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.

Following Written in Water (2002), this is the second publication devoted to Steven Holl’s legendary watercolors. Four hundred watercolors represent the creative process of this renowned and influential American architect and reveal his highly personal method developed over many years, containing preliminary ideas and sketches of all major projects.

Holl is known for his sculptural architecture and his virtuosic use of light, and watercolors are the ideal means to visualize these characteristic aspects of his work. At a time of rapidly changing technology in the service of architectural design, these watercolors become spectacular examples of a low-tech method. The results are invariably original works of art. The water colors are juxtaposed with photographs of the built architecture and emphasize the crucial aspect of scale.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Dan Graham, one of North America’s most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces in the context of postmodern everyday culture represents an extremely important facet of his work.

This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham together with original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, as they were taken in the same locations, the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham photographed in the sixties. Creating a fascinating, multilayered reference system of repetitions and differences, both spatially as well as temporally, it raises questions about architecture and public space and their function in society.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Five North American Architects brings together five architectural practices that, while all distinct, share a particular sensibility for the impact of craftsmanship and climate on the generation of form, as well as a concern for the expressive tactility of material and the effect of light on the articulation of structure.

Designed with a passion for detail, the book offers an indepth survey of recent work by Steven Holl (New York), Rick Joy (Tucson), John and Patricia Patkau (Vancouver), Stanley Saitowitz (San Francisco), and Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe (Toronto).

The regional specificity of the work is considered against a larger North American context, allowing one to assess the practice of its architecture today.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Küchenwerkzeuge – Pfannen, Messer, Kellen, Dosenöffner, Knoblauchpressen – sind in jedem Haushalt vorhanden und werden täglich genutzt. Trotzdem finden sie wenig Beachtung. Nach Gebrauch verschwinden sie in Schränken und Schubladen. Küchen Werkzeug – Kitchen Tools. Design by Kuhn Rikon gibt Produkten eine Bühne, die in den vergangenen fünf Jahren bei Kuhn Rikon entworfen wurden und in Funktion und Ästhetik neue Wege beschreiten. Die fotografische Inszenierung von Cortis & Sonderegger lässt sie aus dem Hintergrund treten und macht sie in spielerisch arrangierten alltäglichen und nicht ganz alltäglichen Szenen zu Protagonisten. Die Fotografien werden durch Texte von Claude Lichtenstein, Christof Gassner und Philipp Beyeler ergänzt, die sich mit der Küche als Welt im Kleinen, Design im Kontext des Kochens und der Geschichte des bekannten Schweizer Herstellers von Küchenwerkzeugen beschäftigen.

Poemotion is an interactive book-object. The abstract graphical patterns in this small volume are set in motion as soon as you move the attached special foil across them: moiré effects allow complex forms to develop, set circles in motion and make graphical patterns vibrate. Inspired by Seesaw, an earlier book from the publisher, in a playful and at the same time minimalist way the Japanese designer Takahiro Kurashima establishes a link to the motif of a “School of Seeing” that has long occupied a special place in the program of Lars Müller Publishers. With this book the viewer can discover how, as if by magic, figures and forms are created out of optical overlays, set in motion and then disappear again. In the era of digitalization this book shows that interactivity is also possible in the format of the analogous, bound book.

Design: Takahiro Kurashima, Junji Hata

Deutsche Lufthansa is one of the most important airlines in the world. Just as long and varied as ist history is the history of its visual identity. The beginning of the 1960s witnessed one of the most important developments in corporate communication. The company employed the designer Otl Aicher and his Gruppe E5 student group at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm to develop a new visual identity for Lufthansa. Largely implemented beginning in 1963, today it ranks as one of the most groundbreaking corporate design solutions of the twentieth century.

With a particular focus on its famous corporate identity, the design and advertising history of Deutsche Lufthansa from the 1920s until today is comprehensively documented here for the first time. Alongside numerous illustrations from the corporate archive and background articles and interviews, this volume contains reproductions from the Ulm study of 1962 and the first corporate design manual for Lufthansa from 1963.

Design: Jens Müller, Karen Weiland

Since it was set up in 1989 the office of Gigon/Guyer architects has conceived an impressive series of projects. The most important designs arried out include museums, housing projects, and office buildings. The recently completed Prime Tower and its annex buildings on the Maag site in Zürich have been internationally acclaimed.

The monograph provides a sharply focused insight into how Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer understand architecture. The various concepts as well as the different constructions, materials, forms and colors that they employ in their projects are presented in an exhaustive documentation of their work that uses numerous photographs, plans and short texts. The three essays as well as a discussion between Patrick Gmür, Martin Steinmann and the architects offer in-depth reflection and contextualization.

With essays by Gerhard Mack, Arthur Rüegg and Philip Ursprung

Design: Gigon/Guyer with Integral Lars Müller

Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present offers a new overview of the history of Swiss photography. The focus is on seventy selected photobooks, from classics to long-forgotten publications or brilliant works by contemporary photographic artists. The individual books are presented with lavish series of illustrations and texts by highly-esteemed authors, while five longer essays position them in their respective eras. An extensive bibliography completes this volume.

Swiss Photobooks is a chronologically organized reference work that traces photography’s transition from a document to a subjective or artistic means of expression. It also pays homage to the photobook, which has repeatedly shown itself to be an ideal medium for the presentation of photographic work.

With this compact presentation published on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary the Fotostiftung Schweiz adds to its earlier standard works on the history of Swiss photography and in the process provides a new key to understanding an important aspect of contemporary visual culture since the 1920s.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

We sit on them, write with them, ride them, listen to music through them, and live inside them. The furniture, product, and interior designs of Swiss designer Hannes Wettstein, who died in 2008, have left their mark on everyday life and shaped contemporary conceptions of design—in the form of a pen by the brand Lamy, a watch by Nomos, or as interiors for the Hotel Grand Hyatt in Berlin. Hannes Wettstein Seeking Archetypes documents his life’s work for the first time in monograph form. The volume features images from the world of this exceptional designer—works, sketches, and personal objects. Their diversity reveals the essence of his creative achievement. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné provides a complete overview of Wettstein’s works. Supplemented by quotations from Wettstein, anecdotes from his life, essays, as well as statements by personalities from the worlds of design and architecture, this monograph provides a multifaceted portrait of an extraordinary designer.

With essays by Max Küng and Volker Albus and a text collage by Thomas Haemmerli

Design: Prill Vieceli Cremers

“The buzz word is swarm intelligence, which has acquired an unforeseen reality in the era of Facebook and Twitter. The behavior of a collective without a center has become a social phenomenon, which is not only of interest to natural scientists, but also particularly to politicians and economists.” (Peter Pfrunder in his contribution to the book)

Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.

With contributions by Peter Pfrunder, Gordon H. Orians, Deborah M. Gordon, and Wallace Stevens

Design: Integral Lars Müller

First known as a supplier of theatrical textiles to Broadway and beyond, Maharam pioneered the concept of engineered textiles for interior applications in the 1960s. Today Maharam is the world’s leading provider of textiles to commercial architects and interior designers. His studio takes a holistic view of design, embracing a range of disciplines that include architecture and interior design, furniture, fashion, accessories, and graphic and digital means. The Maharam Design Studio oversees the cultivation of an extensive textile collection, ranging from re-editions of enduring designs of the twentieth century’s most noted multidisciplinary visionaries to textile-based collaborations with industry outsiders across varied disciplines that include Konstantin Grcic, Hella Jongerius, Maira Kalman, Bruce Mau, Jasper Morrison, Nike and Paul Smith. The publication provides a comprehensive overview of the company’s history, displays cultural markers, and presents different design projects. Abstracted product applications are illustrated through “useless objects,” a collaboration with Jasper Morrison.

Design: A4 Studio, cover: Hella Jongerius

Posters lend themselves perfectly to serial display. The mediation of the message and of the identity of the advertiser are supported by the effects of recognition. In contemporary advertising campaigns, however, this awareness is only rarely used in imaginative and intelligent ways.

This publication illustrates the creative and effective advertising potential of posters in series. In each case illustrated in this volume a specific design concept is followed. In some instances a formal or content-driven approach of subtle variations produces posters bearing only slight differences from the others in the series; in others, the free interpretation of a basic concept can lead to a wide and highly inspirational spectrum of implementations. Fundamental in the selection of campaigns for this book is the success of a single poster both as a solitary piece and for the additional visual value created by its inclusion in the series.

With an essay by Fabian Wurm and statements by Cyan, Max Küng, Anette Lenz, Vincent Perrottet, Giorgio Pesce, Georg Staehlin, Ruedi Wyss

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Gregor Eichinger argues that since the beginning of modernity the concept of surface has been neglected by architecture. A tendency for simplification, for a reduction to the abstract space and the material are the reason that today the topic is given such short shrift.

Based on his research as a professor at the ETH Zürich, Eichinger calls for a serious discussion about the architectural user interface. In an intensive conversation, he and architect Eberhard Tröger discuss what alchemy has to do with architecture, why a good bar has to be a sketch, how one reads ornament, why we no longer look up at the ceiling, why cleanliness gets in the way of everything, how architecture is created from the inside, and much, much more. The text of this conversation is interwoven with a variety of related quotations and complemented by a series of images that deal with the relationship between architectural surfaces and people.

Design: Ecke Bonk

In contemporary architecture, “landform building” is much more than just a formal strategy. New technologies, new design techniques, and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a rethinking of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground.

Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice – not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies, and technical problems within architecture. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the subject and documents current projects with illustrations and maps. It presents work by Iñaki Ábalos, Tacita Dean, Steven Holl Architects, Junya Ishigami, Toyo Ito, Tsunehisa Kimura, Atelier Peter Kis, Mansilla+Tuñón, Michael Maltzan, Adam Maloof+Situ Studio, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Walter Niedermayr, Ryue Nishizawa, Dominique Perrault, Philippe Rahm, and Chris Taylor. Essays by experts complete this work of reference.

With contributions by Stan Allen, Michel Jakob, Kenneth Frampton, Reyner Banham, David Gissen

Design: Thumb, New York