One of Norway’s most exciting new travel writers, Erika Fatland has gained a reputation for telling unique, often overlooked stories. A social anthropologist by training, she has documented terrorism in Beslan and the 2011 terror attacks in her native Norway.
In her latest book, ‘The Border: A Journey Around Russia,’ she turns her attention to frontiers, recounting a fascinating trip through each of the 14 countries bordering the world’s largest country.
Through evocative archival and contemporary photographs, drawings of landmark structures, and graceful, accessible text, The Conservatory celebrates the patrons and designers who advanced the technology and architectural majesty of these light-filled structures. The importance of conservatories continues to grow with efforts to conserve phenomenal plants and their environments.
Elegant and magnificent, conservatories reveal fascinating social, cultural, botanical, and engineering advances as they have evolved across history. First appearing in the eighteenth century as simple structures designed to protect fruit trees and other delicate plants from harsh European winters, conservatories became grand glass houses that spread across the European continent, to the Americas, and ultimately around the world.
Alan Stein is President and Director of Architecture at Tanglewood Conservatories, Ltd., founded in 1993 with his wife and business partner, Nancy Virts. The company’s mission is to conceive and build the finest classical and modern glass conservatories. Tanglewood’s work has been published in Architectural Digest, Garden Design Magazine, The New York Times, Town & County and other periodicals around the world. Alan studied design at the California College of Art and graduated from the University of Maryland with a professional degree in architecture. He lives in Maryland.
Nancy Virts is cofounder of Tanglewood Conservatories, Ltd., with her husband and business partner, Alan Stein. The company conceives and builds the finest classical and modern glass conservatories. Tanglewood’s work has been published in Architectural Digest, Garden Design magazine, the New York Times, Town & Country, and other periodicals around the world.
We see terriers, collies, beagles, bloodhounds, poodles, small dogs, big dogs, show dogs, working dogs, and many more, featuring over 60 breeds photographed in both black-and-white and glorious Kodachrome.
The world appears to be divided into cat and dog lovers, but fortunately Walter Chandoha, the 20th century’s greatest pet photographer found himself happily in the middle. He loved these intriguing creatures equally for their unique beauty and individualism, and as subjects to photograph in a career spanning over 70 years. While working on his critically acclaimed TASCHEN book Cats, Chandoha handpicked his favorite dog photos for a potential follow-up title, putting into carefully marked boxes hundreds of contact sheets, prints, and color transparencies, many unseen for at least 50 years, and some totally unseen.
Chandoha sadly passed away in 2019 at the age of 98, but his legacy lives on in this dashing sequel dedicated to man’s best friend. “Walter Chandoha’s photographs of dogs are compelling not just because dogs have an inherent charm, but because the person behind the camera was a master of his craft,” writes the photography critic Jean Dykstra in the book’s introduction.
Spanning a 50-year period, the book is divided into six sections, and each chapter reveals Chandoha’s exceptional combination of technique, versatility, and soul. The opening chapter “In the Studio” focuses on formal portraiture; next it’s “Strike a Pose” where our canine companions ham it up for the camera; in “Out and About” they get to roam and play, often photographed with Chandoha’s own children; next it’s “Best in Show” with Chandoha using his reportage skills to capture vintage dog shows from the Mad Men era; in “Tails from the City,” the dogs are hitting the streets of mid-century New York; and in the closing chapter “Country Dogs,” it’s back to nature, the fields, and the beaches. Dogs is an unleashed photographic tribute to these lovable and loyal creatures.
Walter Chandoha (1920–2019) was a combat photographer in the Second World War, before a chance encounter with a cat led him on a path that would shape his professional career. He is regarded as the world’s greatest domestic animal photographer with a career spanning over seven decades and an archive of more than 200,000 photographs. His photographs have appeared on over 300 magazine covers, thousands of advertisements, and were regularly featured in magazines such as Life, Look, and their equivalents around the world.
Reuel Golden is the former editor of the British Journal of Photography and the Photography editor at TASCHEN. His TASCHEN titles include: Mick Rock: The Rise of David Bowie, both London and New York Portrait of a City books, Andy Warhol. Polaroids, The Rolling Stones, Her Majesty, Football in the 1970s, the National Geographic editions, and The David Bailey SUMO.
In ‘A Voice Above The Linn’ Lawrence collaborated with the renowned poet John Burnside, who contributed four beautiful new poems to segment its chapters.
