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.

For Climate’s Sake! sets itself the goal of conveying the knowledge revealed by current climate research in a manner that is both concise and appealing. It differs from other books on climate change principally in the way it is conceived as a visual reader that deliberately uses the effectiveness and power of the image to present the theme in a graphic way. Extensive series of images with large photographs and informative diagrams accompany well-researched essays on and around the themes of climate history, research and policy and thus offer an in-depth examination.

The book provides insights into the history of the earth’s climate and reveals the factors that are responsible for climate change. It poses questions and provides answers: why is the earth becoming warmer? What are the consequences we must reckon with? What can we do against this? Who determines the future? As both a volume of illustrations and a reader For Climate’s Sake! Is directed at all those who want to equip themselves with knowledge and understanding to confront what is probably our planet’s most pressing problem.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

The Zürich architects Fuhrimann Hächler take on the most diverse building commissions. The present volume is devoted in particular to private residences, most of them realized for clients who are at home in the architectural and art scenes. These homes captivate by virtue of the clarity and simplicity of their constructive materials, their economically effective construction, and their haptic, sensual surfaces and flowing spatial transitions. Outstanding examples of their architecture include the Haus Presenhuber in Vnà (2007), the Haus Müller Gritsch in Lenzburg (2007) and their own residence in Zurich (2003).

The text contributions take the reader beyond the featured residences while situating these within the overall oeuvres of the architects.

With contributions by Hubertus Adam, Kurt W. Forster, Gianni Jetzer, Marie Theres Stauffer and the architects

Photographs by Valentin Jeck

Design: norm

Christian Lutz continues his photographic study of power structures with “Tropical Gift”. He took portraits in Nigeria of people who live by and with the economic force that dominates everything there, the oil and gas industry. The photographs observe the protagonists’ everyday lives and professional world from very close up, the rich profiteers in the capital and the indigenous population in the oil region, the Niger delta. The pictures tell their own story of business with these coveted raw materials subtly, but highly expressively.

In 1960, Brasilia was celebrated as the realization of an urban planning vision based on designs by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. At the same time, the sectoral city of Chandigarh was rising according to plans by Le Corbusier. The “test tube city” arose as an export of modernity from a Western planning euphoria that displayed utopian traits. In both cities, foreign architecture entered into a harmonious relationship with indigenous culture, forming new and independent identities. This publication addresses the question of how modernism has been appropriated in both cities, and how the people who live in them deal with it. Commonalities and differences are identified and images of everyday urban life showcased. On the initiative of the publisher, the young photographer Iwan Baan has taken stock of contemporary life in both cities. 

With commentary in the form of essays by Cees Nooteboom on the photographs and by Martino Stierli on the architectural and planning history.

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

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.

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.

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.

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) und 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.