Focus areas of our spring program 2012 are architecture, design, art, and photography.

For most people locations that hold a particular importance for the development of our society and for the advancement of science and technology often remain hidden from view. They are separate and protected, such as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, close to the city of Geneva. CERN is best known for its giant particle accelerator. Here researchers from around the world take part in a diverse array of fundamental physical research, in the pursuit of knowledge that will perhaps one day revolutionize our understanding of the universe and life on our planet.

The Swiss photographer Andri Pol mixed with this multicultural community of researchers and followed their work over an extended period of time. In doing so he created a unique portrait of this fascinating “underworld.” The cutting-edge research is given a human face and even if we don’t fully understand the processes at work, the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for. With an explanatory text and scientific-philosophical essay.

What feeds the inspiration of the designer? Observation. In Jasper Morrison’s collection of pictures, icons of design history meet up with the unassuming objects of everyday life, and curious findings with the archetypes of modernism. Every picture tells a story and in juxtaposition with its neighbor a new one is also created—without words, in the language of form. Morrison responds to the arbitrariness of form with simplicity and complexity, poetry and humor in a repertoire of compelling designs. The volume A World Without Words is a school of seeing that addresses both designers and consumers who wish to explore the universe of goods.

Color Light Time sets out to examine the current work of New York-based architect Steven Holl, one of the most outstanding representatives of contemporary American architecture. For nearly three decades now, Steven Holl has developed his architectural idiom and his reflections on architecture with striking consistency. The success of his work can be attributed to its sculptural shaping, his interest in the poetics of space, color, light, and material, and his fascination with scientific phenomena. Numerous illustrations and three essays closely examine archetypical aspects of visual perception, which play an essential role in Holl’s work.

Steven Holl is an American architect, perhaps best known for the 1998 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, the 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the praised 2009 linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

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

Using a typological structure (landscape, park, square, garden, promenade, etc.), Günther Vogt describes the theoretical foundation on which the successful projects of Vogt Landscape Architects are based. In recent years they have realized international projects in Europe and the United States, including a new type of city park for the Tate Modern in London (with Herzog & de Meuron); an “all-weather garden” with great poetic power at the Hyatt Hotel in Zurich (with Meili, Peter
Architekten); an indoor tropical garden for the Novartis Campus in Basel (with Diener & Diener); and the exterior spaces of the Allianz Arena in Munich (with Herzog & de Meuron). The updated edition shows the finished projects that were presented as plans in the previous edition.

In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. To celebrate its 75-year anniversary a facsimile reprint of the magazine will be produced, accompanied by a commentary volume.

The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the
mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.

With a text by Giedion Siegried

As health becomes a central focus of political debate, are architects, urban designers, and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda to address these concerns? Imperfect Health looks at the complexity of today’s health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret Campbell, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, and Sarah Schrank deal with different aspects of the topic of health in the context of architecture such as: “An Architectural Theory of Pollution” and “Strange Bedfellows: Tuberculosis and Modern Architecture—How ‘The Cure’ Influenced Modernist Architecture and Design.”

The book is published in collaboration with the CCA, Montreal on the occasion of the exhibition Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, curated by Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture, and Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator.

With True City, a photographic essay on the “global city” of the twenty-first century, photographer and sociologist Charlie Koolhaas weaves a dense photographic patchwork of images of the historic commercial centers of London, Guangzhou, and Houston and the emerging centers of commerce Dubai and Lagos. For her research, the author has visited these cities and taken photographs which reflect contemporary life in a concentrated way. The images illustrate current issues such as the contradiction between cultural homogenization and local diversity at a time of globalization.

True City starkly contrasts the various urban landscapes with their inhabitants to reveal the differences and similarities between the cities, their cultures, the architecture, and the people living in them. The book is part street photography, part raw documentary and intense observation. Literary text collages by the author supplement the visual explorations and form an associative network with them.

Design: Charlie Koolhaas with Lars Müller

For over thirty years Klaus Merkel has been photographing stones, rocky landscapes, and trees that he pairs up in double pictures. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous publication Album of Stones featured Milan Cathedral’s forest of figures and pinnacles next to the sandstone columns of Utah’s Bryce Canyon. In the same way, Trees as well as Stones presents fascinating connections between natural forms and artwork, such as the millennia-old bristlecone pines in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the decaying stupa temples of Burma. The book thus invites the reader to examine and compare the manifold similarities of diverse structures, whether between a petrified wandering dune and a gaping trunk of an olive tree in Agrigento, Italy, or between a mushroom rock in the Libyan desert and a Namibian quiver tree.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Back in 1993, graphic designer brothers Markus and Daniel Freitag were on the lookout for a messenger bag. Inspired by the cheerfully colored trucks rumbling along the highway that crossed the city of Zürich just in front of their apartment, they cut a messenger bag out of an old truck tarpaulin. The shoulder strap was fashioned from used car seatbelts, while an old bicycle inner tube provided the edging. Freitag bags soon became fashionable and the Freitag company now employs more than 120 people.

The publication uses the example of FREITAG to show that design does not end with the product. The history, products, manufacture, organization, distribution, marketing, and reception are explained, commented upon, and presented in often surprising ways. On the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to the Freitag story at Museum of Design Zürich, Lars Müller Publishers will publish a generously illustrated paperback book that includes interviews, documentation, and essays on the FREITAG concept and its history.

2009 riefen Ruedi Baur, Design2context und die renommierte Elisava Escola Superior de Diseño in Barcelona dazu auf, «Fragen zum Design» einzureichen, mit dem Ziel, diese für eine typografisch gestaltete Wand im Eingangsbereich der Elisava zu verwenden. Über hundert Personen aus aller Welt, unter ihnen Gestalter sowie Studenten, beteiligten sich an dieser Aktion. Bis heute sind über siebenhundert Fragen zusammengekommen, die auf der Wand angebracht sind. Aus diesen haben Vera Kockot und Ruedi Baur die treffendsten und prägnantesten Fragen ausgewählt, um sie in diesem Buch zu dokumentieren. Die Fragen beziehen sich auf unterschiedliche Facetten von Design, die heute in unterschiedlichen Feldern wie Naturwissenschaften und der Gesellschaft allgemein von Bedeutung sind. Das Buch dokumentiert die Typo-Wand mit zahlreichen Fotografien. Ein erläuternder Text stellt Idee und Realisierung des Projekts dar.

RUEDI BAUR, geboren 1956 in Paris, ist Grafikdesigner. Er gründete 1989 in Paris und 2002 in Zürich die Ateliers «intégral ruedi baur et associés» und «integral ruedi baur zürich». Seit April 2004 leitet Ruedi Baur das Institut für Designforschung «Design2context» an der Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (HGKZ).

The Adjaye Studios 2008–2010: Co-Authoring sets out to examine the intersection of art and architecture, not through the tradition of art within architecture, but through non-standard modes of collaboration. From 2008 to 2010 David Adjaye taught three studios at the Princeton School of Architecture. Each year, an artist —Teresita Fern.ndez, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie—was invited to collaborate with the studio and share their approach to three vastly different sites: New Jersey, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the city of Mérida in the Yucatan. Through non-standard modes of questioning, developing, and testing, the studios set out to overturn expectations associated with the conventions of architectural design and representation. The Adjaye Studios 2008–2010: Co-Authoring features a curated selection of recent projects from David Adjaye and the three featured artists, interviews, essays, and archival material that unpacks and offers a new look at the shared space of art and architecture.