We are living in a time when so much of what we see online is fake, and so much of what is real is terrifying. Within these books, you’ll find companions in thought—people who make sense of the past, offer paths forward, find wonder in fugitive moments, and embrace small pleasures. They remind us that to create, design, and imagine is among the most meaningful work we do as human beings.
1. Campania: Recipes & Wandering Across Italy’s Polychromatic Coast
Edited by Belmond
Apartamento
It’s probably because Berlin, where I’ve been spending summers, has been rainy all season, but poring through Apartamento’s new book filled with recipes from the Caruso hotel on the Amalfi Coast and luscious photos by Lea Colombo is a great way to spend a drizzly afternoon on the couch.
2. Cooking Up Dinner Speeches: Ise Gropius in Japan
Edited by Almut Grunewald
gta Verlag ETH Zürich
In the spring of 1954, Ise Gropius went to Japan with her husband, Walter, the famous architect. This book is her travelogue, detailing their private and professional meetings and the places they visited as they worked to establish and intertwine their legacy with that of modern architecture.
3. Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy
Ignacio G. Galán
University of Minnesota Press
The rise of fascism in Italy between the two World Wars also saw the expansion of the country’s interior design and furnishing industries. Featuring protagonists like Gio Ponti, this prescient and incisive book takes a scholarly look at how we can read the evolution of political ideology in everyday objects.
4. Synthesis
Mari Katayama
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions.
This spellbinding collection showcases recent photographs by Mari Katayama, whose multimedia practice continues to explore identity as something self-fashioned and constructed. In these images, Katayama poses among the carefully arranged chaos of objects on the verge of coherence, accompanied by her sewn sculptures and handcrafted prosthetic limbs, which draw deeply from her experience as an amputee.
5. Inside the New Shopping Bag: Susan Bijl 25 Years of Thoughtful Design
Susan Bijl
NAi010 Publishers
Twenty-five years ago, Dutch designer Susan Bijl aimed to design the single-use plastic bag out of existence. This didn’t happen, but we do have her iconic two-toned bag that became a design staple. This book traces the community that has emerged around the bag, detailing the lives of people from Rotterdam to Kyoto who have embraced Bijl’s design.
6. Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists is Shaping the Memorial Landscape
Cat Dawson
MIT Press
Monuments have been toppling as the world slowly and painfully decolonizes. Academic Cat Dawson examines how the role of monuments in the U.S. has shifted through a deep dive into recent art practices that have redefined what a monument is. Featured artists include Kara Walker, Lauren Halsey, and Mark Bradford.
7. Draw
Kenya Hara
Lars Müller Publishers
Taken from more than four decades of sketches, this book collects drawings from one of the world’s most beloved living designers (most of us know him for his work as art director of Muji). Here, the illustrated thoughts of a designer are offered up for contemplation.
8. A Moratorium on New Construction
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Sternberg Press
The building sector accounts for 40 percent of the world’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions. Architect and educator Charlotte Malterre-Barthes points out the obvious—let’s stop building. The book spells out what she thinks we should do instead.
9. Visiting: Inken Baller & Hinrich Baller, Berlin 1966-89
Edited by Urban Fragment Observatory.
Park Books
Anyone who has spent time in Berlin will have come across one of Inken and Hinrich Baller’s idiosyncratic buildings. From amidst the Neoclassical, the Postwar, and the Industrial, the Ballers present whimsy, fantasy, and ornament in some of the most thought-out, considered, and spatially sophisticated German buildings of the last century.
10. Walking Sticks
Edited by Keiji Takeuchi and Marco Sammicheli
Lars Müller Publishers
The catalog to Milan-based Japanese designer Keiji Takeuchi’s exhibition in the Milan Triennial presents the newly commissioned designs of a loaded personal object. Through the walking stick, designers like Maddalena Casadei, Pierre Charpin, Ville Kokkonen, Jasper Morrison, and Jun Yasumoto grapple with issues like aging, personal space, fashion, and ceremony.
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