Books

Edited by Stanley Abercrombie -- Interior Design, 5/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

Hariri & Hariri Architecture: Buildings & Projects
byGisue and Mojgan Hariri
Mulgrave, Australia: Images Publishing Group, distributed by ACC Distribution, $80
256 pages, 300 color illustrations

Readers of this magazine have been amazed and delighted by the work of Gisue and Mojgan Hariri since we first published it in 1994. As the design world knows, these two sisters were born in Iran, educated at Cornell University, and established the firm now known as Hariri & Hariri in 1986. Many commissions, publications, and honors followed, including induction into the Interior Design Hall of Fame.

This book presents six categories of projects. "Mixed Use" opens with an ambitious complex now under construction in Salzburg, Austria: 80 apartments, a garage, a spa, a restaurant, an art gallery, and more. "Commercial" presents offices, a prototype mall, and a Tui Pranich furniture showroom in Miami's Design District. A standout in "Cultural"—unfortunately unbuilt—is a film center for Brooklyn, New York. "Hospitality" features the fluidly formed New York flagship for Juan Valdez coffee. "Residential" includes a number of apartments in addition to the serene Houses at Sagaponac design that brought the Hariris wide recognition back in 2004. Finally, "Art, Lighting, Furniture" shows us just that.

In her felicitous foreword, Gisue Hariri writes of the sisters' childhood in the desert—its isolation, sensual lines, and great vistas conducive to the imagination—and summer visits to Esfahan, "truly the museum of Persian architecture." She concludes that architecture is a means of "encountering the invisible, where beauty, sensuality, functionality, technology, and philosophy connect the body and mind."

The Great Lady Decorators: The Women Who Defined Interior Design, 1870–1955
by Adam Lewis
New York: Rizzoli New York, $65
256 pages, 200 color illustrations

Well researched and well illustrated, this book provides a valuable overview of the dozen glamorous ladies who dominated interior design in the early 20th century. (The dates in the title notwithstanding, 19th-century work is limited to Candace Wheeler, and she appears only in the introduction.) Of these dozen, Madeleine Castaing was French, Syrie Maugham was British, Virginia-born Nancy Lancaster was based in London, and Australian-born Rose Cumming worked in New York. The rest were American through and through, beginning, as such a book must, with Elsie de Wolfe. Also included are Ruby Ross Wood—who, among other things, was De Wolfe's ghostwriter—Elsie Cobb Wilson, Dorothy Draper, Frances Elkins, Marian Hall, Eleanor Brown, and Sister Parish. Adam Lewis has amassed ample information about their personal as well as their professional lives. Supplementing photography both archival and new, perhaps the greatest glories of this valuable book are the dozen luminous "room portraits" by the super-talented Jeremiah Goodman, who gives the full flavor of interiors with the deftest of touches.

And what, you may ask, of the gentlmen? Having also written books on Van Day Truex and Albert Hadley, Lewis points out in his epilogue that the end of the Second World War brought many changes: "One of the new ventures that the veterans could explore was interior decorating." So you may not be surprised to learn that Lewis's next book, coming out in October from the same publisher, is Billy Baldwin: The Great American Decorator. Can William Pahlmann, John Fowler, David Hicks, and Angelo Donghia be far behind?

What They're Reading . . .

Dan Kaplan, Senior partner at FXFowle
Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World
byWarren Berger
New York: Penguin Press, $28
352 pages, 44 illustrations

Most practitioners harbor an unwavering faith in the power of design to improve the way people live and work. So when one of Dan Kaplan's partners passed him Warren Berger's collaboration with Bruce Mau, exploring how contemporary design is responsible for a plethora of paradigm shifts, the book was a natural for his library. "It pulls together the threads of thoughts floating through the industry and weaves them into a coherent whole," Kaplan says. Organized according to the concepts often used to tackle project issues—such as embracing constraints or working the metaphor—chapters outline the shift from the separate disciplines of architecture, interiors, products, and graphics to an integrated profession that works on everything from communication technologies to green business practices, heightening public awareness in the process. Kaplan himself is working to change the world via prefab Global Building Modules. Inspired by the shipping container, they're being developed by FXFowle with a consortium of architects, manufacturers, and engineers. "It's a mid- and high-rise system that can take one third off the typical cost and one half off the typical construction time," he explains. So much for global. How about local? "Well, my wife, Amy Graydon, is also an architect, and our daughters have become quite the sidewalk critics." That's the sort of early awareness the world needs. —Deborah Wilk