Bookshelf News
On Sale Now: California College of the Arts Studio Series
Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010, by Jim Norrena
Select CCA Architecture Studio Series titles listed here can be purchased through William Stout Architectural Books. Select individual titles for specific ordering information.
5X2
CCA & University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design
Executive Editor Balz Mueller and associate editor Mark Donohue
Paperback, 174 pages, $25
Leading architects from two countries, Switzerland and the United States, were brought together in five interviews to discuss research and the role it plays in the building process. The book 5x2 documents their international exchange revealing salient issues in contemporary practice. In the process, their discourse provides a blueprint for a new pedagogical model that values an engagement through dialog by those that shape the field, engaging students and practitioners in conversations about contemporary issues. These conversations confront the similarities and differences in education, design, and construction in the two countries in an effort to better understand how architecture is made.
Architecture for a Hybrid Landscape: Proposals for the California Delta
Edited by Katherine Rinne
Paperback, 112 pages, $25
Water and land are intimately linked in the California Delta. It is a charged landscape, full of tension both historically and literally, and heavily altered by human interventions. The Delta is also crucial to California’s water infrastructure. Students in Katherine Rinne's spring 2007 Architecture for a Hybrid Landscape studio course were asked to design a hypothetical new California Water Research and Interpretive Center facility on a specific California Delta site. This book showcases their innovative designs, essays, artworks, and photographs.
MXDF Architecture Studio: Una Propuesta Urbana para Xochimilco
CCA with University of California Berkeley & Universidad Iberoamericana
Editor Sandra Vivanco, Rene Davids, Isaac Broid, et al.
Hardcover, 91 pages, $25
The MXDF studio, the first of a series of international architectural laboratories, focuses on the Xochimilco area of Mexico City—well known for its extended series of canals which is all that remains of the ancient system of lakes stretching for most of the valley of Anahuac in the middle of which Tenochtitlan, the impressive capital of the Aztecs, was located.
Thirty-two California students and faculty traveled south producing and documenting 20 archeological pieces to serve as the “permanent collection” for a museum proposal.
Later, 43 Mexican students and faculty visited the Bay Area to review their projects. This book records their collective efforts, culminating in an exhibition at the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco.
Propositions: Thesis Research in Architecture 2007-2009
Editors Neal Schwartz and Geneviève L’Heureux
Paperback, 128 pages, $25
From Old Delhi to Jerusalem, Alameda to Philadelphia, students and faculty in the Architecture Program at California College of the Arts offer creative propositions for the potential of architecture in locations around the world. This full-color book features some of the most intriguing thesis projects to come out of the program in the last two years.
The work expands and deepens contemporary architectural practice: Frankenstein’s monster becomes a model for revitalizing a defunct naval air base; a jacket is transformed into a deployable hammock for urban living; an airport terminal is distilled down to the text on its walls and remains navigable; a decaying waterfront area in Istanbul is revitalized via reconsidered transit infrastructures. These projects and many more give a glimpse of what these promising minds will bring to the future of architecture.
Vertical Places; The Tall Building in the World City
Edited by Neal Schwartz
Paperback, 62 pages, $20
This volume is one is a series spawned by the design research of the Advanced Studios at California College of the Arts (CCA), developed under former chair Rodolphe el-Khoury. Vertical Places: The Tall Building in the World City not only takes on the complexity of the design of the tall building but also that of the tall building within the context of rapidly growing world cities—such as Beijing, Dubai, Mexico City, and Singapore. The work presented here was led by a small group of expert practitioners from Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, San Francisco, and supported by the teaching experience of the Bay Area firm of GDeS Architecture and Planning.
ShareCategories: Architecture Bookshelf Students
URBANbuild local global Book Collaboration Named on AIGA's 50 Books List
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2010, by Jim Norrena
Last year Architecture Director Ila Berman and associate professor Mona El Khafif worked with Graphic Design associate professor Bob Aufuldish to design their book URBANbuild local global. The result? It was honored in the 2010 “AIGA’s 50 Books / 50 Covers” competition, which chronicles the year's most outstanding book-design solutions—inside and out.
The competition recognizes two distinct design considerations: design as it relates to the book in its entirety; and just the book cover itself. URBANbuild local global has been honored for its overall design, and as such excerpts of the book will reside in a permanent and accessible historical record of notable graphic design—the AIGA Design Archive—and tour as part of an international exhibition.
URBANbuild local global (William Stout 2009) documents the work of URBANbuild—a comprehensive two-year program at Tulane University School of Architecture, initiated by Ila Berman to be a unique multiscaled laboratory for city research and a vehicle to generate innovative architectural strategies to actively support the rehabilitation of New Orleans following its devastating destruction in 2005.
The challenge the authors and designer faced was to create a design that communicated its larger architectural and urban intentions in a compelling way for many different types of readers.
