Andrew Blauvelt – författare

Exploring the paradox of design in our daily livesIn the past decade, designers have become increasingly engaged with the quotidian. This shift away from more strictly formal and functional concerns has allowed them to freely explore design's contexts and effects. A light that responds to silence, a table that knows where it is, a pig farm the size of a skyscraper, a coat that becomes a tent, a house that fits in your pocket--these projects by innovators in the field of design question the habitual, transform the commonplace, alter our notions of dwelling and blur the boundaries between form and function. Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life explores the paradox of design in our daily lives. Anonymous and conspicuous, familiar and strange, design surrounds us while fading from view, becoming second nature to us and yet remaining still somehow elusive. This exhibition catalogue includes more than 40 innovative projects drawn internationally from the fields of architecture, product, furniture, fashion and graphic design. Among the designers and architects featured are Shigeru Ban, MVRDV, LOT-EK, Atelier Bow-Wow, Dunne & Raby, Marcel Wanders, Michael Anastassiades, Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym, and Allan Wexler. This richly illustrated volume includes essays on the tactics of formlessness and its impact on everyday consumption, the potential of an endlessly transformable environment to extend product lifecycles, and ruminations on the strange and familiar worlds of design.

The Walker Art Center recently opened its expanded space, which includes a new theater, a new restaurant and more galleries, but is best known for being Herzog & de Meuron's first public building in the United States. The project drew national coverage from media including The New York Times. Expanding the Center addresses this public interest in the building with a generous selection of images, including sketches, renderings and photographs of the construction process and the completed work. Herzog & de Meuron's shimmering but grounded design mirrors the textures and shades of the Walker's original space, and an institutional philosophy based in innovation and risk-taking, the exploration of alternative approaches to learning, the experimental use of technologies to communicate information, and the design of spaces to enhance a variety of museum experiences. The book is organized around the decisions and actions of the architects, builders, Walker staff and the audience--i.e. designing, constructing, unveiling, staging, gathering, patterning, framing, collecting--and highlights the thinking that led to the visible form of the Center as well as the innovative projects and initiatives that give it its inimitable character.

The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christopher Ballantyne, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, Worlds Away demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. Conceived as a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding suburban life, the catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.

The first monograph on American midcentury textile pioneer and interior designer Ruth Adler SchneeThis monograph presents the work of textile and interior designer Ruth Adler Schnee (b. 1923), still in active practice at age 96, affirming her pivotal role in the development of the modern interior. At the core of this volume, published to accompany the first major museum retrospective of Adler Schnee’s work, is the body of textile patterns she has created over the course of her prolific seven-decade career, including the screen-printed fabrics that helped define midcentury American modernism as well as their later iterations as woven textiles. One of the first women to receive an MFA in Design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, these designs have been the thread that connects Adler Schnee’s diverse production and many professional networks, crossing between her and her husband’s retail entrepreneurship and her interior design commissions and architectural collaborations (Adler Schnee is also famed for her collaborations with Alexander Girard, Minoru Yamasaki and Frank Lloyd Wright). With more than 80 color plates, an illustrated chronology and three critical essays, Ruth Adler Schnee: Modern Designs for Living presents the definitive narrative of the designer’s oeuvre. Contributors include Susan Brown, who provides a survey of Adler Schnee’s textile designs and production, Deborah Lubera Kawsky, who narrates a biographical sketch of the designer’s life and business, and Ian Gabriel Wilson, who presents a historical analysis of Adler Schnee’s interior design commissions and architectural collaborations. A history of midcentury modern American design through the work of one of its under-recognized protagonists, Ruth Adler Schnee: Modern Designs for Living is an essential, long-overdue volume.

Parallel Cities examines the history of the multilevel city with a focus on elevated pedestrian systems as a recurrent concept in urban planning and design. The book chronicles the evolution and migration of this concept from 19th-century French social utopian thinkers and 20th-century Soviet Constructivist architectural circles to its incubation in postwar London, its theorization by members of CIAM and Team 10, and its eventual dissemination to North America and Asia, where extensive systems were built in cities such as Minneapolis, Calgary and Hong Kong. This fascinating and untold history explores an architectural idea as it evolves under varying social, geographic and political contexts—charting its use as an ever-shifting multipurpose tool to segregate or commingle the classes, foster social cohesion and the public good, facilitate security and surveillance, improve pedestrian safety and traffic flows, or to enhance retail consumption by ameliorating climatic extremes. The implementation of streets above streets creates parallel cities, not mirrored but alternate realities where questions about access, use and control emerge. The book considers both radical visionary schemes of the future urban metropolis by progressive architects and the grand, if visually more mundane, implementation plans of extensive networks built in cities around the world that engender what the authors call a surreptitious urbanism. The first and only comprehensive book on the subject, Parallel Cities represents important new scholarly research on a topic that remains a persistent theme in architecture and urban planning. Accompanying the extensively illustrated text is a lexicon of related terms and an appendix of specific systems drawn from key cities.