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Summer Reading
Swiss Design Classics
Kenya Hara
Kenya Hara is considered the most influential designer of present-day Japan and has published widely on design theory. After graduating in design from the Musashino Art University of Kodaira in 1983, he worked as a curator and graphic designer before taking on the role of art director at Muji in 2002. Hara is president of the Nippon Design Center Inc., and head of the department of Science of Design at Musashino Art University.
Explore his core influences, design philosophy, and vision for the future via the titles below, or pick them up together in the Kenya Hara book bundle offered exclusively via the Lars Müller Publishers webshop.
Jasper Morrison
Born in London in 1959, Jasper Morrison is a designer whose work has shaped contemporary ideas about furniture, lighting, tableware, electronics, and everyday objects. His designs are produced internationally by leading manufacturers including Vitra, Flos, Alessi, Muji, Samsung, and others. Morrison is especially known for his commitment to quiet, useful, and long-lasting design. Rather than treating objects as statements, his work investigates how things become part of daily life: through proportion, familiarity, material intelligence, and restraint.
His relevance lies not only in the objects he has designed, but in the clarity of his position: design as careful observation, not novelty for its own sake. Through his books with Lars Müller Publishers, including A World Without Words, Super Normal, Everything but the Walls, and A Book of Things, Morrison has also contributed a precise and influential written language for understanding the role of objects in contemporary culture. View all books by Jasper Morrison.
Louis Kahn
Born in Estonia, Louis Kahn (1901–1974) emigrated with his family to Philadelphia when he was four years old. Kahn received Beaux-Arts training at the University of Pennsylvania, under the French-educated Paul Philippe Cret, and then adopted his own idiosyncratic modernism, which would engender the heterogeneous “Philadelphia school.” It wasn’t until 1950–51 when, as an American Academy fellow, he traveled in Italy, Greece, and Egypt that he developed his own singular philosophy of architecture.
In 1951 he attained his first major commission to design Yale University’s Art Gallery, and upon its completion gained instant national recognition before going on to do international commissions a decade later. He developed a signature style that was monumental, monolithic and transparent in its functionality. Kahn was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 1971 and the RIBA Gold Medal in 1972. View all books by Louis Kahn.
