September reading list: new-in architecture and design books

With a well documented volume – over 600 pages and 2,000 illustrations – Amy Auscherman, Sam Grawe and Leon Ransmeier cover the history of Herman Miller and, with drawings and period photos and articles, narrate the human side: from Dirk Jan De Pree, Herman Miller’s son-in-law, to designers he engaged, like Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames. The story of a company made of research, experimentation and intuition, which dictated and anticipated the lifestyle of entire generations.

From new biodegradable materials to the clever use of human and animal waste: there are eight major ideas listed by Kate Franklin and Caroline Till in the volume Radical Matter. Solutions that will guide the choice of materials, design methods and production processes. The authors explain what they are and why it is time to go beyond “sustainable design”.

Among the many publications for the centenary of Bauhaus, it is worth mentioning the book edited by Magdalena Droste and Boris Firedewald. Our Bauhaus is a unique collection of memories: of friends, directors, professors and students who attended and contributed to its fame. Amidst experiments and utopias, success and failure, their testimonies, collected between the 1960s and 1980s by Eckhard Neumann, portray daily life inside the walls of the academy and show how “each person had his own idea of Bauhaus”

In the form of a graphic novel, the book by Benjamin Swiczinsky Schwanzer. Architect. Visionary. Maestro outlines, with a refined use of colour – alternating black and white, two- and four-colour prints – the life and design vision of Karl Schwanzer (1918-1975), one of Austria’s most influential architects and author of over 600 designs, including the BMW headquarters in Munich and the WIFI Institute in St. Pölten.