Philip Wilkinson

“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.” -- Jonathan Ive (Sr. VP of Design at Apple)

In this beautiful and informative volume, writer Philip Wilkinson works with the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to highlight ~100 outstandingly designed products that are “both completely fit for purpose and unrivaled in appearance.” From designers around the world, they’re presented chronologically from the bentwood chair in 1860 (when the show more Industrial Revolution’s mass-production began to require designers to draft models for manufacturers to follow) to the iPad in 2010.

There’s furniture; home accessories and decoration; cookware/tableware; graphics (wallpaper, fabric, posters, maps, books, fonts); transportation; electronics; and more, presented as lushly as you expect from Dorling Kindersley -- pleasingly laid out and printed in full color on smooth, heavy paper. It's definitely "survey" in depth, but each design is featured as a two-page spread that includes background on the product, its designer and the time period, plus numerous photographic perspectives that describe key features. A tally of my prioritized favorites comes to 27! The following group of four, surprisingly (to me) all in transportation, stays especially in mind:

• the 1938 Volkswagen Beetle (which I was shocked to learn was created pursuant to “Adolf Hitler’s demand for a cheap ‘People’s car’ that would carry two adults and three children in comfort, at a speed of 62 mph (100 kph), and at a retail cost of 1,000 Reichsmark (the price of a small motorcycle”);
• the 1946 Vespa (the Italian word for “wasp,” which it delightfully resembles); and
• the Austin Seven Mini and the Cadillac series 62, both of which are from 1959 but couldn’t be more visually different -- the former a 10-foot-long “bubble” economy car that is all passenger area, and the latter a 20-foot-long luxury model that’s everything but passenger area.

This is one of very few coffee-table books I’ve read from cover to cover (The Elements, The Oxford Project, and Off the Tourist Trail are three others that come to mind). I was so enamored with some of the designs that I shopped online for the products ... and was greeted with such sticker-shock each time that I’m grateful to at least have the representations of them in this beautiful book :)

(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.) show less

For a book about such an essentially orderly philosophy, this book is a mess. Every page is a mix-up of small excerpts by images about the philosophy and practice of Buddhism - basically centered on a central exposition. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I tend to be a bit wary of series books, but this one is precisely the kind of thing which would have caught my eye in fifth or sixth grade. It’s full of pictures and a veritable wealth of information about various features of various show more sects of Buddhism, and it also spends a good amount of time on the cultural practices of monks and lay people in societies where the philosophy is more prevalent. The text never goes into too much detail, but it still manages to say a little bit about a lot of different facets. The intended audience of this work is probably somewhere between fifth and eighth grade students who show an interest in understanding world religions; and this book would be pretty good for them as an introduction to Buddhism – on a basic level. This is a decent enough book, overall, and I may consider having it, or others from the series, in my classroom. show less

The book details mythologies around the world, giving close attention to creator gods and other myths of creation. The author includes pictures of various representations of gods, and cross-references to similar stories, as well as indicating what a given god is called in a different culture, especially in the classical period when many Roman gods were adoptions into the pantheon from conquered peoples. This collection is interesting and the work is well written; if it was meant to be show more inspiring, it failed. In fact, it is a good demonstration of the total hatred of religions for the things and people of this world, and the desire for some sort of utopia, as well as the fact that the gods were not going to be good to humans in most cases. It details more human suffering than human inspiration or hope, bringing into question the already questionable assertion that religion brings hope to the hopeless. A good reference collection, but perhaps a bit better if it included an appendix with the names, regions, and roles of the various gods for ease of comparison. show less

This is one of those books the title of which says it all: a guide that you can carry around with you when visiting towns, cities or country houses to view the buildings of England. (And it really does mean only England, not the other currently constituent countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, though much of the information here is transferable to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.) Explicitly excluded from the notion of custom-designed architecture -- show more except for a brief mention of building materials -- are all those examples of fine vernacular structures, whether thatched cottages, terraced houses or tithe barns, though I suspect the last-mentioned cathedral-like storehouses may well have been planned by the same individuals who directed the building of the associated abbeys.

The book is simply structured, starting with a timeline taking in twenty-two broad stylistic categories -- from Saxon and Norman to Modernism and Art Deco -- and covering the period 600 to 1939. This is then followed, after a short introduction, by chapters summarising the principal features of all those styles, with occasional 'interludes' to discuss changing tastes or available materials. Before the final index there are useful appendices illustrating diagnostic details to aid identification of periods: pillars, windows, doors, arches, vaults and towers.

According to his blog the author has written "The English Buildings Book, England's Abbeys, Restoration, the book of Adam Hart-Davis's series What the Romans Did For Us, other books about architecture and buildings, and various books on other subjects, including Dorling Kindersley's handbooks on Mythology (written with Neil Philip) and Religions." So he definitely knows whereof he speaks. An added attraction of this unpretentious and accessible guide is the inclusion of vintage illustrations, from the line drawings of Colen Campbell's 1715 Vitruvius Britannicus and Victorian reference books to historic postcard photographs. The picture research was done by Fiona Shoop who had access to the postcard collection of the Estate of Stanley Shoop, and they add greatly to the character of this 136-page guide.

http://wp.me/p2oNj1-QF show less