If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

The 15-year history of the production of a “German scotch” Black Whisky.

Drawing on documentation from a community of gardeners, cooks, ceramicists, and creatives, Rochester Square in North London’s Camden is a case study for how urban spaces are finding new life.

Published in conjunction with the “metalworks – designing & making” exhibition in the Konschthal Esch, this book uses the production of some twenty international creators to discuss methods of transforming metal in contemporary design.

The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing.

This publication extends Studio Experimentelles Design’s socially committed approach to design through conversations, lectures, research, debates, and project documentation. To critically examine design’s current practices, it asks questions of how designers work today, demanding a fundamental reorientation in the issues design addresses and the social actors it serves.

In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.

Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells the audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories—Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther—flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and elucidates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.

Does art possess the power to cause structural and meaningful changes in daily life? By means of a critical essay, correspondence with kindred spirits from the field, and visual impressions, this book reflects on the possibility to merge art and life, fiction and reality, and on the importance of this process for the future of artistic practice.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities.

In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design—in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design’s established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present.

When making things without prior knowledge of “the material,” how should such naive and potentially brutal behavior be interpreted, and what does it represent and generate?

This book outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Stemming from a range of different disciplines, the contributions in this book reflect the multidisciplinary and diverse nature of postcolonial fashion research today.

How do you tell the story of a friendship? How do you trace the roots of one of the most significant cross-disciplinary unions in fashion today? Artist Sterling Ruby and fashion designer Raf Simons did just that when they sat on stage with curator Jessica Morgan at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is a story, and an exchange, that is beyond collaboration.

“What’s my DNA?” Virgil Abloh asks to an overflowing auditorium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Abloh goes on to provide his audience with a “cheat code”—advice he wishes he had received as a student. He then unpacks a series of “shortcuts” for cultivating a “personal design language.”

This publication was created on the occasion of Dutch designer Ineke Hans’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The exhibition—its title a pun merging the German phrase for “What’s going on?” with the name of architect Adolf Loos—provided an overview of Ineke Hans’s recent work while also exploring the present and the future of design.

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture.

In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design.

In this in-depth conversation with architectural theorist K. Michael Hays, Yoshi Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow reflect on representation, occupation, and the democracy of architecture. Explaining their belief in the behavioral capacities of humans, architecture, and nature, Tsukamoto and Kaijima reveal the generous spirit of their work, and the importance of pushing such capacities to their most yielding limits.

It’s easy to rant about the fashion industry. Nowadays, a large part of it is based on producing and consuming vast amounts of clothing. Collections are manufactured at dizzying speeds and sold for extremely low or incredibly high prices.

Three interconnected palimpsest essays recount (1) the backstory of a “meta” font recently updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition book series, (2) a broad history of the rationalization of letterforms that considers the same typeface from “a higher point of disinterest,” and (3) a pending proposal for a sundial designed to operate in parallel physical and digital realms. Notes on the Time, Time, Letters & Spirits is the sixth volume of the Contemporary Condition.

Conceived as a field of production and mutual learning, Green light works with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and NGOs to fabricate an unlimited edition of fully functional lamps: geometric, stackable modules made from recyclable materials and fitted with a welcoming green light.

This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.

This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world.

The second volume in the EP series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains.

Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. It consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings.

The No-Frills book series was developed in the early 1980s as a translation of the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples to mass-market genre fiction. The result of research into this experimental series, Signature Strengths also includes complete reproductions of its books—Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance.

Released to inaugurate The Serving Library’s new red, gold, and green space in Liverpool, this issue is both printed in and concerned with color. It includes, among other contributions, a truncated phone call from Dexter Sinister to László Moholy-Nagy, the late, great Muhammad Ali discussing skin color in a 1971 TV interview, a personal history of paint and painting by Amy Sillman.

What does it mean to publish today? How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice.

An experiment with alternative forms of design, Public Design Support is also an intervention in urban life. This publication—which includes key project materials, scholarly essays, and significant historical texts—chronicles the aspirations, methods, and projects of the first four years of Public Design Support.

Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.

