Out of the Woods: Architecture and Interiors Built from Wood

Across small cottages and lavish villas, beach houses and forest refuges, discover the world’s finest crop of new homes. This cutting-edge global digest features such talents as Shigeru Ban and Marcio Kogan alongside up-and-coming names like Aires Mateus, Xu Fu-Min, Vo Trong Nghia, Desai Chia, and Shunri Nishizawa. Here, there are homes in Australia and New Zealand, from China and Vietnam, in the United States and Mexico, and on to less expected places like Ecuador and Costa Rica. The result is a sweeping survey of the contemporary house and a revelation that homes across the globe may have more in common than expected. Among guava trees and abandoned forts in Western India is a sanctuary designed for and by Kamal Malik of Malik Architecture. The House of Three Streams is a sprawling spectacle with high ceilings, verandas, and pavilions, perched atop a ridge overlooking two ravines. A medley of steel, glass, wood, and stone, the house weaves along the contour of the landscape, almost as an extension of the forest. Encina House by Aranguren & Gallegos, an elegant, sloping structure reminiscent of a gazebo, similarly inhabits its surrounding vista. Ensconced in a pine forest north of Madrid, the lower level is embedded in rock and connected to the upper by a natural stone wall. Shinichi Ogawa’s Seaside House is an immaculate two-story minimalist marvel in Kanagawa that overlooks the Pacific. Its living area spills onto a cantilevered terrace and infinity pool, almost dissolving into the ocean as one seamless entity. In Vietnam, Shunri Nishizawa’s House in Chau Doc exudes tropical sophistication with exposed timber beams, woven bamboo, plants, concrete panels, and inner balconies and terraces. Its corrugated iron panels act as moveable walls and shutters, ushering in views of surrounding rice fields. These homes—along with more than 50 others—are each remarkably distinct in design. They all, however, toe the line between inside and outside, each one symbiotic with its surroundings.Multilingual Edition: English, French, German

Aleksandr Rodchenko was one of the main generators of creative ideas during the extraordinary time of the Russian avant-garde movements, and he perfectly reflected its spiritual atmosphere. In 1924, photography was "invaded" by Aleksandr Rodchenko. The result of this invasion was a fundamental rethinking on the nature of photography and the role of the photographer. With the introduction of conceptual thought, the photograph changed from being a mere reflection of reality to a means of visually representing dynamic intellectual constructions. Throughout the entire history of Russian photography in the first half of the twentieth century, Aleksandr Rodchenko is the only figure to have left us exclusive traces through the publication of articles and diaries: they are the artistic reflections of a thinker-photographer, the witness to a historic cataclysm that generated a tragic conflict in him between conscious supposition and the unconscious creative drive.

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect. For years, she was widely acclaimed and won numerous prizes despite building practically nothing. Some even said her work was simply impossible to build. Yet, during the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a new and unique architectural language to cities and structures such as the Port House in Antwerp, the Al Janoub Stadium near Doha, Qatar, and the spectacular new airport terminal in Beijing. By her untimely death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among architecture’s finest elite, working on projects in Europe, China, the Middle East, and the United States. She was the first female architect to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal, with her long-time Partner Patrik Schumacher now the leader of Zaha Hadid Architects and in charge of many new projects. Based on the massive TASCHEN monograph, this book is now available in an extensively updated and accessible edition covering Hadid’s complete works, including ongoing projects. With abundant photographs, in-depth sketches, and Hadid’s own drawings, the volume traces the evolution of her career, spanning not only her most pioneering buildings but also the furniture and interior designs that were integrated into her unique, and distinctly 21st-century, universe. Multilingual Edition: English, French, German

With his residential buildings, office blocks, schools and factories, Boris Velikovsky (1878–1937) made a definitive contribution to Russian avant-garde architecture. His early constructions, such as Gribov House in Moscow, are still very much bound to Russian Neoclassicism, yet since the Revolution of 1917, he increasingly designed Constructivist architecture. One example is his Gostorg Management Building, distinguished by glass facades, the functional division of space and use of state-of-the-art materials. Furthermore in the garden city of Druzhba for instance, Velikovsky intensively engaged with new ideas in town planning. With mostly hitherto unpublished technical plans as well as numerous historical and new colour photographs of his most famous projects, Boris Velikowsky’s contribution to Russian avant-garde architecture is appreciated for the first time in book form.

Leave the city behind you, switch off, reconnect with yourself and nature, and fall in love with the world again. Stay Wild is a book by gestalten and Canopy & Stars, it presents the finest selection of treehouses, cabins, houseboats, yurts, shepherds huts and tipis from around Europe, alongside a series of features on connecting with nature (and the positive impact that has on well-being and quality of life give), slow travel, and things like the joy of treehouses or sitting around the campfire.