I am a design-obsessed George Washington University (Washington, DC) professor, author, architect, interior designer, sketcher, modernist, city lover, traveler, and University of Michigan alumni who writes about topics on architecture and interior design for people of all ages and backgrounds. Everyone lives in the built environment, but not everyone understands it. For example, sketching is one of the best ways to understand a piece of furniture, interior, or building. You will never see the object the same way after you draw it! All of the books on this list are approachable, interesting, fun, and most importantly inspiring. Enjoy!
This stunning book features 100 inspiring interiors across the globe, and is a great resource to get to know some of the world’s best designers. There is just enough text to provide an understanding of the history, concepts, and ideas behind each project, while the core focus is on the photography of rooms and details. Quite simply, you may want to study interior design after reading this book cover to cover.
This compact volume features over 100 of the most spectacular interiors from across the world, spanning the entire 20th century to the present day. It includes interiors assembled by artists and fashion designers, architects, interior and set-designers, bringing together diverse design talents from Piero Fornasetti to Alvar Aalto, Marc Newson and Matthew Williamson. Twenty short profiles are presented in the introduction, with a single iconic photograph and a concise, informative text; the interiors are arranged by chronological order, with superb colour photography and texts recounting the stories of these remarkable designs. Representing every style from minimalism and Art Nouveau to…
For more than thirty years I have been discussing, formulating ideas, and writing about Architecture, Building Reuse, and Interiors. I lead the MA Architecture and Adaptive Reuse programme and direct graduate atelier Continuity in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. I am currently the Visiting Professor at the University IUAV of Venice where I am conducting research on the sustainable adaptation of existing buildings with particular emphasis on the environmental concerns within the inherently fragile city of Venice.
Mario Praz’s Illustrated History of Interior Decoration is a wonderful chatty collection of case studies that explores the history of the subject in a well-informed and erudite manner. Interiors are generally lost to the mists of time, remembered only as the backdrop to other activities in paintings and prints, Praz has searched out the best of these to generously illustrate the book.
This is a reference source for anyone with an interest in period styles of furniture and decoration, this book comprises a complete survey of domestic interiors portrayed in art from the ancient world to the late 19th century. A collection of pictures and watercolours from all over Europe, Russia and America record rooms of all periods and their contents; the furniture, fabrics, carpets, pictures and wall-coverings. This text presents a cultural history of man in relation to his domestic surroundings.
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
The Romantic painters of the early 19th century were intrigued with notions of the sublime, the Absolute, and the unity and divinity of all nature. After the mid-1880s the focus of the avant-garde painters became energized by the quest to escape the bounds of “materialism” (an umbrella term by which they meant positivism, the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics, as well as the destructive effects of industrialism). Lynn Gamwell illuminates the fascination many of the modern artists felt for various scientific discoveries in various decades. For instance, the first exhibition of x-rays by the Berlin Physical Society in 1896 was hailed by the artists as proof that an invisible structure underlies every surface, just as Theosophy asserts! Exploring the Invisibleis subtle, thorough, and insightful engagement with this rich interplay.
How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral…
I am a somewhat eclectic personality, who has studied both arts (fashion, illustration) and sciences (geology, chemistry) alike. I hope that in the book choices I have made - using my love of words, appreciation of fine books, and natural discernment - the reader will find a degree of excellence; as well as surprise and delight, at the discovery of titles they may not even have thought of!
Dover (one of my favourite publishers) has the knack of knowing good art when they see it. This is one of my favourite books, slimline though it happens to be - showing the genius imagination, and fashion illustration, of “RT (his real initials)” at its most luscious.
We’re treated to: the alphabet; numbers; playing cards; gems; and The Seasons - albeit, not in the forms you might think - but in the glorious, arresting, Art-Nouveau style that was Erte’s trademark. A feast for the eyes, and above all - just the sort of fun we need, to motivate us, in this day and age!
The Russian-born, Paris-bred artist Erté (Romain de Tirtoff) is recognized as one of the foremost fashion and theatrical designers of the twentieth century. In 1968, when he produced his first lithographs, art lovers discovered that he had found another medium suited to his extraordinary talents. This volume provides a fascinating sample of Erté's very best graphic work, offering every plate from his most popular collections: The Alphabet (1977); The Numerals (1968); The Aces (1974); The Precious Stones (1969); and The Seasons (1970). Each plate has been painstakingly reproduced from the autographed, limited-edition lithographs. A brief Preface offers bibliographic data.
I’m a historian specialising in the French Revolution at the University of Glasgow. During my doctorate, my now wife and I stayed in Ménilmontant in the 20th arrondissement. There grew a knowledge and love of Paris that have never diminished. As part of my research, I explore the places and spaces where events unfolded, trying to understand how these sites have since changed and been overwritten with new meanings and historical memories: I have the worn-out boots to show for it. I’m currently writing a book on Paris in the Belle Époque, from the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 to the outbreak of the First World War.
