot be simply characterized as the “Las Vegas of...

Known for his "Super Normal" approach to design, Jasper Morrison looks to find the exceptional in the world of the ordinary. Underpinned by his principle that "objects should not shout," Morrison’s designs are defined by beguiling simplicity, ready familiarity and a distinctive playfulness. While he made his name with the Thinking Man’s Chair in 1985, he has won devotion for a broad spectrum of projects, from cell phones to lights, tea sets and door handles as well as for his interiors, exhibitions, books and photography.

For Denise Scott Brown, who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her – and to make a case for the architect and planner’s role in intervening within it.

Steven Holl has set up a documentation centre for the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859 –1952) on Hamarøy, in northern Norway. This unconventional building reflects the author's no less unusual personality. The centre in the barren landscape of Hamarøy, where Hamsun lived and worked, the silence and solitude, challenge visitors...

Neubau Forst Catalogue is the 432-page print catalogue of a digital collection of tree silhouettes and sculptures seen at different seasons. Working by hand, the Neubau designers digitally removed the trees from their original Berlin surroundings and thereby crafted a body of visual material whose scope, outstanding quality of...

 

What is a Museum Now? asks about the role of a museum in contemporary society. All of Snøhetta's work is formed by the interaction between humans and their physical surroundings. Regarding this connection, the design studio recognized that a museum is a mediator between art and life. This book contains...

In light of the reawakening interest in R. Buckminster Fuller’s works and thoughts, and of their growing importance for our technological world, it is time for a reedition of this comprehensive and legendary publication from 1999. The visual reader Your Private Sky examines and documents Fuller’s theories, ideas and projects,...

How our medical obsessions and the image of the body influence modern architecture. This book explores the impact of medical discourse and diagnostic technologies on the formation, representation and reception of modern architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that the architecture of the early 20th...

As Art Director for Muji since 2002, Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara (born 1958) and his aesthetic of pared-back, beautifully functional objects has taken the world by (quiet) storm. With Kenya Hara: Designing Japan, the designer presents his vision of how his industry can contribute to the future of his...

Swiss French photographer Hélène Binet takes us on a visual journey through a world of stone, walls and gardens that define and celebrate the Korean art of making. In pure and calm photographs, The Intimacy of Making captures the traditional Korean architecture of three historical sites. Binet examines different typologies...

“The importance of a drawing is immense, because it’s the architect’s language,” famed architect Louis Kahn, one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, told his masterclass in 1967. While much of his built work...

One hundred years after the founding of Bauhaus, it’s time to revisit bauhaus journal as significant written testimony of this iconic movement of modern art. In this journal, published periodically from 1926 to 1931, the most important voices of the movement are heard: masters of the Bauhaus, among others, Josef...

Müller, Lars ed. | Zurich, Switzerland | Lars Müller Publishers, 2019 | Hardbound in graphic dust jacket | 9.75 x 9.75 in. | 226 pp | Color & B/W illustrations 

In 1919, the state art school in Weimar was reopened as the Bauhaus, under the direction of Walter Gropius and...

Founded in 1978, Ballenberg is a legendary Swiss open-air architectural museum that gathers more than 100 residential and agricultural buildings from the 14th to the 19th centuries, from almost all of the cantons of Switzerland, which have been transported to the museum from their original sites. Together these buildings show...

First published by Lars Müller in 2010 and now highly collectible, Brasilia-Chandigarh receives a new printing in a compact format. Dutch photographer Iwan Baan (born 1975) was originally commissioned by the publisher to document two urban planning experiments undertaken in the 1960s: Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Le...

Published in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death in March 1974, this two-volume set contains a facsimile of the notebook in which Louis Kahn drew and wrote during his last year of life, alongside a...

Hara, Kenya | Zurich, Switzerland | Lars Müller Publishers, 2009 | Hardbound | 5.5 x 7.75  in. | 128 pp | Color illustrations

White is not a book about colors. It is rather Kenya Haras attempt to explore the essence of “White”, which he sees as being closely related...

Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) is one of the greatest and most influential architects of Japan's postwar generation. He created sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature and the city. The underlying formalism in Shinohara’s architecture lends his work a poetic quality...