Our aim is that, taken together, the new publications of any one year should give a more or less clear picture of the spectrum of our program. This year the picture is crystal clear: In all subject areas we have achieved a selection that does full justice to our guiding principle of pinning down facets of cultural debates and revealing social contexts. The new titles provide insights into seminal themes of our times, discuss design processes, social questions, cultural phenomena, and they document outstanding positions in design and art. These are specialties that are not only for experts, but for an interested audience that shares our fascination with multifaceted and quality debate.

The publication presents the designs of six internationally renowned bicycle builders whose embrace of the tradition of working in metal brings striking innovation to their craft. Through their manipulation of steel, aluminum and titanium, the builders of Bespoke produce racing bicycles that speed champion athletes to victory, mountain and cyclocross bicycles built to negotiate vertiginous terrain, urban bicycles that stylishly convey commuters, and randonneur bicycles elegantly stripped down for epic journeys. Candid portraits including builder’s inspirations, working methods and bicycles, lavishly photographed in great detail, highlight this exhibition at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Bespoke offers a rich and intimate view of objects that sit squarely at the intersection of art, design, craft and performance.

With contributions by Michael Maharam and Sacha White (Vanilla Bicycles)
Photographs by D. James Dee

Includes bicycles by the following builders: Mike Flanigan (A.N.T), Jeff Jones, Dario Pegoretti, Richard Sachs, J. Peter Weigle

Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan spent four months, from March to June, in Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland. The landscape they explored on their daily walks is dominated by snow, which shapes the atmosphere in and around the fjord with its changeable forms: turquoise meltwater, frost patterns, a few glass-clear bright colours in the whiteness, walls of snow by the edge of the road, drifts, icicles and at last the first brown snow-free places — things are slowly turning green. The artists create a unique portrait of Iceland’s magnificent landscapes with their photographs, in all its detail, thus chronicling the passage of time and the approach of the warmer season. 

Hamish Fulton’s photographic work focuses on nature and the way people experience nature. He has been hiking all over the world for 30 years, and translates what he experiences and sees into art. In 2009, Hamish Fulton and an expedition team climbed Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world. This publication presents this artist treatment of the ascent to the summit for the first time in a compendious pictorial volume in the form of collages of photographs and text, sculptures and works on paper.

The second issue in the exciting and experimental cross-disciplinary series “Findings on…” by Astrid van Baalen and Hester Aardse from the pars Foundation is centred on Elasticity in the broadest sense of the word. What happens when one gives a simple rubber band to an architect, historian, choreographer, chemist, artist, mathematician, physicist, economist, anthropologist, and geologist and asks each of them for a statement on elasticity? The economist studies the elasticity of supply and demand of market forces. The architect calculates the elasticity of the steel structure of a building during an earthquake. The anthropologist studies the flow of people returning to their homes in the wake of a natural disaster. “The Pars Foundation” draws researchers out of their specialized niches in order to publish their brilliant, crazy, important, or bewildering results and assembles them in this interdisciplinary volume. “Findings on Elasticity” is the second part of a publication series that together will constitute an atlas of creative thinking. There are no guidelines for the form their contributions must take. It may be images, poems, essays, sketches on coasters, formulas or a piece of sculpture; the editors only ask that a contribution reflect the respondent’s own field as well as his or her passion for the topic.

The acclaimed Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson developed a sequence of spatial experiments for his Your Chance Encounter exhibition in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. His piece challenges visitors to move around and get their bearings, and stimulates them to see the museum as a public space for addressing art and reality critically.

The installations were developed especially for the exhibition. They are arranged in a tight context with the spatial structure of the museum and extend the concept of architecture by the Japanese architecture practice SANAA. Olafur Eliasson does not work only in the museum galleries, but also in the corridors in between and the adjacent courtyards, thus linking the indoor and outdoor areas closely and examining this museum’s unique qualities.

The artist’s book was created in close co-operation with Olafur Eliasson’s studio. Its elaborate design with an extensive pictorial section offers a comprehensive record of the exhibition and an important analysis of this successful artist’s work. An essay by art historian Eve Blau interprets the exhibition in relation to its surroundings and contrasts the experimental approaches of Olafur Eliasson and SANAA, while curator Hiromi Kurosawa introduces the history and context of the museum in Kanazawa.

With texts by Eve Blau, Hiromi Kursawa

While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. “Ecological Urbanism” approaches the city without any one set of instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary approach. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.

With contributions by Homi Bhabha, Stefano Boeri, Chuck Hoberman, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Bruno Latour, Nina-Marie Lister, Mohsen Mostafavi, Matthias Schuler, Sissel Tolaas, Charles Waldheim, among others

Today we are witnessing a renewed enthusiasm for space exploration, with scientific expeditions, satellite launches, and the emergence of space tourism pushing us to reconsider our relationship with our planet.

Other Space Odysseys has nothing to do with Space Architecture or architecture in outer space. It is not a celebration of high-tech architecture and imagery or extreme physical and mental conditions. Instead, this book proposes a letting go of architecture understood as the production of -material goods in favour of architecture as the production of ideas.

How can thinking about space lead to fresh perspectives on earth? Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan and Alessandro Poli present different avenues for approaching this question. Their odysseys, real and virtual, ultimately promise a rediscovery of our own world.

“Uncorporate Identity” is an anthology of Metahaven projects, ideas and models. A science fiction book about design, it describes corporate identity beyond certainty, entwined with politics, speculation and information networks. Carved out from the multipolar geopolitical spaces of the early 21st century and the paradoxical leftovers and peripheries of ancient regimes and ruined ideologies, Uncorporate Identity is at once an artistic manifesto for design under globalization and a workbook of essays, narratives and truisms investigating the ambiguous state of identity and branding today. “Uncorporate Identity” is edited by Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk (Metahaven) with Marina Vishmidt and includes contributions by Boris Groys, David Singh Grewal, Vladimir Kolossov, Keller Easterling, Dieter Lesage, China Miéville, Chantal Mouffe, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Bruno Besana, Michael Taussig, Regula Stämpfli, Mihnea Mircan, Mariana Celac, Florian Schneider, Marina Vishmidt and others.

Co-published by Jan van Eyck Academie