Hazan knows every nook and cranny of his city. He exults in the buildings and architecture, but his main subject is the people who wove the fabric of its diverse communities and their histories. He takes us on a historical journey that passes from the salons of the old aristocracy to the artisanal districts where popular, revolutionary activism was born. Hazan makes no attempt to conceal his left-wing sympathies, but he is equally at home admiring the Art Nouveau gems of the well-heeled 16th arrondissement as he is enjoying the vibrant, ethnically diverse northern districts of the city. Hazan’s love of the human life of Paris shines through.
The Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan. Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo with the riots, rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining the raconteur's ear for a story with a historian's command of the facts, he introduces an incomparable cast of characters: the literati, the philosophers and the artists-Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Maney, and Proust, of course; but also Doisneau, Nerval and Rousseau. It is a Paris dyed a deep red in its convictions.…
I picked up this book for a very simple reason: I
had just moved and was furnishing my new apartment from scratch and wanted a
guide for inspiration.
I’ve also loved
Art Deco design since seeing a fading image of the era and its works appear in
many of my favorite science fiction movies and books, from Metropolis to
Bladerunner and The Caves of Steel to Fahrenheit 451.
“Beauty in everyday objects” might briefly describe the movement. Still, there’s more to it than that and Duncan’s book meticulously describes the
period through a variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, painting,
décor, and objet d’art.
The history
around each medium is also fascinating and competes well with the beauty of the
archetypes presented throughout the book.
Art Deco Complete is the last word in Art Deco, the most glamorous decorative arts style, and the one that shaped popular ideas of modern luxury. It covers furniture and interior decoration, sculpture, paintings, graphics, posters and bookbinding, glass, ceramics, lighting, textiles, metal work, and jewelry. It includes the work of all of the important Art Deco designers, from high-style French furniture makers to the creators of the popular "Streamline Moderne" style. And it is, in the spirit of Art Deco, a lavish and attractive book, as well as being authoritative and thorough. This 544-page volume includes more than 1,000…
I was a happy child until I went to school. When my teacher turned her back, I ran home. My mom sent me back. The umbilical cord broken, I held a grudge. That enmity remained until my ninth-grade English teacher read us Richard Brautigan’s post-apocalyptic, proto-hippie fantasy In Watermelon Sugar. There was much to imagine: a multicolored sun, an infinite garbage dump, and mathematical, parent-eating tigers. Like the narrator, I wanted to live in a shack, not have a regular name, and hook up with a proto-hippie, hot cake-making artist girlfriend who made “a long and slow love” possible. Since then, I have devoured fiction, poetry, art, film, you name it.
I repost art that catches my eye. I click when I see a piece of Egon Schiele on social media. It’s impossible to look away, which is saying something, considering the variety and audacity of modern art. Born in Tulln, Austria, in 1890, Schiele died of the Spanish Flu in 1918 at only 27.
A student of Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s art is expressionistic, graphic, and transformative. His imagination is a slap in the face, a Munch “Scream” of a crime scene photograph. Steiner has done a great service in producing this art book, in which all of Schiele’s work is reproduced in color. His commentary is, at the same time, chronological and thematic. Schiele survived derisive criticism and prison, and although his life was short, his imaginative punches still landed.
With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism and one of the most startling portrait painters of the 20th century.
Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own much more gritty and confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures. His prolific portraits and self-portraits stunned the Viennese establishment with an unprecedented psychological and sexual intensity, favoring erotic, exposing, or unsettling poses in which he or his sitters cower on the floor, languish with legs…
A cult author who has survived by the skin of her wits. Nina has spent her adult years in London though many believe she is from New York, which sounds like a lot of travelling for someone who has spent the majority of her life in the dream land of writing. What does being a cult author entail? It is to be a literary Will o’ the Wisp, possessing a gem like glimmering in a mist of obscurity, loved by the rarified few. After writing many critically acclaimed books on various nefarious rock n’ rollers, her ardor dimmed with the passing years as those she had loved were no more and so she returned to her first love, which is the strange and supernatural.
This bejeweled guide to Fin de Siècle art and aesthetics is like a moonlit walk in one of King Ludwig II fairytale castles, populated by androgynous chimeras, drowned princes, and erotic vampires carrying John the Baptist’s head on a platter designed by Moreau. As fabulous and tragic as the author, whose drag mode was that of a convincing English Spinster, Philipe Jullian was born to write this book which has influenced my work since I bought it aged 18, with not a clue about life. For over 40 years I have endeavored to keep a torch burning for the extraordinary decorative aesthetics of the author. Few books are as complete as Dreamers of Decadence for not only does Jullian explore the artists of that curious oeuvre, he also introduces the best of the literature as well as the movement’s strange obsessions and themes, each chapter revealing new facets of the…
There have been few movements in the history of Western art as strange as that of the Decadents of the last quarter of the 19th Century. While public attention was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different...and more imaginative way...to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them. The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850s. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau; their most…
