| Finding inspiration in the ordinary, architect John Pawson selects 272 snapshots from his archive, showcasing a different way of looking at the everyday. |
 | | A Visual Inventory presents some of the images from Pawson’s personal collection of over 230,000 digital snapshots.
Hand-picked and arranged in pairs, photographs of buildings, objects, landscapes and surfaces are accompanied by captions written by Pawson that explain why he was compelled to capture the image. It’s the selection, arrangement and captioning of the photographs that make this book unique, valuable and attractive to any architect, designer, artist or student who wants to see the world around them with a stronger eye.
£29.95 | $49.95 | €39.95
BUY NOW |
‘If people mention something specific about a place, a type of brick they saw perhaps, I always want evidence. "Where's the photograph?" I say. A verbal description can help, but it's not necessarily what the person saw. Video is fantastic, but it's much too time-consuming. I can't sketch, so I take pictures instead.’
John Pawson in The Guardian |
 | |  |
| Caught in the sun, this acrylic vase designed by Shiro Kuramata tints the sill with coloured light. Where I like to work with stone and wood, Kuramata’s preference was for synthetic materials whose perfect surfaces give the impression of something that has spontaneously materialized in space. It allows his work to appear at once abstract and hyper-real. Kuramata was a key influence on me at a critical point in my life. | | This accumulation of paint spatterings is an incidental byproduct of a creative process, but it has an aesthetic quality of its own nonetheless. The workbench is in the paint shop of the Pinarello cycle factory in the north of Italy. The man who dealt with my order was a bit put out when I said I wanted the frame to be as plain as possible, without all the usual colourful branding decals. |
 | |  |
| Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West was installed in Dia:Beacon in 2002, having been partially realized in the Sierra Nevada in 1967. It comprises four monumental voids, set flush with the floor. Heizer’s experience of desert landscapes is reflected in the scale of the work—although he prefers the term size. The powerful atmosphere it generates in the gallery goes beyond straightforward feelings of tension or apprehension. | | Also at Dia:Beacon are Walter De Maria’s Silver Meters and Gold Meters, each formed of a series of eight stainless-steel squares. Every square contains a troy ounce of gold or silver, inserted flush into the steel in the form of cylindrical plugs of varying depth. The longer the plugs specified for a particular square, the fewer the total number of plugs and thus the sparer the visible grid. The outcome is incredibly refined. |
 | |  |
| For just one day or so every year, the restrained granite wall of this Breuer house on the shore of Lake Maggiore is covered in red camellia petals. The strength of their visual impact brings to mind the iconic scene in the film American Beauty, when Mena Suvari floats on a bed of scarlet petals. | | This shot was taken in the backyard of my London house, after an autumn rain shower. The honey coloured limestone darkens to grey in its wet state, but the grid of slabs still forms the perfect quiet backdrop against which to register the delicate hues of the leaves and the solitary rose petal. In among the other more static forms, the two wisteria stems have an expressive, almost balletic quality. |
| | A Visual Inventory
Hardback | 304 pages | 272 photographs
Covering a huge range of subjects, the photographs form a remarkable body of reference material. Some of the images illustrate a particular idea about form, material or space; others reflects the author’s interest in returning repeatedly to certain subjects, capturing the changes brought by different weather, light conditions, seasons and patterns of use.
BUY NOW |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment