By Meghan Edwards
This fall three books give readers intimate looks at artists, architects and designers: where they work, how they work and what they create.
Magic Happens Here
Twenty years ago, interiors photographer Paul Barbera shot the studio of an artist friend, launching a visual obsession that has resulted in Where They Create, a compilation of photographs of his favorite studios. Based in part on Barbera’s blog, wheretheycreate.com, the book delves even deeper into the creative spaces of Wallpaper* magazine, fashion labels Acne and Opening Ceremony, architect Clive Wilkinson, artist Jeremiah Goodman and other artists, architects, illustrators and designers. The images are un-styled and raw, shot only with natural light, and mix bird’s-eye views with exquisite details, including idiosyncratic stacks of paper, doorbell nameplates and even the contents of a refrigerator. Author Alexandra Onderwater’s interviews with the owners of each studio provide spatial descriptions that reveal how daily work environments interact with creative production. $44.95 (pre-order $29.21); Frame Publishers, available through Amazon.
Under the Arbor
London’s Serpentine Gallery has been sponsoring summer design pavilions by some of the biggest names in architecture for eleven years. Renowned architecture writer Philip Jodidio collects them all in Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, showcasing not only built pavilions by the likes of Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001) and Oscar Niemeyer (2003), but also unrealized designs like the 2004 commission by MVRDV. The program’s temporary pavilions are by international architects or designers who, as a prerequisite to their invitation to submit, have never before completed a building in the United Kingdom. More recent renditions have been by Frank Gehry (2008), Jean Nouvel (2010) and Peter Zumthor’s current pavilion, open through October 16. Architectural drawings and photography of each work are accompanied by interviews with the gallery’s co-directors, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, the latter who launched the concept in 2000. $59.99; Taschen Books, available through Amazon.
Brushes With Genius
In October people will get a first-hand look at Roy Lichenstein at work in Roy Lichtenstein in His Studio. Laurie Lambrecht, administrative assistant to the Pop Art master for three years, photographed the artist in his studios in New York and Southampton in the early 1990s, and their collaboration is revealed as Lichenstein works on two major series, Reflections and The Interiors. Lichtenstein is seemingly unaware of the camera, as Lambrecht captures him perched on ladders and deep in thought, endlessly analyzing color and composition. Photographs of scrapbooks, sketchbooks and archival materials document the artist’s preparation for a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1993. The photographs are works of art in their own right, and are accompanied by an essay by the artist’s wife, Dorothy Lichtenstein; Edward Robinson, an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, dishes on the artist’s method. $35 ($23.10 pre-order); Monacelli Press, available through Amazon.
