VAN ALEN BOOKS

Rietveld’s Chair
Marijke Kuper & Lex Reitsma
Rietveld’s Chair, the first in the Premsela Design Stores series on Dutch design history, provides a detailed look into the work of Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld, from his early training as a cabinetmaker to the legacy of the Red-Blue Chair as an icon of Dutch design and symbol of the De Stijl movement. Now available after the popular first edition sold out in 2011, this book by Marijke Kuper—the world’s leading expert on Rietveld’s work—includes text in both English and Dutch as well as an accompanying DVD documentary by the book’s designer, Lex Reitsma.

Ludwig Hilberseimer
Metropolisarchitecture
In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885–1967) redefined architecture’s relationship to the city. His proposal for a high-rise city, where leisure, labor and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. Hilberseimer’s Groszstadt-architektur (Metropolisarchitecture) is presented here for the first time in English translation, as the second volume in the GSAPP Sourcebooks series.

Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci, ed.
Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice
Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists. Opening with a foreword by Teddy Cruz, the book mixes artistic and architectural contributions with those of sociologists, urban historians, philosophers, and activists.

CIVIC ACTION with The Noguchi Museum & Socrates Sculpture Park
As urban planning and civic projects become more interdisciplinary, Civic Action reconsiders the role that artists and cultural institutions can play. The Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park engaged four artists—Natalie Jeremijenko, Mary Miss, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and George Trakas—to lead teams to develop new strategies for community development in the surrounding neighborhood of Long Island City. These partnerships yielded an array of innovative and surprising approaches, and also an argument for new urban planning models.

Mohsen Mostafavi, ed.
In the Life of Cities
What are the relations between the design of a city—its form—and the life engendered by that form? This new volume compiles two dozen responses to this question, with its contributors drawing observations from urban locales as disparate as São Paulo, Houston, Paris, Jakarta, and Mumbai. A series of extraordinary photo essays rounds out this substantial contribution to the literature on contemporary urbanism.

Helen & Hard
Relational Design
Based in the coastal Norwegian city of Stavanger, the design partnership Helen & Hard has developed their principles of ‘relational design’ over fifteen years of practice. Each project responds to social and ecological site conditions—witness Geopark, an urban playground bricolage assembled from the detritus of the region’s oil industry.

San Rocco 5: Scary Architects
Just in—The latest issue of San Rocco Magazine confronts the horror of architecture: “What should we think of the architects who have decided to scare the rest of the world deliberately? And what about buildings that are not just big and uncanny, but deliberately dark, windowless, gloomy, repulsive, or anti-human?”

Günther Vogt
Miniature and Panorama
Just in from Lars Müller Publishers, this exquisitely designed volume spans twelve years of Vogt Landscape Architects’ innovative practice. Featuring high-profile works such as the Tate Modern grounds in London (with Herzog & de Meuron) alongside formal and typological investigations, this book reveals the theoretical foundations of one of Europe’s most prolific landscape architecture firms.

Harvard Design Magazine 35: Architecture’s Core?
What does it mean to speak of a particular design discipline today? While past issues of Harvard Design Magazine have explored the intersection of various design fields, Issue 35 examines architecture as a distinct discipline. Investigating architecture’s values, methodologies, and pedagogical techniques, Architecture’s Core? asks how the field of architecture should respond to societal and technological transformations.

Five Borough Farm: Seeding the Future of Urban Agriculture in New York City
Urban agriculture is booming in New York City, with more than 700 food-producing urban farms and gardens citywide. This ambitious project, by the Design Trust for Public Space in partnership with Added Value, seeks to document the scope of existing agricultural activity, and to assess its benefits beyond the production of food. With an eye toward public policy, this book envisions a future for these agricultural sites at the center of civic life.