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Design

A Chinese Village’s Breezy New Library Uses Traditional Construction Techniques to Make a Social Impact

Modeled after a traditional Dong timber house, a new local library designed by Chinese architecture firm Condition_Lab highlights the region’s architectural heritage through elegant, contemporary details. Pingtan Book House is located in the village of Pingtan, Tongdao Province, Hunan, and nestles into the courtyard of a primary school that serves 400 children. The studio saw an opportunity to complement the school—a 20-year old blocky, concrete construction—with an addition that was more empathetic to its cultural and natural surroundings.

Condition_Lab conceived of the idea for a pitched, tiled roof and mortise-and-tenon construction from the local vernacular, drawing attention to the region’s disappearing historic construction. “Entire villages built over centuries from a single sustainable material, indigenous China Fir, are rapidly losing their identity,” the studio explains in a statement. “Dong’s cultural DNA is being challenged by contemporary living and the quest to modernize.”

Connection and interaction within the space and with one another is an important facet of Condition_Lab’s ethos. “Social impact does not require large amounts of financial investment, design is not limited to high-end projects, and architecture must have a purpose,” the studio says. To make the interior space inviting for children to explore, sit, and read, the designers devised a unique plan: instead of rooms and doors, the layout consists of two staircases that wrap around one another in a double helix. Landings between staircases provide wall space for books and top-to-bottom windows that peer out into the surrounding landscape. The steps provide seating for the children, with views up and down the three-story structure through airy balustrades.

Condition_Lab focuses on purposeful design as a vehicle to make change, and you can explore more of the studio’s work on its website and Instagram.

 

Design

The Elegant ‘Library House’ Encases a Vast Book Collection Within a Swedish Forest

Nestled in lush woodlands near Stockholm, the “Library House” is a sophisticated dwelling that’s both creatively inspiring and meditative. Glass walls enclose the four-building structure, which was designed by the architecture studio Fria Folket, and shelves of books delineate many of the rooms and hallways. The cozy and airy dwelling features a wood stove in an open kitchen, a connected greenhouse, warm rust-colored tile running throughout the home, and a central courtyard for gathering.

Explore more of Fria Folket’s elegant designs on Instagram. (via Plain Magazine)

 

Art

Everyday Situations Take an Amusing Turn in Toon Joosen’s Clever Collages

A man mows a field of text, a vacuum cleaner sucks up beachgoers, and kids shield themselves from falling words in the witty collages of Toon Joosen. From his studio in The Netherlands, the artist cuts and splices vintage photos, magazines, postcards, and book pages into clever works that take an ironic and surreal approach to everyday activities. Joosen tends to play with scale and perspective, creating tongue-in-cheek scenarios brimming with nostalgia and humor. He shares dozens of works on Instagram and has prints, buttons, and other goods available on Etsy.

 

Art

A New Book Repaints the Legacy of Street Art by Spotlighting Women Leading the Genre

For street artists, the urban landscape is an infinite canvas. Whether wheat pasted, sprayed, or layered with brushes, vibrant compositions revitalize public spaces and provide an ever-evolving barometer of the political climate and current affairs. The genre has been historically dominated by men, but a new book by journalist Alessandra Mattanza and Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art founder Stephanie Utz shifts the dial.

Women Street Artists spotlights the diverse practices of 24 graffiti and mural artists hailing from around the globe who work in a variety of styles, from large-scale public projects like Camilla Falsini’s vibrant pavement composition in Milan to striking interventions like Olek’s pink, crocheted coverlet for “Charging Bull,” Wall Street’s masculine bronze sculpture. Each finds walls, sidewalks, demolished structures, prison cells, grain silos, and other nontraditional surfaces to express ideas around feminism and empowerment, body imagery, racism, the climate crisis, and other critical issues.

You can find a copy of Women Street Artists on Bookshop.org, available now in the U.K. and scheduled for release in the U.S. on December 6.

 

Art Craft Photography

Top of the Stack: Colossal’s Favorite Art Books of 2022

As we near the end of 2022, we’re taking a look back at the year, starting with the books we found most compelling, impressive, and inspirational. We’ve published dozens of articles on artist monographs and compendiums of broader topics across art and design and science and history over the last 12 months, and these are the 10 titles that impacted us most.

