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Christmas 2024: ten architecture and design books that would make great gifts

Text by
Giulia Marani
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Kenzo Tange, Group Headquarter Fujisankei Communication, Tokyo - Ph. Shutterstock

Biographies of great architects and designers, impactful photographic coffee-table books, exhibition catalogues, essays that reflect on the role of designers in society: here are our tips for the upcoming holidays

Not yet completely dematerialized or supplanted by technological gadgets, the book is still one of the most popular gifts for the Christmas festivities. And, compared to other types of gifts, it has the merit of saying a lot not only about the recipient but also about the personality of the person who chose it. We have selected a dozen recent releases (or at least from the last year or year and a half) that will appeal to architecture and design buffs and all who take an interest in design in various ways. A handy complete guide to choosing gifts for Christmas 2024. 

 

“Il design analogico” (original title “Analogue: A Field Guide”) by Deyan Sudjic, Edizioni Atlante: for nostalgics

 

Radios, record players, portable and non-portable recorders, cameras, video cameras, TV sets, telephones, typewriters, thermometers, watches... So many analogue objects once in common, and even very common, use have left our homes, to be replaced by their digital counterparts or turned into streaming services. Nostalgia and a taste for well-made objects are the moving spirit of this illustrated book edited by the former director of the London Design Museum, which lists 250 of them, all extinct or endangered. Inside we find some milestones in the history of design, from Franco Albini’s Radio in cristallo (1938), whose mechanical parts were enclosed between two sheets of tempered glass, to the Grillo telephone designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper for SIT-Siemens (1965). 

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Il design analogico, Deyan Sudjic Ed. Atlante 

“Olivetti. Storie da una collezione” by Alessandro Santero and Sergio Polano, Ronzani Editore: for Olivettians and lovers of graphic design 

 

In its ninety years of history, Olivetti stands out not only by its products but also by its original and very distinctive advertising. Its posters and other graphic materials (brochures, user manuals, headed notepaper, circulars...) were designed by renowned creatives such as Bruno Munari, Albe Steiner, Max Huber, Costantino Nivola and many others. This volume, selected in the ADI Design Index 2024 and therefore a candidate for the next edition of the Compasso d’Oro, brings the most significant examples together for the first time, with over 500 images and a “bonus track”: two essays by the architectural historian Sergio Polano, who died in 2022. A plunge into the aesthetics and philosophy (they often go together) of the celebrated company based in Ivrea, it will delight insiders and graphic design enthusiasts.  

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Olivetti Storie da una collezione, Allessandro Santero, Ed.Ronzani Editore

“Big book of architecture” by Giovanni Leoni, 24 ORE Culture: for architects and architecture students 

 

The big book of architecture by the historian Giovanni Leoni starts from an ambition: to condense a century of history of the discipline into just under 400 pages, in the manner of an illustrated encyclopedia. To do this, he chooses to focus on 20 world-famous figures and divides them into four groups: the “Masters” (Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto), all born in the nineteenth century and now widely historicized, with their powerful individuality and faith in the transformative power of the architectural gesture; those born in the first thirty years of the twentieth century (from Louis Kahn to Kenzō Tange and Aldo Rossi), who were plunged when young, in some cases very young, into an event that shattered certainties, World War II, and reacted to it in their personal ways; cultured professionals such as Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and Tadao Ando, poised between practice and theory; and, finally, the postwar generation (Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Eduardo Soto de Moura, David Chipperfield and Kengo Kuma) with a gift for playing the part of the starchitect and at the same time developing a critical discourse on the significance

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Big book of architecture, Giovanni Leoni Ed. 24 ORE Cultura

“Milano: proiezioni astratte” by Paolo Ventura, Corraini: for dreamers - and for those who love strolling about Milan in mid-August 

 

Milan as photographed by Paolo Ventura is “abstract”, because it has been rebuilt in wood and cardboard, with the windows designed as a theatrical set or a children’s game. But it is faithful to reality in the positions of the buildings and their forms. This procedure enables the artist to eliminate the superfluous, so what we see on the page is an essential, rarefied urban setting, where the buildings emerge overwhelmingly with their volumes and the hundreds of electric cables of trams and trolleybuses that “cross, run parallel, chase after each other, circle”, and seem to hold them together as if they were stage sets. The final effect is of metaphysical estrangement in the spirit of De Chirico and utterly fascinating.  

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Milano proiezioni astratte, Paolo Ventura, Ed.Corraini

‘Gae Aulenti. Lo spazio scenico’ edited by Nina Artioli, Alessandra Coppa and Davide Pedullà: for set designers and those sensitive to the magic of theatre

 

Gae Aulenti always repeated that architecture is not set design and design is not decoration, claiming the autonomy of each discipline with respect to the others and the impossibility of applying the same set of pre-established rules to all of them. This does not detract from the fact that in her long career she has designed a series of memorable theatre productions, in particular for plays directed by Luca Ronconi to whom she was linked by a long artistic association that began in 1974 with a chance meeting in the dressing rooms of the Teatro della Scala. Among the most interesting scenic devices realised over a twenty-year period are Il barbiere di Siviglia in 1975, with its self-propelled furniture on wheels or suspended in mid-air, and Strauss's Elektra in 1994, where the palace of Mycenae is transformed into a bloody slaughterhouse. ‘Gae Aulenti. Lo spazio scenico’ offers an overview of this work starting with research involving students from the Brera Academy and the archives of the designer and La Scala.