In 2016 Robbie Lawrence first travelled to a remote stretch of coastline in the west coast of Scotland, to Linn Gardens, which lies at the head of Cove Bay on the west side of Rosneath peninsula. The gardens had been run for fifty years by Jim Taggart, an avid botanist and gardener.
Jim discovered that the region’s subtropical climate allowed him to grow plants and flowers from all over the world. His endeavours led to the estate being covered in an intricately plotted web of ferns, bamboos, Magnolias and Rhododendrons. As Jim got older, his son Jamie took over the more physical elements of maintaining the garden, including travelling abroad to research and gather new plants. On one such journey, to the northern mountainous region of Vietnam, Jamie disappeared. His body was found years later, he had evidently fallen in one of the mountain’s higher passes.
“When I first met Jim, who by this point was well into his 80s, he told me that he decided to keep the garden going as a memorial to his son. Over the past few years, I went back to visit Jim and document the garden as it passed through the seasons. Despite his age, Jim would bound around the garden, occasionally stopping to provide a lengthy anecdote about a particular fern or tree. Last summer, Jim passed away at the age of 84.” – Robbie Lawrence
Going deeper than mere decoration, London-based interior designer Maria Katsarou Vafiadis and her team have accomplished a broad range of exclusive projects around the world, from leading hotel groups to unique residential properties. MKV Design is distinguished by its distinct vision for exciting and intelligent designs that move people emotionally.
Showcasing the designer’s extensive understanding of the hospitality industry, this comprehensive volume explores MKV Design’s most prominent projects to date, highlighting the balance between commercial demands and artistic integrity. Design Alchemist brings together an impressive array of signature works, elegantly capturing the creative trajectory of an innovative and far-reaching design practice.
Dominic Bradbury is a writer, journalist, lecturer and consultant specializing in architecture and design, as well as property and travel. He has written over twenty books, including Mid-Century Modern Complete, The Iconic House and The Iconic Interior (Thames & Hudson) and Winch Design (Assouline). Bradbury is also a contributor to The Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph, House & Garden, World of Interiors, Wallpaper, Vogue Living, Architectural Digest and Elle Décor.
The bestselling author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll and Last Train the Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, this dazzling new book of profiles is not so much a summation as a culmination of Peter Guralnick’s remarkable work, which from the start has encompassed the full sweep of blues, gospel, country, and rock ‘n’ roll.
It covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers.
“You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us,” rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick’s earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one. And yet, for all of the encomiums that Guralnick’s books have earned for their remarkable insights and depth of feeling, Looking to Get Lost is his most personal book yet. For readers who have grown up on Guralnick’s unique vision of the vast sweep of the American musical landscape, who have imbibed his loving and lively portraits and biographies of such titanic figures as Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips, there are multiple surprises and delights here, carrying on and extending all the themes, fascinations, and passions of his groundbreaking earlier work.
This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson,Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor.
Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.
Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements, and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality.
Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard, and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His TASCHEN books include the Architecture Now! series and monographs on Tadao Ando, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Richard Meier, and Zaha Hadid.
The 65-year old American chef Thomas Keller discusses his latest book, “The French Laundry, Per Se”. The restaurateur also discusses how his company has fared during the coronavirus pandemic.
Thomas Keller is an American chef, restaurateur, and cookbook writer. He and his landmark Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, have won multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation, notably the Best California Chef in 1996, and the Best Chef in America in 1997.
Vik Muniz’s series Postcards from Nowhere grapples with how, through photographs, we have come to “see” and understand distant yet iconic sites we may never actually view with our own eyes. “The images we hold in our heads are an assemblage,” notes Muniz. “They are an amalgam of every image of those locations that we have ever seen.”
Not so long ago, it was relatively easy to wake up overlooking Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong and go to sleep in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge; to travel from Venice to Istanbul in time for dinner. The international network of the art world, in particular, made it easy to slip through time and borders—with the right invitation and the right passport. You may never have been to Basel, Switzerland for the art fairs, but you might certainly feel as though you have, experiencing it exclusively through the spate of other people’s images.
The Monocle Book of Gentle Living is a handbook to help you think about how to reconnect, make good things happen, to do something you care about and discover nice places and extraordinary people along the way.
Sometimes the fixes are simple and personal: to run, dive into a lake, sleep more or set aside some time with the people who make us happy. Maybe it’s about eating food from producers who are proud of its provenance or building spaces into cities that respect older residents and value younger ones. Our editors have brought all this together in one simple book – so how about taking a few moments away from the crush to flick through the pages? Gently does it, now.
Boomers Daily 