Head to Bookshop to browse all 25 books on our list, including the highly anticipated Hilma AF Klint Catalogue Raisonné, a glimpse into rarely-seen works by Ruth Asawa, and a dive into the history of protest art.

 

Ocean, Exploring the Marine World

Across its 352 pages, Ocean, Exploring the Marine World dives into the planet’s notoriously vast and mysterious aquatic ecosystems, traveling across the continents and three millennia to uncover the stunning diversity of life below the surface. It presents science and history alongside art and illustration, including biological renderings by Ernst Haeckel, Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints, and works by artists like Kerry James Marshall, Vincent van Gogh, and Yayoi Kusama.

 

Nick Cave: Forothermore

From floral Soundsuits and found-object sculptures to a multicolor web of millions of pony beads, Forothermore surveys the 30-plus-year career of artist Nick Cave and accompanies a massive retrospective of the same name.

 

Paint with Thread: A Step-By-Step Guide to Embroidery Through the Seasons

Learn the distinctive stitching techniques of artist Emillie Ferris with Paint with Thread: A Step-By-Step Guide to Embroidery Through the Seasons. The how-to volume contains instructions for creating five whimsical projects that utilize Ferris’s long and short stitches to create textured portrayals of flora and fauna.

 

Great Women Painters 

Spanning nearly 350 pages, Great Women Painters highlights more than 300 artists across 500 years and a vast array of movements and aesthetics. The book pairs icons like Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington with contemporary artists like Ewa Juszkiewicz and Katharina Grosse in a broad and diverse overview of the women who profoundly impact art today.

 

An Alternative History of Photography

From East Asia to West Africa and New Zealand to Uzbekistan, this volume traverses the globe as it acknowledges the recognized greats of the medium and uncovers overlooked artists, traditions, and techniques. The book contains hundreds of images across decades, including works from Western icons like Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Man Ray, and Ansel Adams and African studio photographers like Sanlé Sory, Michel Kameni, and Malick Sidibe.

 

Olafur Eliasson, Experience

This enormous, nearly 500-page monograph explores the inimitable career of artist Olafur Eliasson. The edition comprises a breadth of works from the 1990s to today, including “The Weather Project” from 2003 (shown above) and the more recent “Life,” which flooded Fondation Beyeler with murky green waters.

 

Prime, Art’s Next Generation

Across nearly 450 pages, PRIME, Art’s Next Generation offers a broad and insightful survey of the Millenials defining the future of the art world, including Jordan Casteel, Tau Lewis, and Firelei Báez. The tome takes a broad look at what’s emerged from a cultural and creative landscape shaped by the internet.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure

This monograph accompanies the expansive King Pleasure exhibition that opened earlier this year in Chelsea and offers an intimate and holistic glimpse at the life that inspired Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oeuvre. The 336-page book features a broad array of works, interviews with family members, and an in-depth consideration of his life.

 

Art and Climate Change

We’re continually concerned with the effects of the climate crisis, and this collection within Thames&Hudson’s World of Art series draws together an array of works that respond to the current moment.

 

Shop all 25 titles on our list on Bookshop.

Photography

Salt Extraction Sites Turn Landscapes into Vivid Tapestries in Tom Hegen’s Aerial Photos

Since 2018, German photographer Tom Hegen (previously) has been soaring above regions from western Australia and Senegal to France and Spain as he documents the vivid landscapes of salt production. His mesmerizing aerial images peer down at evaporation ponds that carve the earth into a patchwork of vibrant hues. “What attracted me was the graphic and abstract appearance of these landscapes, which almost has a painterly quality. This is also the core feature that aerial photography has to offer: an unfamiliar few at ordinary things that surround us,” Hegen shares about the project.

Spanning nearly 300 pages, a forthcoming book titled Salt Works compiles more than 160 images from the series. Although their footprints vary widely, many of the areas spotlighted approach extraction in a similar manner: Harvesters often route seawater into these fields or small pockets of land, and the sun and wind help evaporate the liquid, leaving the crystalline minerals behind. Micro bacteria tint the salt into striking pastures of rose, aqua, and ochre, transforming the areas into rich tapestries of color.

Shop prints and posters from the series on Hegen’s site and pre-order Salt Works. Find more on Instagram and Behance.