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GAE AULENTI Lo spazio scenico

“Chromatic herbarium” by Massimo Gardone and Alessandra Muran, edited by Francesco Messina, Corraini: for Romantics, and those looking like Carlo Scarpa for ways to “cut out the blue of the sky”  

 

Surely everyone, while walking in a meadow or woodland, has happened to want to fix in the mind (or in its technological evolution detached from the body, namely the camera of a smartphone) the special color point of a flower or a leaf. And to think about how nature is incomparable in combining nuances and shades of color, better than any stylist or designer, because unlike them it never errs. For twenty years, Massimo Gardone and Alessandra Muran have been collecting and photographing botanical subjects – leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, petals, bits of bark, collected here in an exceptional sampler of plant memories and flanked by the indication of the colors identifiable in the photos with their respective “pantones” and short texts that add factual or poetic-literary information. A seemingly very simple but enlightening operation, and precious for all those who work with color. 

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Chromatic Herbarium, Massimo Gardone, Alessandra Muran, Ed. Corraini

“Con assoluta autonomia. Cini Boeri” by Cristina Moro, Electa: for brilliant friends 

 

Cristina Moro is the curator of the personal archive of Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known to all as Cini Boeri. So it is hardly surprising that her biography of the great architect and designer, one of the latest issued in the Oilà series devoted to creative women of the twentieth century, despite its slenderness (95 pages in all), has the relaxed pace of a walk through her papers: sketchbooks, notebooks and photographs accumulated over the many decades of her career. An ideal path that, in the course of the narrative, also becomes a physical itinerary through the places of Cini Boeri’s heart, from the red brick villa by the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio where she grew up as la picinin, the smallest of three siblings on the island of La Maddalena, the refuge, with the famous Casa Bunker lying on the rocks, passing through Lake Maggiore, where she was a young evacuee, serving as a partisan messenger on her bicycle, and the house in Milan in a building designed by Asnago and Vender.  

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Con assulta autonomia, Cini Boeri, Cristina Moro, Ed.Electa

“Elio Fiorucci” by Judith Clark, Electa: for those born in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties 

 

Gillo Dorfles called him “the Duchamp of Italian fashion”. Elio Fiorucci, however, was much more than a designer, and his genius lies in having created a complete universe, an eclectic and colorful “system of interferences”, in which garments and accessories coexist with books, records, photographs and above all objects, from handcuffs covered in pink plush to lamps supported by garden gnomes. This is why the catalogue of the current exhibition at the Triennale di Milano is also a design book, which will appeal to specialists by how it gives an all-round view of the career of a bulimic and multifaceted creative, and the over-forties who as children crowded into his shop in Piazza San Babila, for a dip into the past with a guaranteed Amarcord effect.  

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Fiorucci Catalogo, Judith Clark, Ed. Electa

“What design can’t do” by Silvio Lorusso, ed. Set Margins’: for millennial designers in an identity crisis 

 

Over the years we have become accustomed to hearing about what design can do, and it is a great deal if we consider that it’s a field with liquid, indefinite boundaries. For this reason, those who enter the profession finds themselves faced on the one hand with an expanse of possibilities to explore, some highly stimulating, with courses and MA degrees devoted to countless branches and sub-branches of design, from graphics to biomaterials to interfaces. And on the other hand they have to cope with the responsibility of finding solutions to all the ills of the world, or at least search for them. In this book, Silvio Lorusso, an Italian researcher and visual designer based in Lisbon, scales back the very Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for design thinking applied to everything, replacing it with a more earth-bound and realistic vision: that of professionals who, especially if young, struggle to find their place in the world (and often to survive in everyday life amid the requests of clients, 60-day payments, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and the need to push their way to the fore on social media to get noticed).  

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WhatDesignCantDo, Silvio Lorusso, Ed. Set Margins

“Aaautoscatti” by Giulio Ceppi, Sartoria Editoriale: for architecture and design students and self-deprecating professionals 

 

Architect, designer and professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Giulio Ceppi has written an atypical autobiography that proceeds in no particular order, through nine pictures or snapshots. At the center of each one is a concept – the subtitle of the book is “9 principles with multiple anecdotes and useful tips for those who believe they are creative (but then it’s up to others to decide)” – followed by memories, reflections, reports on trips to Mongolia or Guatemala and the description of projects inserted as factual counterpoints. One of these is Autogrill Villoresi Est, inaugurated in 2013, the first to obtain environmental certification and the Design for All quality mark. The account has two great merits: the irony that pervades it and the fact that it includes not just successes but also failures, works that cost time and effort, which then for various reasons came to nothing.  

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Autoscatti, Giulio Ceppi, ED. Sartoria Editoriale

29 November 2024
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