We hope all our publications will enjoy a due success. Many are long sellers. Some are bestsellers on the international market. Of these we are especially proud.

The photographer Lukas Felzmann was fascinated by the very thing that some driving past would find boring, flat, and disconsolate: the vast Sacramento Valley, located just a hundred miles from San Francisco. Felzmann discovers with his camera the hidden charms of that seeming nonplace. For him, exploring a place means both walking around and lingering quietly, until the valley opens up like a book, with stories that cry out to be read and discovered. With his camera he traces how time, determined here by the growth of the plants, slows on the plane, and how the horizontality of the surface becomes a reassuring balance to the hectic city of millions nearby. The photographs show the diversity of the plane: the original landscape in its natural state, the large swaths put to agricultural use, the modern provincial towns, and the transitional areas in between. Photographs of water in all its facets run through the book, just as water runs through and forms a valley.

With marginalia by Angelus Silesius and John Berger

World's Fairs and International Exhibitions have always had a political as well as a commercial and cultural context. This was particularly true during the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. Jack Masey served with the United States Information Agency from 1951 to 1979, for many years as Director of Design. He commissioned numerous American architects and designers including R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Peter Blake, Ivan Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar to design the US presence at major world Expos including Expo '67 in Montreal and Expo '70 in Osaka. This important new book draws on Masey's recollections, recently declassified documents, unpublished memoirs and photographs, interviews with surviving members of U.S. design teams, and others, to detail the significant role played by architects and designers in shaping America's image during the cultural Cold War.

The book reconsiders the theme of living in a city by exploring new approaches that reveal a different way of integrating projects into the existing city. Due to their scale, extensive built environment, and efforts to grow the city from within, London and Tokyo face similar urban development issues but occupy cultural contexts in which themes of proximity, privacy, community, and public space take on different meaning. The housing projects of Nishizawa and Taylor show how inhabitants can live in a house, and, at the same time, enlarge the scale of their living to the neighbourhood and the city. The book contains statements by Nishizawa and Taylor framing their approaches and ideas, accompanied by images and explanation of their projects and a discussion between them, as well as essays by Giovanna Borasi focusing on the relevance of this topic today, and by Peter Allison framing the architect’s approaches in a historical perspective and within the two cultures.

With the publication of the Dymaxion House in 1929, Buckminster Fuller became an overnight sensation in the world of American architecture. It was an uncompromising design and spectacularly novel. The living areas were hexagonal and attached around a central supply tower, and the multistory interior was fully climate-controlled. The house was conceived as completely self-sufficient – all the necessary supply modules were contained in the tower. The rooms were equipped with the most modern furnishings and fixtures. The approximately 150 m2 house weighed just 3 tons, cost no more than a car, and was designed to be constructed and dismantled anytime and anywhere. The house reflected Fuller’s basic technological principle, his determination toachieve the greatest possible utility at the smallest possible cost in terms of energy and materials by making use of everything that science and technology have to offer. The author examines and compares Fuller’s Dymaxion House in the context of the international development.

With a preface by Mark Wigley

High-population centers of enormous size are springing up in China with dizzying speed. With them comes an increased demand for migrant workers in the construction sector, factories, and mines. In growth centers like the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, million people have already set out from the underdeveloped provinces to earn their living there. The photographer Andreas Seibert accompanied the workers repeatedly in order to document their everyday lives and their journey to the high-population centers. Their stories are told in a collection of striking photographs that provide a close-up portrait to complement the current discussion of economic growth in China. With its combination of text and images, this volume conveys a unique impression of the scale of this modern migration of peoples.

With texts by Jeff Kingston, Andreas Seibert, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao

Following the successful formula of “The Face of Human Rights” and “Who Owns the Water?”, this volume deals with the origin and significance of human belief. Religious phenomena such as the yearning for transcendence, inwardness, the experience of oneness, happiness, meaning in life, and rituals, as well as for models that can help to explain the origins and future of humanity and the world, exist both inside and outside official religious groups. With texts and a clear pictorial language, this volume addresses the phenomenon of religion belief, guiding the reader and viewer into the world of the numinous and mysterious, while also giving them a bit of critical orientation and existential questions to take along with them on their continued quest. The publication also takes a critical look at the traditional world religions, in order to help the reader differentiate between the political, cultural, and specifically religious roots of contemporary conflicts.

