Arts and Culture

The art of Makoto Azuma uses flowers and plants as its starting point, but juxtaposes their timeless yet transient beauty with an incredibly diverse range of striking settings. In a series of sculptures, installations and interactive events, he delights in blurring the boundaries between nature and artifice. Azuma founded the floral atelier Jardins des Fleurs in 2002, taking commissions from pri

In this first systematic introduction to contemporary Chinese art, Wu Hung provides an accessible, focused and much-needed narrative of the development of Chinese art across all media from the 1970s to the 2000s. From its underground genesis during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), contemporary Chinese art has become a dynamic and hugely influential force in a globalized art world where the disti

The most comprehensive, practical, and beautiful directory of type, organized by type category - Serif, Sans Serif, Display, and Script - and covering all styles throughout history. Type Directory offers over 1,800 examples of the best in type design, spanning almost 600 years of design history. From classics such as Garamond, Baskerville, Futura, and Helvetica, to more idiosyncratic recent crea

The book behind Anton Corbijn’s film Squaring the Circle (the story of Hipgnosis) Founded in 1968 by Aubrey “Po” Powell, Storm Thorgerson and Peter Christopherson, graphic design firm Hipgnosis gained a legendary status by transforming the look of album art through their designs for AC/DC, Black Sabbath, The Police, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Syd Barrett, and The Who. In t

For many young architects, houses or domestic buildings are among the first projects they design. For David Adjaye, such early commissions were connected to a rising generation of creatives, with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistry, clever use of space and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in many innovative and widely published houses, mainly built in London. After tw

Santiago Calatrava first made a name for himself in the late 1980s with delicately designed structures in Zürich that seem to grow out of the earth. He went on to create a series of highly innovative, iconic bridges across Europe, and in recent years he has drawn attention for such large-scale projects as the City of Arts and Sciences in his birth town, Valencia; the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de J

David Adjaye, the son of a Tanzanian diplomat, spent his childhood moving between international cities before settling in London, where he was educated. Fresh out of the Royal Academy of Art, his early commissions reflected an influential generation of artists at the turn of the millennium with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistic sensitivity, deft use of space and inexpensive, un

A career-spanning, slipcased monograph in two volumes presenting the work of one of Asia's most thoughtful and innovative architects. With rising populations around the world and the pressures of looming climatic catastrophe, the work of Vo Trong Nghia is a call for architecture to transform itself from a source of pollution to a reason for hope. Nor is this idea anecdotal: the World Green Bu

Type Tells Tales focuses on typography that is integral to the message or story it is expressing. This is type that speaks – that is literally the voice of the narrator. And the narrator is the typographer. This can be quite literal, for example when letters come from the mouth of a person or thing, as in a comics balloon. It can be hand lettering, drawn with its own distinctive peculiarities that

The V&A Photography Library is a new series of accessible, introductory volumes to the key themes, works, objects and individuals in photography, illustrated with unprecedented access to the V&A’s photography collection, the oldest held by a public museum and one of the largest and finest in the world, now expanded with acquisitions from the Royal Photographic Society collection. Written by Mar

The essential purpose of a staircase is utilitarian: to facilitate ascent and descent. Yet the design of even the simplest stair is complex, requiring great knowledge, skill and ingenuity. This volume showcases the astonishing diversity of staircases over the centuries, from the stepped pyramids of the Maya to the exquisitely proportioned stairs of the Renaissance, to the elaborate balustraded con

This fundamental resource for all textile and fashion designers explores over 70 production techniques and over 60 materials used in textile and fashion design. Organized into four main parts – Fibre and Yarn Technology, Textile Technology, Construction Technology, and Materials – it is a complete overview of the life cycle of textile and fashion manufacturing, from the spinning of yarn to recycli

Over the past 40 years, Lois Greenfield has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most accomplished and respected photographers of human motion. Her images of dancers in mid-flight or mid-movement are astonishingly beautiful and capture the magic of dance in a unique way. In the 17 years since her last book was published, Greenfield has moved into digital colour photography, and some 150 of th

‘This ad is gender neutral’, proclaimed a 2016 poster for the fashion brand Diesel; ‘I resist definitions’, announced a Calvin Klein ad in the same year, while a Louis Vuitton shoot featured Jaden Smith, son of actor Will Smith, wearing a skirt like a natural. Fashion magazines have printed countless features on the blurring of gender barriers, while brands including Yves Saint-Laurent, Gucci, Bur

Jim Shaughnessy: Essential Witness is a comprehensive overview of Shaughnessy’s sixty year as a railroad photographer. Starting in the late 1940s, he began documenting in earnest the rapidly changing railroad scene in the Northeastern United States. His interests and travels also took him to other areas of the country to document the Rio Grande narrow gauge in Colorado and the UP Big Boys in Wyomi

The World According to Roger Ballen, co-authored with Colin Rhodes, looks at Ballen’s career in the wider cultural context beyond photography, including his connections with and collections of Art Brut. It features photographs selected from across Ballen’s career, along with installations created exclusively for the exhibition at Halle Saint Pierre and photographs of objects and works from Ballen’

Embracing paintings, drawings, sculpture and ceramics, this book features glorious reproductions of rarely seen works by Monet, Matisse, Bacon, Lichtenstein, Kokoschka, Picasso, Klee, Chagall and Giacometti, among other which are complemented by extensive information on the works and artists.

For the second installment of Nomenus, a limited edition arts publication, Erik Madigan Heck has curated a special issue titled The Language of Flowers, that seamlessly weaves together a curated selection of floral and figurative contemporary paintings and photographic studies from Anselm Kiefer, Rita Ackermann, Helen Frankenthaler, Gabriel Orozco, Nick Knight, Mircea Suciu, Miranda Lichtenstein,