What’s on a Universal Serial Bus? A collection of electronic works by Dexter Sinister produced from 2008 to 2015. Dexter Sinister is the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, who operate at the intersection of graphic design, publishing, and contemporary art. This memory stick is released parallel to the exhibition at Kunstverein München, “On a Universal Serial Bus.*”

Black transparency is an involuntary disclosure of secrets against a backdrop of systematic online surveillance, as large parts of contemporary life move into the digital realm. In their latest book, Metahaven embark on a journey of subversion while examining transparency’s intersections with design, architecture, and pop culture, as well as its ability to unravel the circuitry of modern state power.

This tenth volume is a “sampler” issue comprising one choice Bulletin from each of the previous nine. From now on, Bulletins of The Serving Library will proceed in full color and at half its former size (but will be twice as good).

The Paris-based architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal opened their 2015 lecture at Harvard University with a manifesto: study and create an inventory of the existing situation; densify without compressing individual space; promote user mobility, access, choice; and most importantly, never demolish. Freedom of Use reflects on these core values to present a fluid narrative of Lacaton and Vassal’s oeuvre.

Issue number nine tackles all manner of sports and games, providing commentary on their language, politics, and philosophies.

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University. He brought five chefs, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate “lecture de pâtisserie.” The Architecture of Taste recaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé’s pastry visions.

This issue is smaller than large and larger than small: *medium*. Produced under the auspices of the exhibition “Transmitting Andy Warhol” at Tate Liverpool, it includes a history of the relations between drugs and groups by Ian Svenonius, an e-mail exchange between Paul Elliman and pioneer of voice synthesis Richard T. Gagnon, and a collage of voices that conjure Warhol’s aura by Michael Bracewell.

This issue concerns itself with “numbers,” ranging from a brief note on “The Psychology of Number” by John Dewey and John McLellan, to Vincenzo Latronico’s historical overview of the ongoing attempt to conjure “truths from thin air” (such as proof of the existence of god).

Conceived while in residency at the library of the Goethe-Institut New York, this issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library used the context of the hosting institution as a thematic starting point. Germany, and often the author’s specific relationship to the German language, is the unifying thread that unites these diverse pieces.

Archaeology of the Digital delves into the genesis and establishment of digital tools for design conceptualization, visualization, and production at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Conceived as an object-based investigation of four pivotal projects that established distinct directions in architecture’s use of digital tools, the book highlights the dialogue between computer sciences, architecture and engineering that was at the core of these experiments.

While emphasizing the multiple correspondences between collectives and groups like Arte Povera, Archizoom, Superstudio, and figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, this volume also highlights previously overlooked spaces, works, and performances.

Tecoh is a sprawling series of buildings designed by the artist Jorge Pardo deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far the artist’s most ambitious work to date. This book offers the only available glimpse of the project, as it was primarily conceived as a private residence.

In a Manner of Reading Design features different texts and artistic contributions meant to create a space in which debate can unfold, a debate that considers the impossibility of an unbiased position and as such reminds us of our dependence on the other in any conception—and any project design might aspire to.

What is “work” today and what is its relation to art? What is the position of the artist if “creativity” has become a commodity? How can the artist’s conditions of production be described, and what role can art and architecture play in societal change?

Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.

Encounters with art engage various conditions of interiority—whether through psychic spaces or specific physical environments, such as museums and private residences. Through diverse discursive modes—commissioned essays, conversations and talks, historical writings, and artistic projects—this anthology, the first CCS Readers volume, examines the poetics and politics of interior experience within the frame of contemporary art.

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition.

Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts. The Cybermohalla project, which takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood), has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities.

To accompany his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, this book presents the work of the Swiss-American graphic designer Zak Kyes. The exhibition and publication bring together a range of works by Kyes, as well as works by a host of collaborators, presenting contemporary graphic design as a practice that mediates, and is mediated by, its allied disciplines.

Joan Sallas, a virtuoso of the fold, has meticulously researched and mastered the history and techniques of the art of the fold. With the banquet table as setting, his expertise and philosophy pour forth in the form of splendid, folded linen.