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity – for the first time in its history – has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. “This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe — the alternative of which is oblivion.” R. Buckminster Fuller.

And it Came to Pass – Not to Stay brings together a selection of Buckminster Fuller’s lyrical and philosophical best, including seven “essays” in a form he called his “ventilated prose” which address global crises 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, thesimple, and the profound.

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. 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.

The new building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in December 2007, houses the first museum developed from the ground up in Lower Manhattan. The seven-story building, with a total floor area of 60,000 square feet, was designed by the renowned architectural duo SANAA – Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. This book presents the design and building of the new museum in a series of interwoven stories, documents, and dialogues. The building expands the museum and its distinct role within the city and at the same time testifies to an important moment in the history, art, and life of the city. The photographs by Dean Kaufman emphasize the dynamics of the life of the building, whose unpredictability and disorder seem to be in conflict with minimalist form and order.

With Photographs by Dean Kaufman

Designed in 1957, the Helvetica font is an icon of swiss graphic design, which was a model of sober, functional communication throughout the world in the 1950s and 60s. The balanced and neutral appearance of Helvetica forgoes a high degree of expressivity – a quality for which it is both criticized and admired. This polarization has helped to gain it unparalleled notoriety. This publication retraces Helvetica’s fifty-year history, compares it to the well-known sans serif fonts of the twentieth century, and examines the phenomenon of its unparalleled spread. The documentation is based on the achievements and archive of Alfred Hoffmann, the former director of the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (type foundry), where, in conjunction with Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, Helvetica was developed. Numerous illustrations show a multitude of ways the font has been used in five decades from a wide variety of fields – from signal design to party flyers.

With contributions by Axel Langer and Indra Kupferschmid 

“All men are born free and have an equal right to freedom,” states the UN Convention on Human Rights. Almost all nations have signed treaties to this effect, and yet reality looks rather different: everywhere people are tortured and executed, children starve to death and women are raped. And yet the work of the countless human rights actives all over the world is worth while. Proceedings can be instituted against states that fail to meet requirements, as human rights are internationally enshrined. One of humanities essential tasks is to implement them. This visual reader wants to make a contribution. The Face of Human Rights attempts to present all aspects of human rights visually and make them tangible. 720 pages demand that readers address the issues. Over 500 photographs show human rights infringements world-wide and the tireless struggle to implement and preserve those rights. The extensive selection of text explores the background and creates a dense network of links. 

With contributions by Slavenka Drakulic´, Carlos Fuentes, Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, Alexander Kluge, Sima Samar, Susan Sontag, Wole Soyinka and Margrit Sprecher

Karl Gerstner’s work is a milestone in the history of design. Designing Programmes is one of his most important works: in four essays, the author provides a basic introduction to his design methodology and suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era. The book is especially topical and exciting in the context of current developments in computational design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture, and art,it inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for the design of the human environment, but in recent years this relationship has grown even more intense. “Nature as model” has influenced the most diverse possible concepts and developmental processes and is revealed in a large spectrum of forms and functions. Nature Design brings together projects and objects from design, architecture, landscape architecture, photography, and art that have been inspired by nature to develop complex and innovative works. The protagonists include Werner Aisslinger, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Ross Lovegrove, Olaf Nicolai, Francois Roche, Lars Spuybroek, and Günther Vogt, among others. The book covers the historical and theoretical fundamentals of the themes sea, topography, plants, human beings, animals, scent, and climate. Nature Design is intended to reveal the diversity of possibilities for copying and reinventing nature and to open up new perspectives.

With essays by Barry Bergdoll, Dario Gamboni and Philip Ursprung

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 of 2000.

3rd edition will be available September 2010

Over a period of three years the photographer Christian Lutz accompanied a member of the Swiss Federal Council on diverse official occasions throughout the world. In Protokoll he observes the mise-en-scène of authority within the hierarchies to which the political decision makers and their delegations are subjected. He isolates the clichés that rule the world and records the unsaid and unobserved with his camera. His images show a reality that differs from the official photographic reports. The photographs present a concentrated critique that calls into question a deeply ingrained system of representation and causes readers to alternate between laughter and astonishment.

