12 books on design and architecture for 12 months
A selection of worth reading for all design lovers
There are 12 books recommended for the year ahead. 12 as the thoughts they share, and 12 as the stories they enable us to enter. There are portraits of “anti-heroic” women collected in the Oilà series edited by Chiara Alessi for Electa, and then there is the body, which the Italian essayist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vittorio Lingiardi restores to the center of all contemporary scenes. There is its movement, as traced by the rafts, design metaphors to which the reflections of Francesco Faccin for Corraini Editore are anchored, and there is the Roman Zibaldone, Campo’s atlas, which maps paths to redraw the boundaries of the mother discipline, namely architecture. The architecture that Ukko de Ukki explains to children is “beautiful if it brings hope” and becomes testimony when, as happens in the reports by Giovanna Silva and Emila Giorgi, it reveals cultures still inaccessible. As Giulia Ceriani, with a PhD in language sciences, suggests, squeezed between the insignificance and senselessness of the times we are going through, we need to reverse course. We need to return to the (lost) sense of things, to explore the recesses of the soul and of needs, to investigate, and then negotiate new forms of consumption and design, even more attentive to the planet. This Ferreol Babin and Matteo Ward do, as mold-breaking champions of design and fashion. Or as we read in certain pages: those by Antonio Monda, who rediscovers the value of relationships in encounters, and those shared by Stefano Boeri and Amos Gitai, who discover themselves in generative dialogue, to return to the word. To its innermost, silent value.
OILA’ (collana Electa)
“A tent resting on the rocks” is “a place that favored the happiest days, with absolute independence and at the same time the joy of being together”, “a shared space”, “but also rooms for maturing independently”. This is how Cini Boeri, as recounted by Cristina Moro, designed the house for her family, in Sardinia, on the island of La Maddalena. With Francesca Alinovi and Irene Brin, they are the new protagonists of the Oilà series, in bookstores from 12 November 2024. Edited by Chiara Alessi for Electa, with the graphic design by Leonardo Sonnoli, the series of these short “anti-heroic” biographies of women and professionals of the last century (artists, designers, scientists, writers...) was created to free the protagonists from the role of both queens and victims, presenting universal stories and details of their struggles under a magnifying glass.
UKKO de UKKI (Collana ed. Corraini)
The statement says it all: architecture, of all the arts, is the greatest, the most important these days. And again: “Architecture is beautiful if it brings hope, ideas and foresight for a new world,” says Ukko de Ukki, inviting us to reflect on the importance of building a better future, brick by brick. Ukko de Ukki is the conscience of Michele De Lucchi, as well as the protagonist of “The Architect”. Together with “Idee in rima” and “Ma tu chi sei?”, the booklets are a journey into the world of design seen through the eyes of the Italian master: the illustrations and rhymes are his way of enabling children of all ages to discover the wonders of architecture, the great challenges of the present and future, and the changes that are forever reshaping the appearance of our world and our cities. And in the midst of all this, rediscovering the role of the architect as a possibility.
UNIVERSO SATELLITE. 25 anni di/ years of SaloneSatellite, edited by Beppe Finessi (ed. Corraini)
“We have always called it the ‘Satellite’, but over time it has become a true ‘Universe’,” writes the author, “ever since Marva Griffin Wilshire conceived, designed and inaugurated it in 1998.” The volume is a tribute to the dedication and affection of its godmother and a quarter of a century of ideas, encounters and innovations that have appeared in this laboratory to mark the panorama of contemporary design. More than 1,200 images, previously unpublished documents and personal accounts have been selected to convey the complexity and richness of a project created to give a voice to young creatives, which has become a global landmark over time. From the first prototypes to the objects that have entered industrial production, “Universo Satellite” goes beyond mere cataloguing to trace the evolutionary path of many designers today recognized as leading figures in the field and gives itself to the public. A marvelous Wunderkammer that hugs us in a collective embrace for Marva.
FERREOL BABIN. Enigmatic Refractions/ Barbara Brondi & Marco Rainò (Quodlibet Studio.Design)
“Consciously functional and then emotionally poetic, his projects lend themselves to an often ambivalent interpretation.” This passage shows how necessary the book is. The objects styled by the French designer Ferréol Babin are inscribed in an original typological category, straddling archaic artifact and ultra-contemporary product. Characterized by a refined formal purity, these works made as single specimens or in series, are experiments of craft inspiration that aim to recover – or preserve – a profoundly human dimension and a relationship of essential connection with nature, its materials and its life cycles.
INVERSIONI. SENSO DELL’INSENSATO/ Giulia Ceriani (Mimesis)
A semiologist of trends with a doctorate in Language Sciences, the author is one of the most acute observers of evolutionary scenarios: Crosscut, Rehab and Endurance are the post-Covid-19 trends presented with her observatory Baba Consulting. The book tells of the times we are living through, characterized by an apparent bulimia of meaning. “We are sucked into hypertextuality, intertextuality, excesses, excrescences, hypertrophies: from media saturation to the fascination of big data, from the dispersion of reticularity to the eternal Escherian return of gaming. Multiplication by excess produces desemantization,” a difficult, slippery, only apparently inexplicable category. The publication highlights the relevance of at least two modes of negation of meaning: on the one hand, insignificance, which enunciates the lack of recognizable meaning. And, on the other, senselessness, as an epiphany of the absurd.
