This handsome book explores the recent use of figurative characteristics in the design arts. Through digital literacy and enhanced fabrication techniques, this avant-garde movement has reintroduced hybrids of methods and ideologies that were once considered too ornamental in character or too handcrafted for the 20th-century minimalist design lexicon. Both large urban-scale architecture and the small domestic realm of design are employing this avant-garde vocabulary formally and figuratively in the terms of shapes and surfaces that evoke trees, tornadoes, parasols, photography, death, illness, food, music, and sensuality. The volume includes recent work by a wide array of international architects, designers, and studios, including Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Jürgen Mayer H., UNStudio, and many others, and features full-page spreads devoted to illustrations of everything from tattooed and perforated surfaces to woven and sculptural forms—a rich aesthetic charting new territories in the realm of contemporary design.
This handsome book explores the recent use of figurative characteristics in the design arts. Through digital literacy and enhanced fabrication techniques, this avant-garde movement has reintroduced hybrids of methods and ideologies that were once considered too ornamental in character or too handcrafted for the 20th-century minimalist design lexicon. Both large urban-scale architecture and the small domestic realm of design are employing this avant-garde vocabulary formally and figuratively in the terms of shapes and surfaces that evoke trees, tornadoes, parasols, photography, death, illness, food, music, and sensuality. The volume includes recent work by a wide array of international architects, designers, and studios, including Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Jürgen Mayer H., UNStudio, and many others, and features full-page spreads devoted to illustrations of everything from tattooed and perforated surfaces to woven and sculptural forms—a rich aesthetic charting new territories in the realm of contemporary design.