“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

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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 

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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

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It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the métier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. 

This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work.The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out.

Price:EUR 35.00

Günther Vogt and his landscape designers bring a lot of passion to their research and to their search for ideas for transforming undesigned sites or tracts of land into landscapes. They don’t want to depend just on knowledge acquired from books. They venture out into the landscape at all times of the day and year and interrogate what they see there. They make room for art and science in their studies and use the same tools to turn their landscape designs into reality. Most of their “field trips” begin out of curiosity based on something they’ve seen, heard, or read. Against this backdrop, they explore, among other things, fortifications in France, the Upper Rhine in Switzerland, and national parks in England. The results of their “field trips,” research projects, and practical implementations are collected in this publication. “Distance and Engagement” takes up where “Miniature and Panorama” left off and shows not only what Günther Vogt is working on but also, and above all, how he works.

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Steven Holl has set up a documentation centre for the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859 –1952) on Hamarøy, in northern Norway. This unconventional building reflects the author's no less unusual personality. The centre in the barren landscape of Hamarøy, where Hamsun lived and worked, the silence and solitude, challenge visitors to involve themselves with him and his work. The book records the connection between Hamsun, the architecture and the landscape. Photographer Iwan Baan relates the landscape and the building to each other, and historical documents illustrate Hamsun's contradictory life and influential work, et al. the novel Hunger (1890), with which Hamsun achieved his fame. In 1920 the poet was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

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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.

Price:EUR 35.00

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

Price:EUR 28.00

A comprehensive analysis of product design based on the "Die gute Form" (Good Design) campaign by the Swiss Werkbund 1952 - 1968

Price:EUR 15.00

In 1957, Swiss typographer Max Miedinger came up with “Haas Grotesk”. Renamed Helvetica after 1960, this typeface went on to become one of the world’s most used typefaces ever. It embodies the myth of Sachlichkeit, propagated at the time by Swiss Typography. This book sings the praises of this shift-worker and solo entertainer of typefaces, of its forgotten creator and all those who have contributed to its unparalleled international march of triumph over the past forty years. The designs gathered together here in honour of Helvetica have been created by superb designers and anonymous amateurs from all over the world. They present a unique panoply of this icon of modern design. Superb applications are juxtaposed with an anonymous collection of ugly, ingenious, charming, and hair-raising samples of its use. Helvetica is not only the preferred typeface of leading professionals, it is also an all-time favourite among the multitude of codes and signals and commands that enliven urban life.

Price:EUR 15.00

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.

Price:EUR 55.00

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.

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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”. 

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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

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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

Price:EUR 55.00

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

Price:EUR 58.00

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

Price:EUR 40.00

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.

Price:EUR 40.00

Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings – seen either as a method of discovery or for themselves – are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred – mostly unpublished – drawings by Kahn and his associates are woven together with a lively and informed commentary into an intimate biography of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 – 69) the drawings form a narrative which not only reveals the richness and hidden dimensions of this unbuilt masterpiece, but provides compelling insights into Louis Kahn’s mature culture of designing.

Kahn – long considered an “architects’ architect” – emerges as a vivid and instructive guide, provoking reflection on questions which continue to remain relevant: on how works are conceived, on how they might be perceived, on how they become part of human experience. Fascinating not only in their beauty, the drawings open a new and stimulating perspective on one of the past century’s great architects.

Price:EUR 59.00

This publication casts light on the spectrum of the script poster, using consistent reduction to type and without any illustrative or geometrical elements. The script poster enjoyed its first heyday around 1915, with the discovery of the letter as a design element. Starting with examples influenced b the Bauhaus and its successors, the series continues to the present day. Technical developments in the spheres of design and printing also influence visual expression. The contemporary script poster offers a mixture of different trends showing effortless skill in handling different creative approaches.

Price:EUR 25.00

Le Corbusier’s buildings have long been part of the inalienable canon of twentieth-century architecture. But Le Corbusier’s work as a book designer and author is scarcely known. He planned and realized over 40 books in his lifetime. Architect of Books shows that Le Corbusier accorded great importance to books as an essential part of his output. Catherine de Smet traces the process by which these books emerged and makes it possible to discover the great construction architect as a book artist. New images and in-depth analyses make Vers une Architecture du Livre an indispensable complement to Le Corbusier, Architect of Books.

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