A Variation on Powers of Ten uses the opening picnic scene of Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten as score to guide ten discussions. The result of a research-based residency at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the publication includes four essays and ten interviews with researchers whose work relates to one of the magnitudes of ten of the 1968 IBM-commissioned film.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.

This issue of Bulletins of the Serving Library doubles as a catalogue of sorts to “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language,” a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The second issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library includes contributions by Dimmi Davidoff, Július Koller, David Fischli & Peter Weiss, Rob Giampietro, Anthony Huberman, Junior Aspirin Records, Perri MacKenzie, David Senior, and Jan Verwoert.

Design Act: Socially and Politically Engaged Design Today—Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics is a project that presents and discusses contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues.

Casco Issues is a magazine published by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, which explores recurring issues that emerge from Casco’s program. The twelfth edition of Casco Issues, Generous Structures, is a playful enquiry into “playfulness” as a value in critical cultural practice. It positions alternative notions of playing against the grain of neoliberal ideologies of “lifelong learning” and “work as play.”

The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

Welcome to Finland, a young land of rapid aging, where newly founded institutions are already outmoded and geographic impediments are a constant crippling agent. As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Finland: The Welfare Game by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments.

As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Japan, or The Book of Japans, makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the “far.” The Book of Japans restores a sense of wonder—along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies—by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but also time.

For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining the prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years.

In 1668, Queen Christina of Sweden was greeted in Rome with three spectacular banquets that surpass all historical precedents and successors in the register of extravagant gastronomy. As the first publication of her series On the Table, Charlotte Birnbaum presents Antonio degli Effetti’s newly translated seventeenth-century text, which elaborately describes the three feasts in all their sumptuous and performative glory.

Bulletins of The Serving Library is the new biannual publication from Dexter Sinister, which continues where the final issue of their previous house journal DOT DOT DOT left off.

This book brings together visual and written documentation of BLESS’s last twelve collections (N° 30–N° 41), continually prompting and challenging the question of where a product begins and ends.

Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution Series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.

Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy is the fifth book in the Solution Series. Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with analytical elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable.

Internal Necessity was the topic of the Sommerakademie 2009, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. The result is an independent reader that does not aim to merely document the academy 2009, but reflects and develops its topics in a rich diversity of visual and textual forms.

What happens when you look at design as some thing more than a service-based relationship between client and designer? What new strategies and models help to question and challenge the limits of design? What outer circumstances influence this kind of practice?

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support.

At a time when functional independence seems to be a real possibility for Scotland—and yet no one is quite sure what that means—a delirium of visions, realistic and absurd, is necessary.

In Solution 1-10: Umbauland, Ingo Niermann devises ten provokingly simple ideas which would see Germany work it out after all, including a new grammar, a new political party, assigning allotment gardens to unemployed people and retirees, and the Great Pyramid, the tallest building of the world which would serve as a democratic tomb for millions of people.

This book explores contemporary publishing in its broadest, most exploded sense. The first part of this book consists of pieces of writings written since the conception of Dexter Sinister’s New York basement workshop and bookstore in the summer of 2006. The second part consists of reproductions of a series of lithographic proof prints.

The book Live Recorded Delay constitutes the only documentation of the legendary project “Il Tempo del Postino.” Conceived by the graphic design team M/M (Paris), it is both a personal archive and an open-ended score for future restagings of the event.

“German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.”
—The Independent

While style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960’s onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style.

Agenda is an ongoing project by graphic designer Manuel Raeder which focusses on different methods of how people organize, in a personal or non-personal way, their time.

This fully illustrated book features for the first time the wide range of Bless’ activity and documents a unique mode of cultural production.

This book provides an exemplary look into the work of Bernhard Willhelm, the German fashion designer whose sartorial skills have been hailed by both the fashion industry and the art world.

Fully conceived by M/M, this large-format limited edition contains an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an introduction by Cristina Ricupero as well as illustrations from the designers’ recent projects.

This book, part psychedelic philosophy, part biography, is the first to present Sture Johannesson’s work in depth, documenting his affiliations with the “high” underground and the punk movement, his activism and his radical exploration of the relationships between art, politics, technology, and human consciousness.