The first publication documenting the work of Brooks Stevens, one of America's most influential twentieth-century designers.
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World is a long overdue introduction to the work of visionary industrial designer Brooks Stevens (1911-1995). Believing that an industrial designer "should be a businessman, an engineer, and a stylist, in that order," Stevens created thousands of ingenious and beautiful designs for industrial and household products―including a clothes dryer with a window in the front, a wide-mouthed peanut butter jar, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. ("There's nothing more aerodynamic than a wiener," he explained.) He invented a precursor to the SUV by turning a Jeep into a station wagon after World War II, and streamlined steam irons so that they resembled aircraft. It was Brooks Stevens who, in 1954, coined the phrase "planned obsolescence," defining it as "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary." This concept has since been blamed for everything from toasters that stop working to today's throwaway culture, but Stevens was simply recognizing the intentionally ephemeral nature of a designer's work. Asked once to name his favorite design, he replied, "none, because every one would have to be restudied for the tastes of tomorrow."
This book, which accompanied an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum (the repository for Stevens's papers), includes 250 illustrations of designs by Stevens and his firm, many in color. Glenn Adamson, exhibition curator, contributes detailed studies of individual designs. John Heskett, Kristina Wilson, and Jody Clowes contribute interpretive essays. Also included are a description of the Brooks Stevens Archive and several key writings by Brooks Stevens.

Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World

Adamson, Glenn

Business & Money

Mit Pr

Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (Mit Press)

The MIT Press

Global Design History

Globalism is often discussed using abstract terms, such as ‘networks’ or ‘flows’ and usually in relation to recent history. Global Design History moves us past this limited view of globalism, broadening our sense of this key term in history and theory. Individual chapters focus our attention on objects, and the stories they can tell us about cultural interactions on a global scale. They place these concrete things into contexts, such as trade, empire, mediation, and various forms of design practice. Among the varied topics included are: <ul>
<li>the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture</li> <li>the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth-century</li> <li>the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of ‘import substitution’ </li> <li>German design in the context of empire </li> <li>handcrafted modernist furniture in Turkey </li> <li>Australian fashions employing ‘ethnic’ motifs </li> <li>an experimental UK-Ghanaian design partnership</li> <li>Chinese social networking websites </li> <li>the international circulation of contemporary architects.</li> </ul>
Featuring work from leading design historians, each chapter is paired with a ‘response’, designed to expand the discussion and test the methodologies on offer. An extensive bibliography and resource guide will also aid further research, providing students with a user friendly model for approaches to global design. Global Design History will be useful for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers in design history and art history, and related subjects such as anthropology, craft studies and cultural geography.

Arts & Photography

Riello, Giorgio

Teasley, Sarah

History & Criticism

Routledge

The first book to address the significance of the materials and methods used to make contemporary artworks Today, artists are able to create using multiple methods of production―from painting to digital technologies to crowdsourcing―some of which would have been unheard of just a few decades ago. Yet, even as our means of making art become more extraordinary and diverse, they are almost never addressed in their specificity. While critics and viewers tend to focus on the finished products we see in museums and galleries, authors Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and processes behind the scenes used to make artworks are also vital to current considerations of authorship and to understanding the economic and social contexts from which art emerges. This wide-ranging exploration of different methods and media in art since the 1950s includes nine chapters that focus on individual processes of making: Painting, Woodworking, Building, Performing, Tooling Up, Cashing In, Fabricating, Digitizing, and Crowdsourcing. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of techniques and materials. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Alice Aycock, Isa Genzken, Los Carpinteros, Paul Pfeiffer, Doris Salcedo, Santiago Sierra, and Rachel Whiteread. 219 color illustrations

Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing

Bryan-Wilson, Julia

Thames&Hudson

Called "an offspring of Brancusi and early-twentieth-century abstraction" by the Whitney Biennial, where his work was presented in 2014, Alma Allen creates sculptures that have been the critical darlings of the art-collecting set for the past decade. Painstakingly made in foraged wood, sculpted marble, and cast bronze, Alma Allen's works range in scale from minuscule to oversize. These sensuous biomorphic forms caught the attention of collectors such as Beth Rudin DeWoody, Tobias Meyer, and Ronnie Sassoon and have been part of museum exhibitions as well as single-artist gallery shows. Following the inclusion of three of Allen's works in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Time magazine named one of the pieces in their five best works in the Biennial. This is the first volume devoted to this emerging artist's work, with newly commissioned photography of Allen's studios in Joshua Tree, California, and Tepoztlán, Mexico--two spaces designed and built by Allen that have been highly lauded by press and social media. A critical essay and extended biographical text make this an insightful and welcome monograph on one of today's most sought-after artists.

Alma Allen

Fogle, Douglas

Individual Artists

Rizzoli Electa

The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.\nLiza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou's long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.\nIn this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work.

Liza Lou

Sherman, Elisabeth

Chaffee, Cathleen

The Invention of Craft

Glenn Adamson's last book, Thinking Through Craft, offered an influential account of craft's position within modern and contemporary art. Now, in his engaging sequel, The Invention of Craft, his theoretical discussion of skilled work is extended back in time and across numerous disciplines. Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry's "other", a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position. The Invention of Craft ranges widely across media, from lock-making, wood-carving and iron-casting to fashion, architecture and design. It also moves back and forth between periods, from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Bloomsbury Academic

Glenn Adamson's last book, Thinking Through Craft, offered an influential account of craft's position within modern and contemporary art. Now, in his engaging sequel, The Invention of Craft, his theoretical discussion of skilled work is extended back in time and across numerous disciplines.
Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry's "other", a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position. 
The Invention of Craft ranges widely across media, from lock-making, wood-carving and iron-casting to fashion, architecture and design. It also moves back and forth between periods, from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Dirt on Delight is the catalogue for the ICA Philadelphia's hit exhibit of 2009; in a rave review for The New York Times, Roberta Smith observed that this "close to groundbreaking" show, in its diversity, reminds us that ceramics "has one of the richest histories of any medium on the planet," and the works gathered here range from modestly-scaled pots to larger installations, crossing false delineations between fine arts, crafts and "outsider" practices. Among the artists included are Robert Arneson, Kathy Butterly, Nicole Cherubini, Lucio Fontana, Viola Frey, Jane Irish, Ron Nagle, George Ohr, Ken Price, Sterling Ruby, Peter Voulkos, Beatrice Wood and Betty Woodman.

Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay

Schaffner, Ingrid

Porter, Jenelle

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

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