Designers Books

Wonderful overview of this prolific designer's work. Love especially the interior shots. A wonderful tribute.

Black Frog's doodles are charming and funny, the quality of the line work is astounding, this is a must have for anyone going into illustration or animation!

I had been looking for notebooks that were well designed and stylish. I was a fan of the other PaperBlanks books but this notebook was simple and rugged. It has a flap that closes with a magnet to keep the notebook closed when its flopping around in my bag. Works perfect for me.

A great book for visual identification of certain Blenko glass pieces and colors.

full of cute and cool images of 60s! so young and fresh, i miss 60s in London. is there unabridged version? i need it madly..

I enjoyed reading about the different styles of garden designers. It broadens the possibilities in your own garden. Beautiful pictures. It's not for the beginner gardener.

We bridge difficulties. We like a bridge over troubled waters. We needed a bridge into the new millennium. Bridges have a hold on us in a way that other examples of civil engineering do not. And we often don't notice them as we use them. Although I had traveled on the Natchez Trace Parkway many times, upheld by a bridge in Franklin, Tennessee, I had never looked down and appreciated the span until alerted to it a couple of years ago. It is a beautiful, big, parabolic concrete arch which I now get off and admire fairly often. According to _Bridges: The Spans of North America_ (Norton) by David Plowden, I am not alone. This bridge "is unlike any heretofore built in America and has been the recipient of innumerable awards." Calling attention to the bridges we take for granted, and telling a history of American bridge building, Plowden's book is fittingly big, and displays his beautiful black and white pictures in large format, splendidly reproduced. It is properly sized for the coffee table, but the text is appropriately comprehensive, and as worth reading as the pictures are worth admiring.

_Bridges_ is divided into chronological sections based on the materials used: stone and brick; wood; iron; steel (divided into three time periods, since there are so many steel bridges); and concrete. Erecting a stone bridge was expensive and time consuming, especially compared to using wood. There are more miles of wooden bridges than any other type in America, although Plowden has little good to say about the "cult of the covered bridge" which has obscured the trusswork he thinks is the important part of these wooden bridges. Iron was used for bridges for only a short time, and iron bridges are the rarest of bridge artifacts. Concrete bridges are the way to go for the main bridge-building impetus in America, the highway system. Reinforced concrete does extremely well for piers to hold bridges up, as well as for the flats that carry traffic. Plowden spends many pages on the most famous type of bridge, the steel spans, and his pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge present them in new ways, and he hurtles through the engrossing stories of their construction because they are relatively familiar. The stories of lesser known bridges, such as the wonderful Eads bridge in St. Louis (built by Captain James Eads, of few engineering credentials and no bridge experience) bring to light many surprising difficulties and solutions the bridge builders came up with.

Plowden's history serves as a demonstration of engineering problem-solving. Each bridge is unique in purpose, location, and difficulties of completion. This is true even in replacement bridges. Many of these beautiful photographs show bridges that are no longer existent. There have been bridge failures, of course, but usually bridges built in the nineteenth century show signs of distress, and are called out of commission. Sometimes railroads simply no longer need a particular link. There are, however, new vistas for bridge building, especially in the straits and bays that have needed bridges and now have proposals for bridges meeting new engineering and economic abilities previously unavailable. Plowden is confident that utility will continue to be combined with beauty, and his handsome book supports such confidence.

This text is the latest printed material on the work of Charles and Ray Eames. With recent publications by Eames Demetrios and Vitra Design, this text provides a unique modern perspective of the Eames's work. I am a scholar of the Eames' work and this book has many never seen before photo's and illustrations of Charles and Ray. I highly reccomend this title for anyone who intends serious to pursue serious scholarship of Charles and Ray.

Most of this book deals with, essentially, how to make a living doing cabinet work, including financial, bidding, estimates, dealing with potential customers, etc.

However, the chapters on drawer making alone makes this book worthwhile.

Peters is one of the top arts and crafts designers today, he is in ill health however. His knowledge would take multiple volumes, but this book tells the whys and how to's of being a professional cabinet maker.

My first encounter with skeleton structures was a plastic building set consisting of interlocking beams, columns, and very thin infill patterns. The concept of modular construction is one that many of us have been raised with, whereas at one time the idea of building with interchangeable lightweight metal units, sized to fit together in a variety of patterns, was a wholly new revelation. Understanding where this link occurs, manifested in the built environment by practical necessity, connects the modernity of International Style into the historic preservation movement.

Several years ago I found myself involved in the business of repainting cast-iron facades in the Soho Cast Iron District in New York City and became intrigued to know more of the history of cast-iron architecture. Until I received this book, which I ordered from Amazon.com, I had to remain satisfied with a crude photocopy of an article by James Marston Fitch describing the mystery of the Laing Stores. The façade of the Laing Stores (erected in 1849 and the second of Bogardus's façade commissions) was dismantled in 1971, carefully stored with the intent of future restoration, and in 1974 were carted off by someone not-in-the-know like so many old steam radiators to be sold for scrap iron. This has engendered a small degree of paranoia with experienced preservationists and it has always been of value to me, as a preservation contractor, to know whereof the sentiment is derived. For whatever reason I have also been wondering for several years what goods were sold in the Laing Stores. This book provides the answer.

James Bogardus (1800-1874) was a nineteenth-century American inventor, machinist, architect, engineer, manufacturer, and builder in a time, unlike our own, where an individual could do almost anything industrious and put a good name to it afterward. His inventions included the eccentric mill, the self-supporting cast iron façade, and, with construction of the McCullough Shot & Lead Company shot tower of nonstructural brick wall panels entirely supported by an iron frame to a height of 217 feet in 1855, he anticipated the skeletal steel-framework of our urban environment. At the time this structure was the tallest in Manhattan.

I find it curious that the modern skyscraper was born of the necessity of the armaments industry. There is something else I had been wondering about -- the function of a shot tower is that lead is passed through a sieve at the top, falls a distance where it becomes spherical, and then plunges into a bath of cold water where it hardens. The necessity of the structure of a shot tower is to be tall, economical to build, and to not allow lead to not be blown around by gusting winds.

Bogardus, in an age where mechanical invention was the new wave, was a practical and ambitious entrepreneurial builder seeking profitable income. It is ironic to consider that if he were alive today he might not have any particular interest to looking into the past or especial concern for preservation of the historic fabric that he was building for us then.

"As for his customers, they probably were not concerned with architectural revolution or looking into the future. They wanted structures that accomplished the task at hand. Bogardus's buildings did so. And that was that."

The above is about as speculative as this book gets -- there is a lot of factual information, dated and attributed thoroughly, that represents a great amount of admirable research. Unlike many books full of facts derived from historical records, this book is readable, the authors have a smooth and patient prose style, and I recommend the reading to anyone with a serious curiosity about cast-iron architecture, particularly if they are the owners of one of these beautiful facades. For those readers not familiar with the streets and buildings of New York City I advise keeping a street map and an AIA guide nearby (duly noted in the bibliography). I read the book on the subway, the dead time between business meetings, and was pleased to recognize a few of the buildings when emerging above ground. The author sticks to the task at hand and does not wander very far into concurrent events, therefore a timeline of American history or a short history of New York City would assist the casual reader in imagining a familiar context. The year 1855 in which Bogardus's first shot tower was built marks the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the building of the first oil refinery in Pittsburgh.

Though the majority of Bogardus's work was in New York City he built cast-iron structures in several other locations including Chicago, Philadelphia, Albany, Charleston, Washington DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, Santo Domingo (a lighthouse), and Havana. From 1848 to 1862 Bogardus built 43 structures, with five of them now remaining standing where you can go see them for yourself, four in New York City and one, the Iron Clad Building, in Cooperstown, NY.

Margot Gayle, a founder of the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture, is an authority on cast-iron architecture and has been a major inspiration behind the historic preservation movement in New York City. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday, and deserves as thoroughly researched a biography as she has provided us for Bogardus.

First printed in APT Communique 1998.