Said Berman: “[We] wanted this to be a great work of graphic design that was also conceptual and highly spatial. As architects we tend to think of books as designed objects—“things” that have an important physical presence. The intention was to create a double-sided book that would be structured architecturally—as a topological surface that would refer to the continuity between the local side of the book that looks inward toward the city of New Orleans, and the global side of the book that looks outward toward a larger global context.
"This emerged from the desire to reconnect local research, analysis, and design with a broader framework, drawing from the experience of comparable world cities and to have this reflected in the design of the book itself.”
To accomplish their goals, Berman and El Khafif enlisted the graphic design expertise of CCA’s Bob Aufuldish, also a partner in the design firm Aufuldish & Warinner, whose work is in good company in the AIGA Design Archive—his own! With no fewer than six awarded books in the “AIGA 50 Books” competition in the last 10 years, Aufuldish is a celebrated veteran book designer.
(Look for Aufuldish’s design expertise on the following exhibition catalogs: Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA; and two for the deYoung’s—Birth of Impressionism, and Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond, each from the Musée d’Orsay.)
Berman, El Khafif, and Aufuldish each played vital roles in the graphic design of URBANbuild local global; Berman and El Khafif designed the overall structure and design of the contents of the book and the layout of all of the graphic pages, including the spatial and graphic components of the cover.
Aufuldish designed the cover text, including suggesting its fabric/material and the textual inlay. He also did all of the typography, designed all the text pieces for the book, and implemented the final navigator that enables the book to be read nonsequentially (conceived by Berman and El Khafif). He also managed the production cycle. He asserts, “. . . the project was highly collaborative. And the better for it.”
Coupled with the enviable nod AIGA gave the book, URBANbuild local global also reflects the college’s goal to increase the number of projects that are truly interdisciplinary. This particular project epitomizes CCA’s commitment that ours is a community that can nurture independence or interdependence, or both.
Berman and El Khafif describe themselves as “lovers of design—where the design of the book should be as important as its content.” Berman also confided, “I think the overlay of Graphic Design and Architecture produced a phenomenal result. We always tend to love each others' disciplines as much as our own.”
So after “careful and considered review of more than 800 entries,” jury members of the AIGA “50 Books / 50 Covers” competition selected URBANbuild local global in the image-driven books category (Architecture, design, and photography titles) for its outstanding book and book-cover design in 2009.
The competition serves to celebrate and preserve graphic design. According to the AIGA: “To assure that selections become a part of a permanent accessible historical record of notable graphic design—the AIGA Design Archives—each piece is published online with traditional credit information and is published in the AIGA annual 365: AIGA Year in Design.”
One set of the physical artifacts becomes part of the AIGA Design Archives, which is currently housed at the Denver Art Museum, and a second set becomes part of the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library within Columbia University’s Butler Library.
Additionally, selections in the 2010 “AIGA 50 Books / 50 Covers” competition will be displayed as a public exhibition scheduled to open at the AIGA National Design Center in New York in 2010. Afterward, the exhibition will travel to the various AIGA chapters throughout the United States, as well as to student groups and galleries, and then on to China in 2011.
In the official AIGA award notification letter, it states: “AIGA is committed to finding the most effective means of bringing your work to the attention of designers and others for whom this piece is an exemplar of the craft and effect of good design. We are proud to be able to publish your work in this context.”
And we are proud to have faculty members who are representing CCA with such exemplary skills.
Visit URBANbuild to learn more this project, including watching From the Ground Up, a documentary presented by Tulane URBANbuild Central City, New Orleans (May 2007, concept: Mona El Khafif and David Salkin)
More Architecture News
CCA Architecture Faculty Honored with Two ACSA Awards
Three AIA Fellowships Awarded within CCA's Architecture Community
Spanish Media to Televise Feature on Architecture Faculty Member Sandra Vivanco
More Graphic Design News
CCA Graphic Design's Jennifer Morla Awarded High Honors with AIGA Medal
Design Faculty Member Jeremy Mende Receives Rome Prize
Categories: Architecture Awards and Accolades Bookshelf Faculty Featured Graphic Design Sustainability
City in the River, City in the Forest
Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
City in the River, City in the Forest
Hag's Head Press, 2010
Paperback, 128 pages, 12.99 Euros
In this new book by Melanie Westerberg (Writing 2004), Mary is a tour guide at a remote lodge in the Amazon. There she meets Hector, who sneaks into her hammock late at night and leaves tiny gifts at her door. But then she begins to see fires on uninhabited land, hear gunshots, encounter suspicious strangers in the dead of night. She doesn’t know if it’s the start of another undeclared civil war or retribution against the lodge owner, whose husband had fought with the rebels before disappearing for a decade.
Says Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, "Melanie Westerberg has written a wondrous first book. The writing is unique and brave, and the story is as engaging as it is harrowing. It’s the sort of rare, completely original book I am always looking for and never finding."