The best in Swiss photography 2007

Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of super normal design: alongside examples of anonymous design, there are design classics like by Jacobsen, Rams, Bill or Noguchi. With products by Newson, Grcic, the Azumis, and the Bouroullecs, it also represents the generation to which Morrison and Fukasawa belong. The phenomenon of the super normal is located, beyond space and time; and point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is lying exposed before us, it is real and available: Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.

Pipilotti Rist, eine der gefeiertsten Schweizer Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart, und Richard Julin, Chefkurator der Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, haben sich in Zürich einen Tag lang den Vorbereitungen von Rists Einzelausstellung Gravity, Be My Friend in Stockholm gewidmet. Das aus dieser Begegnung resultierende Buch eröffnet neue Dimensionen von Pipilotti Rists Welt und fördert Anekdoten aus dem kreativen Prozess zu Tage. Das reich illustrierte Buch zeigt u. a. Bilder des neuen Werks Tyngdkraft, var min vän sowie von jüngeren Arbeiten wie Homo sapiens sapiens, 2005, A Liberty Statue For Löndön, 2006. 

Industrialization and population growth have brought about a global water crisis. Nature can no longer compensate the exploitation of our freshwater and our oceans. One billion people have no reliable access to clean drinking water; two billion live in precarious hygienic conditions. Famine, poverty, epidemics, and infant mortality are closely linked with the water crisis. Social, ecological, political, and economic conflicts obstruct efforts to resolve the global water crisis. Water is an instrument of power. The key question reads: Is water a commodity or is free access to water an inalienable human right? By approaching water from a phenomenological perspective, Who owns the Water? seeks to persuade the reader that an element that is constantly flowing and changing defies all claims to own it, be they political or economic, and is instead the responsibility of the entire international community.

Miniature and Panorama offers a look at projects since 2000 by the firm Vogt Landscape architects, Zurich/Munich, which is internationally active. With photographs, plans, and explanatory texts, this volume sets forth the intellectual foundation on which the projects of Vogt Landscape architects are based. In words and pictures, it describes and illuminates thirty projects, organized according to the exterior typologies of landscape, park, square, garden, cemetery, courtyard, promenade, and interior. Among them are the exterior spaces of the Allianz Arena in Munich, various projects on Novartis Campus in Basel, and the Masoala Rain Forest Hall at the Zurich Zoo.

With contributions by Olafur Eliasson, Peter Erni, Hamish Fulton, Roman Signer, Olaf Unverzart and Christian Vogt

Winner of “Best German Book Design 2006”. 

In 1963 at the University of Cambridge, Peter Eisenman – world famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) – wrote a dissertation on the formal basis of modern architecture. In it, the architect confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. Eisenman illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. This striking document fully deserves to be published here, for the first time, in a faithful reproduction of the original.

Hanna Saliba ranks among the most innovative restaurateurs in Germany. His restaurant Saliba in Hamburg, which serves Syrian cuisine, is renowned far beyond the city’s borders for its magical culinary experiences. Some of the restaurant’s guests —Hans Hansen from Hamburg, the Munich designer Pierre Mendell, and the publisher of this volume — developed the concept for this book together with Saliba as an expression of their enthusiasm for Arab cuisine, particularly for the diversity and sophistication of its incomparable hors d`oeuvres called Mazza. “Eating with the eyes” is to be taken literally. Arabic calligraphy complements the feast for the eyes and makes the book much more than a collection of recipes for amateur cooks and professional chefs.

With a preface by Udo Steinbach
With photographs by Hans Hansen

Herzog & de Meuron test the boundaries between architecture and art to a greater extent than other contemporary architects. Their interest in surface and material, opacity and transparency and the function and variability of images makes architecture speak—not just in quotations and typologies, but by continually redefining raw materials. Their buildings seem to exist simply to present those mysterious and beautiful moments when material is transformed into meaning.

With essays by Richard Armstrong, Carrie Asman, Gernot Böhme, Georges Didi-Huberman, Kurt W. Forster, Boris Groys, Reinhold Hohl, Petros Koumoutsakos, Robert Kudielka, Albert Lutz, Christian Moueix, Peggy Phelan, Thomas Ruff, Ulrike Rebecca Schneider, Meyer Stump, Adolf Max Vogt, Philip Ursprung, Jeff Wall, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Rémy Zaugg

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were both born in Basel in 1950, establishing their own firm together in 1978. In 2001 they won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.