This book explores the innovative and inspiring ways architects are using this universal building material. Spanning grand Alpine escapes to tropical getaways, plywood penthouses to mass timber high-rises, Out of the Woods documents their progressive and inspiring creations from the foundations up.
Humans have been building homes from wood for thousands of years, and yet, in a contemporary world of option and innovation, the most primitive resource could in fact be the most pertinent.
Stretching back to historic Japanese houses, becoming synonymous with resort accommodation, and intertwining itself in the modern trend of hygge, its tactility and warmth have influenced countless architectural design movements. Timber is fast emerging as a viable material of choice, a safe, sturdy, and sustainable alternative to concrete. Architects are rediscovering wood’s universal appeal, thanks to recent technological advances.
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.
The photographer
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.
The editor
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
When chaos, stress and distraction comes over us, it is good to calm down and focus on the wonderful little things that mother nature is blessing us with.
So I like to invite you to have a break, relax and enjoy some meditative moments of witnessing the little creatures, plants and mushrooms down at your feet, which normally remain invisible for most of us most of the time.
MUSIK: Scott Rakozy – A Mother`s Love | audiio.com
“Nature reveals itself to us in unique ways, if we stop and look at the world through a window of time,” says photographer Stephen Wilkes. Using a special photographic technique that reveals how a scene changes from day to night in a single image,
Wilkes exposes the Earth’s beautiful complexity and the impacts of climate change — from the disruption of flamingo migrations in Africa to the threat of melting ice — with unprecedented force. This performance was part of the Countdown Global Launch on 10.10.2020.
Countdown is TED’s global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world.
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.
The author
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 fifty-sixth Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition will immerse you in the breathtaking diversity of the natural world. Explore some of the world’s richest habitats, see fascinating animal behaviour and get to know some extraordinary species.
After more than 49,000 entries were whittled down to just 17, the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton to her friends) announced the winner of the 2020 Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards at a live-streamed event from London’s Natural History museum this week.
This is one of the more prestigious photo awards going around, with a history going back to 1965. Started by the BBC’s Animals magazine, it aimed to highlight species, behaviors and natural events that few people get to see first-hand. The very first winner was presented with his award by no less than Sir David Attenborough, and for the last 38 years, the winners have been put into an exhibition.
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.
Famed for his photographs of interiors, François Halard sees himself as a soul hunter, capturing places that are alive, infused with the spirits of their owners. Here, he presents his very personal vision of Greece, and in particular the island of Symi. Classical sculptures, mineral structures and landscapes rising up from the earth fill the pages, tinted in blue tones, as if under the watchful eye of Halard’s mentor, Cy Twombly. Born in Paris to parents who were interior designers, François Halard initially made his name in the world of fashion. Haute couture, ready-to-wear, still‑life vignettes, portraits — his photographs were featured in magazines like GQ, Vanity Fair and French Vogue. But with his travels taking him far and wide, and after many inspirational encounters with artists, he moved away from fashion to hunt down fascinating homes and the souls of their owners. It is said he has photographed more than 4,000 of them. Inspired by the House’s travel heritage, the Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye collection evokes cities, regions or countries through the eyes of fashion photographers, from emerging talents to industry legends. Each title in the series features an extensive selection of large-format photographs, together with biographical information and an interview with the photographer or a critical essay. After Louis Vuitton City Guides and Travel Books, this third collection presents travel photography with a fashion perspective, as the chosen photographers all infuse their images of great cities, faraway places or dream destinations with their unique vision.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious