In this accessible volume, first published in 1969, Fuller offers advice on how to guide spaceship earth toward a sustainable future

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartographer, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, and one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time. For more than five decades, he set forth his comprehensive perspective on the world's problems in numerous essays, which offer an illuminating insight into the intellectual universe of this renaissance man. These texts remain surprisingly topical even today, decades after their initial publication. While Fuller wrote the works in the 1960's and 1970's, they could not be more timely: like desperately needed time-capsules of wisdom for the critical moment he foresaw, and in which we find ourselves. Long out of print, they are now being published again, together with commentary by Jaime Snyder, the grandson of Buckminster Fuller. Designed for a new generation of readers, Snyder prepared these editions with supplementary material providing background on the texts, factual updates, and interpretation of his visionary ideas.

Initially published in 1969, and one of Fuller's most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity, and the principles for avoiding extinction and exercising our option to make it. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide spaceship earth toward a sustainable future.And it Came to Pass - Not to Stay brings together Buckminster Fuller's lyrical and philosophical best, including seven essays in a form he called his ventilated prose, and as always addressing the current global crisis and his predictions for the future. These essays, including How Little I Know, What I am Trying to Do, Soft Revolution, and Ethics, put the task of ushering in a new era of humanity in the context of always starting with the universe. In rare form, Fuller elegantly weaves the personal, the playful, the simple, and the profound.

Rethinking the intimate relationship between humans and design, from primitive tools and ornamentation to the constant buzz of modern social media

The question are we human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multidimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media.
The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design.
Colomina's and Wigley's field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.
Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality and media. She is Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University and Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. Her work has been published in more than 25 languages and her books include Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies, Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, Domesticity at War, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media and Sexuality and Space.
Mark Wigley is professor of architecture at Columbia University. A historian and theorist, he explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture and technology. His books include: Derrida's Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction; White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture; Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire; and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He is the co-author of Are We Human: Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Beatriz Colomina, in association with their curation of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. He has also curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Drawing Center in New York; the Witte de With and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. His latest book is Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Lars Müller, 2018). He was born in New Zealand, trained there as an architect, then as a scholar, and is based in New York.

An important manual for young designers from Italian modernist Massimo Vignelli

The famous Italian designer Massimo Vignelli allows us a glimpse of his understanding of good design in this book, its rules and criteria. He uses numerous examples to convey applications in practice - from product design via signaletics and graphic design to Corporate Design. By doing this he is making an important manual available to young designers that in its clarity both in terms of subject matter and visually is entirely committed to Vignelli's modern design.

An intimate guided journey into Louis Kahn s craft and imagination, this book weaves its texts around the drawings of Kahn and his associates to accompany this master architect on his creative search

The importance of a drawing is immense, because it's the architect's language, said the architect Louis Kahn to his masterclass in 1967. While most studies of Kahn focus on his built works or theory and use drawings mainly to illustrate these, this publication chooses to focus on Kahn's drawings as primary sources of insight into his architectural intelligence and imagination. Lavishly illustrated with over 900 high-quality reproductions of work by Kahn and his associates, incisively presented by a group of acclaimed architectural experts, The Importance of a Drawing is a deep immersion into Kahn's work and his design process.
A testament to Kahn's masterly craft, this volume also makes a provocative primer on architectural representation by posing timely questions on how architects use drawings to see, learn, conjecture and reveal. Destined to become a standard reference on Kahn, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of established designers as well as students of architecture.
The result of years of extensive research, The Importance of a Drawing contains original contributions and historical texts from Michael Merrill, Michael Benedikt, Michael B. Cadwell, Louis I. Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, David Leatherbarrow, Michael J. Lewis, Robert McCarter, Marshall D. Meyers, Jane Murphy, Harriet Pattison, Gina Pollara, Colin Rowe, David Van Zanten, Richard Wesley and William Whitaker.
Louis Kahn (1901-74) was an Estonian-born American architect who called Philadelphia his home. Trained in the tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts, Kahn was later able to fuse a progressive modern agenda with the poise of ancient monuments into a work of seminal and lasting importance. His major works include the National Parliament in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas; and the posthumously realized Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Kahn was a revered educator, teaching at the Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957 and then at the University of Pennsylvania until his death.

Muji's art director shares his own personal creative process

Kenya Hara inspires the world with his impeccable design, from the subtle atmospheres and environments he creates as the art director of Muji and his ethereal exhibition designs to his simple everyday objects, packaging and books. His design aesthetic can be traced back to a private practice: the diligent drafting of ideas and forms in delicate sketches and drawings that ultimately develop into compelling solutions. For the first time in his career, Hara gives insight into the captivating early stages of his design process.
Ranging from tentatively sketched beginnings to confident designs of complex concepts, Draw immerses readers in the renowned designer's 40-year-long process of sketching and drawing by hand, leaving no doubt about the origins of his authentic designs. From Olympic logos to silhouettes of dogs and detailed drawings of knots, Hara's drawings are as expansive in subject matter as they are minimalist. Their technical skill engenders a true appreciation for draftsmanship, and could motivate even the most art-averse person to start doodling. Set to inspire the next generation of creatives, Draw is a gentle, persuasive call for the return to analog processes in the design cycle.
Kenya Hara (born 1958) graduated from Musashino Art University in Western Tokyo, and has been a member of its design faculty since 2003. Since 2001, Hara has served as the art director of Muji. His previous books on design include Designing Design, Designing Japan and 100 Whites.

Following the worldwide success of his Poemotion trilogy, Takahiro Kurashima's latest book delights the eye with ingenious visual play

Kurashima's interactive book objects feature graphic patterns that are animated by the reader/viewer with a special foil contained within the book, so that figures and forms are created out of optical overlays, set in motion and then disappear again.

Here, an astonishing panorama of unseen moir effects (i.e. interference patterns produced when an opaque ruled pattern with gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern) unfolds. Kurashima deploys the digital tools for his creations with tremendous virtuosity, while also evoking and alluding to the rich precedents of kinetic art. Moir motion offers contemplative recreation for our eyes.

Takahiro Kurashima (born 1970) studied at the Musashino Art University and since 1993 has lived in Tokyo, where he works as an artist and designer. He collaborates with artists from various genres such as fashion, design and music. Kurashima's series Poemotion 1-3 is known all over the world.

An architectural history of light--both natural and artificial--and its physical, sociopolitical and spiritual properties

Beirut-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh (born 1980) specializes in ultra-contemporary, sustainable public and industrial buildings made from locally sourced natural materials. Her 2023 design for the Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, using the region's traditional bricks, was the first manufacturing building in France to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Light, another natural and physical phenomenon, has also been another source of inspiration for Ghotmeh. Her research on this topic, collected in Windows of Light, draws upon examples from centuries of visual culture. Ghotmeh explores the symbols, myths and innovations of light, and outlines how it fundamentally shapes our biological, astronomical and architectural environments. Anchoring the many representations of light is a photographic narrative that reminds us that access to artificial light in many regions of the world remains a privilege rather than a right.

A tribute to long overlooked Japanese icons and images, from an influential figure behind the success of MUJI

Representing a new generation of designers in Japan, Kenya Hara (born 1958) pays tribute to his mentors, using long overlooked Japanese icons and images in much of his work. In Designing Design, he impresses upon the reader the importance of emptiness in both the visual and philosophical traditions of Japan, and its application to design, made visible by means of numerous examples from his own work: Hara for instance designed the opening and closing ceremony programs for the Nagano Winter Olympic Games 1998. In 2001, he enrolled as a board member for the Japanese label MUJI and has considerably moulded the identity of this successful corporation as communication and design advisor ever since. Kenya Hara, alongside Naoto Fukasawa one of the leading design personalities in Japan, has also called attention to himself with exhibitions such as Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century.

Since the 1970s Wolfgang Weingart has exerted a decisive influence on the international development of typography. In the late 1960s he instilled creativity and a desire for experimentation into the ossified Swiss typographical industry and reflected this renewal in his own work. Countless designers have been inspired by his teaching at the Basel School of Design and by his lectures. In Typography Weingart gives an unusual and frank narrative of his early life and development as a designer. For the first time he gives a comprehensive survey of his works over the past forty years, most of which are unknown.

Inverting Learning from Las Vegas to build a new dialogue between two of the world's most opulent cities

When architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, they revolutionized architecture by claiming that the lessons the American desert town had to offer equaled those of the Eternal City. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza, they declared. Organized to mark the 50th anniversary of this landmark publication, Rome - Las Vegas creates a dialogue between these two cities through specially commissioned images by renowned Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan (born 1975). This project inverts the directive to look from Rome to Las Vegas and instead frames Las Vegas as the model for Rome. Beyond the obvious Italianate designs of Caesars Palace, Baan's photographs survey the entirety of the Strip to create an all-encompassing dialogue between these two cities--one young and compact, the other ancient and sprawling, yet both indelibly marked by wealth, opulence and power. These images question whether we can regard architecture without moral judgment--which Scott Brown and Venturi suggested for studying Las Vegas--in the ecological and social contexts of the 21st century.

How schools merge knowledge with action and prepare the next generation of architects for tackling the climate crisis

As humanity grapples with the climate crisis, architectural pedagogy finds itself at a critical juncture. Architecture schools not only must contribute to envisioning better futures but also equipping the next generation of architects with the audacity to question, project, explore and imagine alternative solutions. Transcalar Prospects in Climate Crisis offers a vital compilation of research projects and essays reflecting the investigative efforts at EPFL Architecture. Addressing critical issues like material uses, land and soil degradation, environmental justice and circular urban flows, the book brings together diverse, entangled perspectives and transcalar vantage points. It is a must-read for architects, urban planners, designers, scholars and anyone seeking knowledge and inspiration for climate action, urging a conscious and critical response to one of the most pressing issues of our time.

A multiauthored portrait of the Swiss open-air museum documenting centuries of historic homes and the enchanting details of vernacular architecture

Founded in 1978, Ballenberg is a legendary Swiss open-air architectural museum that gathers more than 100 residential and agricultural buildings from the 14th to the 19th centuries, from almost all of the cantons of Switzerland, which have been transported to the museum from their original sites. Together these buildings show how architecture, furnishings and tools expressed the needs of everyday life in their design and execution. Traditional handicrafts such as basket-weaving, forging, braiding, spinning, weaving and carving are also kept alive in Ballenberg's on-site workshops.
Edited by Rolf Fehlbaum, entrepreneur and long-time driving force behind Vitra, this beautiful publication is an invitation to discover and explore the world of things with fresh eyes. A Way of Life compiles photographs, observations and discoveries made at Ballenberg by the acclaimed designers Jasper Morrison and David Saik and the architect Tsuyoshi Tane, who all share a fascination with the simple, the practical and the functionally beautiful. In concise, elegant writing, Morrison, Saik and Tane comment on the design ingenuities in various features of the buildings. The book's superb photography celebrates the traces of wear and tear on door handles, benches, columns, brick tile floors and other architectural details that testify to a bygone ethos of enduring utility and economic common sense. A Way of Life serves as an encouragement to designers and consumers alike to resist trends and fads, and to critically evaluate the objects of everyday use in terms of utility and aesthetics.

A window into the world of functional everyday design

The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of super normal design alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable peeler or a simple plastic bag, there are design classics like Marcel Breuer's tubular steel side table, Dieter Ram's 606 shelving system, or Joe Colombo's Optic alarm clock of 1970. With products by Newson, Grcic, the Azumis, and the Bouroullec brothers, it also represents the generation to which Morrison and Fukasawa belong. The phenomenon of the super normal is located, as it were, beyond space and time; the past and present of product design both point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is already lying exposed before us; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available: we need only open our eyes; Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.

An updated edition of the essential guide to the 21st century's new infrastructure of oppression and surveillance

Now in a new edition with updated statistics, texts and other materials, Handbook of Tyranny portrays the routine cruelties of the 21st century through a series of detailed nonfictional graphic illustrations. None of these cruelties represent extraordinary violence--they reflect day-to-day implementation of laws and regulations around the globe. Every page of the book questions our current world of walls and fences, police tactics and prison cells, crowd control and refugee camps. The dry and factual style of storytelling through technical drawings is the graphic equivalent of bureaucratic rigidity, just as the detailed illustrations mirror the repressive efforts of global authorities.
The 21st century shows a general striving for an ever-more-regulated and protected society. Handbook of Tyranny gives a profound insight into the relationship between political power, territoriality and systematic cruelties.
Theo Deutinger (born 1971) is an architect, writer and designer of sociocultural studies. He is founder and head of TD, an office that combines architecture with research, visualization and conceptual thinking in all scale levels from global planning, urban master plans and architecture to graphical and journalistic work.

The chair as sculptural object: a surprising and delightful parade of seating that's not always for sitting--from Ron Arad and Mary Heilmann to Maria Pergay and Richard Tuttle

The chairs in this book are not for everyday use. Occupying a unique terrain between design and art, they are sometimes intended to be sat on--but equally and most importantly, they explore the sculptural possibilities of the chair. The generous layout of this fun, surprising and substantial volume allows readers to fully immerse themselves in its many curiosities and give their imagination free rein. Nicolas Polli and Jean Vincent Simonet use their photographic essays to interpret these modern and contemporary chairs, while texts examine their fruitful friction between art and design and explain their significance in the life of their collector, Thierry Barbier-Mueller.
Designers and artists include: Ron Arad, Arca, Alexey Brodovitch, Choi Byung-Hun, Sandro Chia, Niki de Saint Phalle, Tom Dixon, Front Design, Frank Gehry, Godspeed, Michael Graves, Gruppe B.R.A.N.D., Mary Heilmann, Steven Holl, Richard Hutten, Franco Joly, Donald Judd, Shiro Kuramata, Daniel Libeskind, Xavier Lust, Javier Mariscal, Jasper Morrison, Bruno Munari, Marc Newson, Isamu Noguchi, Objects of Common Interest, Werner Panton, Maria Pergay, Tejo Remy, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, Richard Tuttle, Maria Uys, Franz West and Zoom Design.

Socialism through design: how product and graphic design enhanced social cohesion in Allende's Chile

During Salvador Allende's tenure as president (1970-73), graphic and product design in Chile expressed powerful socialist messages of solidarity and social cohesion. This volume looks at a range of innovative items made in this era, from affordable objects designed for popular circulation such as TVs, record players and chairs, and the innovations behind them, to the visual iconography of protest. The presentation of these works is structured around how to themes such as how to design a peaceful road to socialism; how to address child poverty; how to implement material justice; how to deploy politics in the street; how to improve everyday life; how to nationalize technological innovation; how to design universities connected to the community; how to democratize transportation; and how to foster literacy through book design. How to Design a Revolution makes an exemplary case of an extraordinary era for both socialist and design history.

Sketches and notes for Chandigarh from Le Corbusier's first reconnaissance trip to India

This facsimile edition of the notebook kept by Le Corbusier (1887-1965) from his two-week stay in the area that would become Chandigarh, the new capital city of the Indian state of Punjab, presents his written or sketched memos and personal reflections as well as notes and schematic solutions elaborated during meetings. Album Punjab constitutes a primary source for reconstructing the topics addressed by the small group of planners and governmental officials who in only a few days developed the outlines of the Chandigarh plan.
The spiralbound notebook facsimile is accompanied by a paperback volume featuring previously unpublished photographs taken by Le Corbusier's cousin Pierre Jeanneret during the journey. He documented the landscape and people that the architects encountered upon their arrival--a scenario destined to totally change with the birth of the great city. A detailed commentary by architectural historian Maristella Casciato is also included. The two volumes are housed in a slipcase.

Beautifully executed architectural drawings from the great Sri Lankan architect

The Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa fused sensitivity for local context with the technological discoveries and design principles of modernism. Accordingly, Bawa often incorporated materials (local stone and timber) and layouts (high roofs, cross-ventilation, vast overhangs) specific to Sri Lanka's monsoon climate and storied architectural history--from the cave monasteries of the Anuradhapura period to the feudal Walauwa style of manor houses--into his modernist designs.
Gathering together essays by scholars and writers across a multitude of disciplines--including architecture, photography, geography, urban design and art history--this volume spotlights Bawa's exceptionally beautiful architectural drawings, delving into the central, multipronged role of the medium in his practice, from ideation to instruction to post-construction review. The anthology also explores the identity of post-independence Sri Lanka, which Bawa helped to shape--aesthetically and, less overtly, ideologically. Featuring over 200 lush drawings and photographs, many of which have never been published before, the book promises to engage both general and scholarly audiences with interests in architecture, drawing and archives.
Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003) was a Sri Lankan architect who designed the country's new Parliament building at Kotte, completed in 1982. While Bawa mostly worked within Sri Lanka, he also completed projects in several other countries, including India, Indonesia, Mauritius, Japan, Pakistan, Fiji, Egypt and Singapore. His works include houses, hotels, schools, clubs, offices and government buildings.

A close look at an astonishing architectural achievement situated among other Swiss masterworks

With more than 150 illustrations, this monograph offers the first in-depth look at the genesis of the Steiger House, a masterpiece of modern Swiss architecture, situated in the Doldertal in Zurich near other modernist houses, such as the Doldertal Houses by Roth and Breuer (1936) and the Fellowship Home (1960). Its central hall relates to Villa la Rotonda by Andrea Palladio. Detailed analyses illustrate the central layout and outline the chronology, typology and construction of the building. Further contributions illuminate its relation to local topography, the cultural context of the building, and important historical and contemporary architectural references, including the Steiger House's famous neighbors, the Doldertal Houses. The Swiss architect couple Flora Steiger-Crawford (1899-1991, also a sculptor) and Rudolf Steiger (1900-82) are important representatives of the Swiss avant-garde, and Flora Crawford was the first female architect to graduate from ETH Zurich.

For Fuller, nature is the most exquisite technology we know; and what underlies all of his work is the quest to uncover nature's fundamental principles--in order to foster their manifestation as a pattern integrity 'for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship.' -Jaime Lawrence Snyder, Lars Müller Fuller Series Editor

A Los Angeles Times 2021 holiday gift guide pick

The work of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is among the most extraordinary and inventive in 20th-century design and architecture, not least for its incorporation of a range of intellectual and technical disciplines. Fuller described himself as an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.''

R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking is a major reassessment of Fuller's legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences. Drawing extensively on his archive and with over 300 images, the book follows Fuller's explorations of geometry, language and intellectual property in their relation to design principles and pedagogy, organizing its survey of Fuller's work through parallel conceptual threads rather than in a linear chronology of his career.

Daniel López-Pérez is an associate professor and a founding faculty member of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego. By way of several publications and curatorial projects, López-Pérez has emerged as an authority on Fuller, having edited Fuller in Mexico (2015) and R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man (2013), the latter of which was picked as Design Book of the Year by Architect magazine. He was also the curator of a week of lectures and exhibitions on Fuller at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.