The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus

Mira Locher

Super Potato Design: The Complete Works of Takashi Sugimoto: Japan's Leading Interior Designer

Super Potato Design is the first full-length book to present the work and conceptual ideas of the internationally renowned Japanese design firm Super Potato, founded by Takashi Sugimoto. Super Potato's compelling designs for the interiors of restaurants, shops and hotels, as well as Takashi Sugimoto's designs for tea ceremony spaces and utensils, are richly complex compositions of materials which create simple, strong spaces. Using traditional Japanese building materials such as bamboo, wood, and stone, but creating original yet timeless spaces, Super Potato's designs avoid specific stylistic characterizations and short-lived fashion. By finding contemporary expression for essential concepts present in traditional Japan and combining materials in unexpected ways to create exciting spaces, Super Potato's work has had a significant impact on interior design in Japan and throughout Asia. Super Potato Design is generously illustrated with 320 full-color photographs by the respected Japanese photographer Yoshio Shiratori, who has recorded Super Potato's projects since the firm's conception in 1973. Architect and Japan scholar Mira Locher introduces the ideas and influences of Takashi ...

Stafford Cliff

The Way We Live with Color

Proceeding from the general to the specific, the book begins with different styles and forms of housing and how these are affected and influenced by color. For example, the simplicity of white clapboard New England colonials lend themselves to formal approaches, while the lighthearted pastels of the Caribbean invite informal juxtapositions of style. The book then explores how varying materials and textures--open up new areas for exploring color and mood. The concluding section of the book is a rich sequence of images depicting how color is used differently around the world. Taken together, this book is sure to be a source of inspiration for anyone interested in interiors and decorating.

William Davies King

Collections of Nothing

Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don't think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing--and a lot of it. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value. As he relates the story of his burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating meditation on the human urge to collect. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation and dissection of the collector's art as seen through the life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive fever."What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his ...