SAUDISCAPES. Un viaggio polifonico in Arabia Saudita/ Giovanna Silva, Emilia Giorgi (Nero Editions)
“What Giovanna Silva saw in 2019 through her viewfinder, in some cases has now disappeared or has become something else. Because Riyadh and Jeddah are at the center of major architectural and urban redevelopments, as well as far-reaching social changes,” declares Emila Giorgi in introducing the book, which is a physical and mental journey in Saudi Arabia. The country, inaccessible to visitors for some ten years, has opened its borders to those with an electronic tourist visa. It is the architecture studio Schiattarella Associati of Rome, engaged in a significant number of projects in the Middle East, that has commissioned the photographer and curator to bring to light the traces, often minute and hidden, of past buildings, remains and traditions in the cities now at the center of extensive architectural, urban and social transformations. So restoring the role of cultural activator to reportage.
CORPO, UMANO/ Vittorio Lingiardi (Giulio Einaudi Editore)
The clue is in the title: the comma that imposes a pause, respiratory and mental, within which to look for one’s own body, today at the center of a thousand attentions, but of no care. Vittorio Lingiardi’s book brings the body back to the forefront, with sensitivity and a voice that interprets the infinite disciplines that observe it, tells of liver and brain, eyes and heart. The organs that allow us to be in the world, in relation to space and other bodies. The search for contact and attachment, the turmoil of adolescence, the experience of illness, the awakening of desire, the metamorphoses of gender: anatomical, pathophysiological, social, political, religious, aesthetic, naked, dressed, dancing, energetic, tired, the ‘body, human’ is an enchanted evocation. Which brings us back to ourselves.
ZIBALDONE/Campo (Veii)
Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro and Davide Sacconi, the “four musketeers of architecture”, moving freely through the media, disciplines and generations, in their texts present a collective portrait of the debate on the mother discipline and the city of the last decade. A hybrid object, half diary, half anthology, atlas and scrapbook, collection of postcards and visual essay, the Zibaldone records the activity of CAMPO — a dynamic platform that unites experiments, investigations and research methods — to expand the community. The Zibaldone is an invitation to readers to build their own paths, to draw constellations by connecting the dots. The Zibaldone is an opportunity to open a reflection on curatorial practice as a means of building a shared knowledge of architecture.
ZATTERE. Allegorie di progetto/ Francesco Faccin (Corraini Edizioni)
“A tribute to the raft that is an allegory of a journey that unites us and a metaphor for our intrepid nature, which we often tend to forget. The very path of humanity from its dawn is a bumpy and uninstructed journey, filled with beauty and dark moments.” So writes the author at the beginning of his book, which tells of the need of all of us to set off, to travel, to migrate. We, too, are castaways and, “as castaways we advance alternating hope for the future and the terror of death, the production of beauty and horror”. For those who know Francesco, over the years he has approached the intensity of his works, the poignant reflection that conceals every single design gesture, and his deep disappointment for certain distortions of the design system, sometimes overflowing into the darkest skepticism. The raft is light: it appears as a form of redemption, intimate and fragile, which seems to free him from a perennial shipwreck of thought. And saves him, anchoring him to the project. “The raft is an imaginative, indispensable object, which in the history of humanity has represented in various forms the ability to adapt and attachment to life beyond any reasonable optimism or the desire to go elsewhere.”
FUORIMODA! Storie e proposte per restituire valore a ciò che indossiamo/ Matteo Ward (DeAgostini)
Buying only what we need (or little more), consuming less and better, choosing with awareness, demanding, as far as possible, greater clarity about what we buy, making our voices heard as consumers and as citizens. Fuorimoda! is a journey through the streets of a sprawling industry, in which Ward addresses both those who buy clothes and those who create them, in search of viable solutions, capable of: triggering a process of change; restoring to fashion design the power to preserve the variety of the world; understanding that responsible fashion is not an option for the few but a necessity for all. The book also has a circular structure, which from 1678, when the Sun King decreed that, from that moment on, clothes would go out of fashion, to his minister Colbert, who invented the ‘seasons’, to today’s contributions, by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Sara Sozzani Maino.
INCONTRI RAVVICINATI/ Antonio Monda (I Fari)
Reading Annalena Benini, “Il Foglio” wrote, “This twenty-year-old, wearing huge spectacles, returned to the hotel in the evening, and the astonished concierge told him: ‘Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bernard Malamud were looking for you. But who are you?” It brings to mind the anecdotes about Gianni Minà, and his diary. The pieces about the unforgettable Massimo Troisi as a guest of Maurizio Costanzo are unforgettable. From Rome to New York: this is where Antonio Monda’s stories are set, in the city with which he has cultivated an absolute relationship. From his first arrival in the Big Apple to his international success in literature and cinema, here he has formed friendships, ties and acquaintances that have found in the convivial moments of his home a complicit place, in which to confide and dialogue across the board. From Meryl Streep to Al Pacino, David Foster Wallace, Martin Scorsese, Cate Blanchett and Robert De Niro: the book is a sequence shot of faces and personalities, not only American, who have marked the world of cinema, literature, world culture. The big screen is a world of human characters and spaces that never leaves the project indifferent but nourishes it.
A PRIVATE GLOSSARY/ Stefano Boeri e Amos Gitai (Rizzoli)
A team effort, which combines skills to interlace the disciplines of design and cinema, theater and the performing arts to give life to what Maria Lucrezia De Marco and Alberto Berruto term “generative dialogue”. The Milanese architect and the Israeli director, reconnecting the threads of a dialogue that began in 2017 to give their public a “private glossary” in which memories, lived and shared experiences, nurture words with meaning. To rediscover their strength. The book is a mosaic of themes, of yesterday and today, always relevant, that cross the lives of the protagonists: a foray into experience that responds to the urgency of both to condense their views of the contemporary geopolitical situation. Under the heading “Solid Sea”, the Mediterranean with all its stories, the experience of Multiplicity: “After all, Mediterranean houses are like movies. And, like their cities, they are by nature open to the unpredictability of the flow of life.”
