Reading List

Reviewed by Stanley Abercrombie -- Interior Design, 7/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

Fabrics: A Guide for Interior Designers and Architects

By Marypaul Yates

New York: W.W. Norton, $75

312 pages, 525 color illustrations

Marypaul Yates has designed fabric for Rodolph, Robert Allen Contract, Bernhardt Textiles, and Baker Furniture and has taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design. A follow-up to her 1986 Textiles: A Handbook for Designers, the present publication supplies more information, more illustrations, and much more color. Fabrics does not pretend to provide a survey of the current market but instead examines the processes and techniques of designing, manufacturing, finishing, testing, specifying, and using textiles. A final section, "Guidelines and Pitfalls," contains more good advice for designers than most books do in their entirety: Mohair plush "crawls" on itself when sewed, for example, and lining a sheer fabric produces a moiré effect. The glossary—though it lists benday as "bendé," among other creative spellings—is large and useful, as is the bibliography. Names of sources and trade organizations, a table of fiber properties, and identifications for all illustrated fabrics are also included.

Powell/Kleinschmidt Interior Architecture

By Werner Blaser

Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, $65

176 pages, 252 illustrations

This beautifully executed book documents and celebrates a quarter century of interior architectural accomplishments by Powell/Kleinschmidt founding partners Donald D. Powell and Robert D. Kleinschmidt, both of whom apprenticed at the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and are members of the Interior Design Hall of Fame. The partners' classic modernism is deeply rooted in the accomplishments of Chicago's greatest masters, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and SOM's Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham. In the tradition of these design pioneers, P/K has focused on space as a whole, from furniture to architecture.

Over 40 of the firm's projects, from 1976 to 2001, are surveyed here—intimate residences and large-scale corporate offices alike. All demonstrate attention to spatial clarity, elegant materials, and refined detail. The text (which includes an introduction by Interior Design books editor Stanley Abercrombie) briefly describes overall design goals and identifies key elements within the spaces. The color and black-and-white photographs, composed with an exquisitely rendered floor plan, lend both the interiors and the book a timeless quality. —Cindy Coleman