The New Make Believe
Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
The New Make Believe
Post-Apollo Press, 2010
Paperback, 72 pages, $12
Norman Fischer says of this new book by Denise Newman (Writing faculty):
A strange intelligence guides the works in The New Make Believe toward insistent, yet nearly ineffable, redefinitions of commonplace words, as if everything were, in being named, strange. Accident, law, memorial, wolf, pants sex and other such terms participate in intense proto-symbolic musicalities to reveal (or cover) what seem to be crucial yet cheerily personal insights into what it is to be alive as or in a person surrounded by a baffling world of dark beauty and mysterious others. Denise Newman s work is here more haunting than ever, and as needful of contemplation."
Eleven Eleven's 2009–10 Winter Online Edition Now Available!
Posted on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, by Jim Norrena
I'm delighted to announce the release of issue 8 of Eleven Eleven, the winter online issue of 2009–10. You can also check out the journal's dedicated website to learn more about this issue's featured poets, writers, playwrights, translations, and other artists.
I especially want to thank the students in the MFA Program in Writing without whose work Eleven Eleven would not exist: Adam Fagin, Daniel Ishofsky, Frank Weisberg, Rheea Mukherjee, David Mitchell, Vanelis Rodriguez-Laracuente, Neil Uzzell, Erin Francisco, Scott Allen, Chelsea Trescott, Josh Breitbart, Bryan Anthony, Samantha Boudrot, Lauren Camacho, Carrie Murphy, and Rachel Volk.
Many deep thanks to Graduate Program in Design student Sarah Magrish, who designed our landing page (which in turn is drawn from last year's Rising Tide Conference), and to MFA Program in Writing student Tom Comitta, who worked heroically on the site-building side of the project.
Best,
Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Faculty Editor
Categories: Bookshelf Featured Students Writing
Raymond Carver / Todd Hido
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
Raymond Carver: Short Story Collections
Vintage
Hardcover/paperback
Redesigning Raymond Carver's backlist for the 25th anniversary of Vintage Contemporaries, the publisher decided to use the stunning and luminous suburban night photography of Todd Hido (Photography faculty) for the covers. Hido says: "This might be one of the most important and significant things that my images are ever used for. A dream, really, to contribute something to such an amazing author's body of published work. When I read Carver I see pictures. It makes me lust after going out to hunt for places to shoot. When I discovered it, it put words, stories, and characters in my mind that I had been searching for. I instinctively knew these people from my past experiences—they totally resonated with me." Read more . . .
Categories: Awards and Accolades Bookshelf Photography
Innovation X: Why a Company's Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
Innovation X: Why a Company's Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage
Jossey-Bass, 2010
Hardcover, 256 pages, $27.95
Adam Richardson (Industrial Design 1992), strategy director at the award-winning global innovation firm frog design, shows business leaders and managers how to accomplish truly effective innovation in today's disruptive climate. Richardson shows how business is filled with "X-problems"—tough new challenges that present massive innovation opportunities, but also risks. Combining frog design's approaches with insightful analysis of companies such as Apple, BMW, Clif Bar, Google, Maxtor, and Salesforce.com, Richardson illustrates how to envision and realize successful new business ventures, products, and services.
Categories: Bookshelf Industrial Design
Kota Ezawa: Odessa Staircase Redux
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
Kota Ezawa: Odessa Staircase Redux
JRP/Ringier, 2010
Hardcover, 156 pages, $35
Odessa Staircase Redux is a kind of flipbook revisiting the well-known film sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. The first frame of every cut is hand-redrawn in black ink. The ensuing series of 153 ink drawings is reorganized to form a typology of camera angles and subject matter that in turn creates a new animation of the scene in the mind of the viewer. The German-Japanese artist Kota Ezawa (Media Arts faculty) depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography, and popular culture as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes, and prints.
Categories: Bookshelf
Moby-Dick
Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
Moby-Dick
CCA, 2009
Hardcover, 136 pages, $30
Designed by Jon Sueda (Graphic Design faculty), this Wattis Institute exhibition catalog pays homage to the classic 1930 Random House edition of Herman Melville's canonical novel Moby-Dick. It features artworks and biographies of 33 artists, more than half of whom were commissioned to create new work in response to the novel’s wide-ranging and evocative themes. It also features a foil-stamped cover, a fold-out map, essays by Jens Hoffmann (CCA Wattis Institute director) and Alexander Nemerov, and full-color illustrations.
Categories: Bookshelf Graphic Design Wattis Institute
URBANbuild local global
Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook
URBANbuild local global
William Stout, 2009
Paperback, 464 pages, $60
Awarded the “AIGA 50 Books / 50 Covers” competition as one of the top examples of outstanding book design in 2009.
This book is most notably a documentation of the work of URBANbuild, a program launched by Ila Berman (director of Architecture) to be a unique multiscaled laboratory for city research as well as a vehicle to generate innovative design strategies to aid in New Orleans's urban revitalization. This program primarily focused its investigations on culturally significant neighborhoods central to the core of the city that had been severely damaged, not only by Hurricane Katrina but also by a long history of neglect and urban decay. The book is coauthored by Mona El Khafif (Architecture faculty) and designed by Bob Aufuldish (Graphic Design faculty).
Categories: Architecture Bookshelf Graphic Design
News RSS