An innovatively designed monograph on the work of Matali Crasset, one of France’s leading product designers. A darling of French industrial design, Matali Crasset has earned critical praise internationally with her unique spaces and products. Ranging from simple, ergonomic kitchen utensils to architecture, her work engages its end users by asking questions on the role design plays in their everyday lives. Crasset was awarded International Interior Designer of the Year at the British Interior Design Awards in 2004, received the Grand Prize for Design from the city of Paris in 1997, and was a previous recipient of the Premier Prix de Concours Louis Vuitton. Her work includes products and interventions for Philippe Starck (whom she worked with for five years), Established and Sons, Hermès, Swarovski, Authentics, Domeau & Pérès, Alessi, Meta/Mallet, Artemide, and others. She has also engaged in architecture in the round, including hotels in Nice and Tunisia. Raised in a small village in the north of France, where work and life were intimately bound, the designer’s formative experiences clearly inform her view on contemporary design. The uncluttered rhythms of life in the country are reflected in the simple—but often colorful—forms that have earned Crasset a name for herself in the realms of product design, interiors, architecture, and art installations. Lavishly depicted with more than three hundred sketches, concept renderings, and photographs in a unique and brightly hued book format, the projects are organized thematically, with a special emphasis on materials and process.

Matali Crasset: Works

Arts & Photography

Midal, Alexandra

Ryan, Zoë

Crasset, Matali

Decorative Arts & Design

Rizzoli

Since the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s, many objects have been designed to have capabilities well beyond their immediate use or appearance. Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, these objects talk to us, and we have come to expect interaction with them. Contemporary designers, besides giving objects form and function, write their initial scripts--the foundation for useful and satisfying conversations. Talk to Me focuses on projects that involve such direct interaction--including interfaces, websites, video games, devices and tools, and information systems--as well as installations that establish practical, emotional, or even sensual connections to cities, companies, governmental institutions, or other individuals. The featured objects range in date from the late 1980s to today, with particular attention given to the last five years and projects currently in development. Organized thematically, Talk to Me introduces design practices that are increasingly crucial to our world and demonstrates how rich and deep the influence of design will be on our future.

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects

Antonelli, Paola

Hunt, Jamer

Slavin, Kevin

Vinh, Khoi

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Synchronized dance and the shifting dialogue between the power of forms and the forms of power. A popular form of artistic expression, synchronized dance is often belittled as a minor form of art that stands for a great variety of often conflicting phenomena- the desire to create a Taylorist form of art; a manifestation of American standardization in an economically strained Germany; the endorsement of the precision and efficiency in the name of Americanism; the incarnation of capitalism and its misguided ways; a linguistic and patriarchal taxonomy that categorizes women as gar onne, New Woman, or Heidi; the consumption and reification of women as commodities; the community of Hitler's elite troops; and so forth. Synchronized dance shows draw attention to a state of hypnoptic forms which, under the guise of entertainment, propagate nauseating ideologies, and crime-but not only. The myriad associations triggered by the spectacle of synchronized dance raises fundamental questions about the nature of forms. Do they carry an eternal meaning, as the proponents of the Modern Movement imagined, or do they, on the contrary, yield to any meaning imposed on them? To examine in detail the condition of the synchronized dance form questions whether such body manipulation belong to the past, or not. The omnipresence of revues attracted numerous contemporary analyses, but what is happening to the meaning of form and what does this spectacle used for occasion such as Donald Trump Inauguration or North Korean parade still mean today? The debate around a "rational and empty form" is not useless, since this very emptiness shapes ideologies and is no more confined to a single political conception or to a factual opposition between democracy and extremism than it is linked to a specific era or geography. Neither de-historicized nor depoliticized, synchronized dance rekindles the question of the aesthetics of very relative ideologies.

Sublime Fascism: Girls, the Troopers of Dance: Aesthetization of Entertainment of Politics and Manipulation of Entertainment (Sternberg Press / Domestic Psycho Series)

History & Criticism

Sternberg Press

Design - introduction à l'histoire d'une discipline

Pocket

A counterhistory and new historiography of design.
In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design, in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design's established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present. Midal rejects both linear narratives of progress and the long-held perception of design as a footnote to the histories of fine art and architecture. By weaving critical analysis of the canon of design history and theory together, with special attention to the writings of designers themselves, she draws out the nuances and radical potentials of the discipline―from William Morris's ambivalence toward industry, to Catharine Beecher's proto-feminist household appliances, to the Bauhaus's Expressionist origins, and the influence of Herbert Marcuse on Joe Colombo.

Design by Accident: For a New History of Design

The simultaneous emergence of the serial killer and the assembly line as expressions of the rationality of modern production methods. 
In 1896, at the age of 35, Henry Howard Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudget, became the first serial killer in the United States, confessing to dozens of crimes. To carry out his activities quietly, he built in Chicago a building so vast that his neighbors called it the “Château.” Located just a stone's throw from the most sophisticated slaughterhouses in the world, lethal, practical, and comfortable, Holmes's building was equipped with the latest innovations. A rational, cozy masterpiece of crime dressed in slippers, Holmes's project fit perfectly into the functionalist project of the modern world. 
In The Murder Factory, Alexandra Midal examines the almost simultaneous emergence of the industrial revolution and the figure of the serial killer. Far from being a coincidence, it marks the rationality of new production methods—of which the assembly line and serial murder are two expressions. In the Holmes case, an antihero of modern history can shed light on the treatment of living things brought about by this economic, mechanical, and cultural revolution. 
H. H. Holmes's confessions, published in the Philadelphia Enquirer just before his execution in April 1896, follow Midal's text.

The Murder Factory: Life and work of H. H. Holmes, First American Serial Killer

History

Americas

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Books by Midal, Alexandra