Wednesday 29 February 2012

Folded functionality


Why not bring the opportunity of beautiful handcrafted, fair trade materials and strong colours into our offices? We started to work with Afroart with the intention to let their fabrics be a part of the contract market. With their collection Mira Maya, we wanted to build a construction that would let the fabric be the thing on show. In the end, it became two different types of fabric furniture: a screen – Plisado Horizon – and a storage unit in two different sizes – Plisado Arriba.
Note Design Studio

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Book Case


Rather than being lined up with their spines facing outward, the books are hung along flat plywood spindles that fit between a wooden frame. The spines can be used as a table surface, and the spindles can be individually removed and used as bookmarks.
SightUnseen
Raw-Edges

Monday 27 February 2012

Spiga


Il design contemporaneo ha deciso che il libro, nella libreria, non deve stare più in verticale. Ebbene, qui se ne assecondano tutte le possibili inclinazioni e dimensioni in un elemento esile. Lo scaffale cambia progressivamente angolo di rotazione come fanno i semi della spiga di grano giunta a maturazione. I bordi colorati visualizzano efficacemente questo sofisticato gioco grafico, che si riaggancia alle ricerche della Op Art degli anni ’60 e ’70, adattate a una funzionalità rigorosissi.
Gianluca Sgalippa

Saturday 25 February 2012

Aintree

Commissioned for the exhibition Vera Chapter One, this collection of objects using leather straps as support and structural elements; using the language and techniques of horse saddlery as a starting point.
Tomas Alonso

Friday 24 February 2012

Shelframe

A shelving system that suspends from a single point. The shelves are designed to occupy a space normally reserved for a framed picture or painting, and they act so as to frame compositions of everyday objects. The cable tension allow the shelves to support heavy objects while the silicone pads create a self-securing system that grips the wall as the shelf becomes loaded. This also means that the shelf does not tilt to one side if heavy objects are placed unevenly.
BAHBAK HASHEMI-NEZHAD

Thursday 23 February 2012

Box 1-7


A modular shelf made of seven identical boxes of different sizes. The boxes are combined with seven natural leather ropes of different lengths which allows them to hang from a single nail on the wall.
Be a Malevich



Wednesday 22 February 2012

New York public phone bookcase: DUB 002


Even as they are rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of smartphones, I’m interested in pay phones because they are both anachronistic and quotidian. Relics, they’re dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, a skeuomorph hearkening back to a lost shared public space we might no longer have any use for... But they can also be a place of opportunity, something to reprogram and somewhere to come together and share a good book with your neighbors.
John Locke

Monday 20 February 2012

Book Bath

Ljubodrag Andric

Shelf-Conscious

'As it turns out, for a great deal of their history, shelves were much more haphazard than they are today. Before they even displayed books, they supported piles of scrolls. In the first century BC, Atticus loaned Cicero two assistants to build shelves and to tack titles onto his collection. “Your men have made my library gay with their carpentry work,” Cicero reported. “Nothing could look neater than those shelves.”'

The Paris Review
Image: Ezra the scribe,'Codex Amiatinus'

Sunday 19 February 2012

Street


Street is a collection of stackable units for storage and display of magazines, books and plants in public and private spaces. The system consists of four parts, a frame and a house, high and low unit. The units can be combined in different ways, for example as a shelf or a room divider. Only the imagination sets the limits.
A2

Fridge bookshelf

Yes, but does YOUR office have an orange refrigerator full of Penguin Classics?
The Penguin Press

Saturday 18 February 2012

Bookshelves in the age of eReading

Over the last 20 years we have experienced a revolution in the way we store our knowledge. Yet while we can now shrink an entire personal library to an electronic device the size and weight of a single paperback, there has also been an explosion in the creativity behind the design of that most basic household item, the bookshelf. Bookshelves today are no longer just somewhere to store books. They are modern art, engineering experiments and, of course, status symbols.
Read more at the Thames & Hudson blog

Thursday 16 February 2012

Rosenthal Residence

We told our architect at our very first meeting that one of the most important elements was to integrate our books into the heart and soul of our home. He came up with a brilliant solution which we had never seen before, to build the shelves right into staircases (set into the wall) from top to bottom of house. So essentially "book spines" line the spine of our home.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Architectural Interventions

Monday 13 February 2012

Traliccio Invisible Bookshelf


Traliccio is a library wall in wood and metal. The shelves have been dematerialized and transformed to the point that they remain a thin bent rod that, thanks to its inclination, can accommodate books of different sizes. The shelves can be easily moved either vertically, by utilizing the teeth found on the back of the two supporting columns of wood, or horizontally so as to leave the user maximum freedom of composition. Tralaccio is enriched with some accessories that complement its use, such as a top sheet and bookends.
4P1B

Sunday 12 February 2012

Face shelving

It started from a chat my girlfriend and I were having. A year and a father-son project later, the very originally named 'Face Shelving' is finally done.
The idea is that depending what you put in or on the shelves, you create different faces and expressions. Enjoy.

Alexi McCarthy

Saturday 11 February 2012

Bathing in knowledge


This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa Mancini cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied proper taps and drain, so that it will be a utilizable, functional bath at all effects.
Who cares about that?

Friday 10 February 2012

Wade Davis Writing Studio


Wade Davis has one of the most coveted jobs in America – Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. When he’s home in Washington, he escapes to put pen to paper in his Travis Price-designed study, overflowing with books, manuscripts, artifacts, and inspiration. “Travis did a studio on M Street in Georgetown for me,” Davis says, noting that in his current home, zoning prohibited a detached building. While many need light-filled rooms for inspiration, he wanted to avoid large windows opening onto a residential neighborhood and sought a cave-like atmosphere to disappear into his work. Subtle light was brought in by other means when the architect built a dome above his client’s desk (which Price describes as similar to the rotunda of the oracle’s temple at Delphi) and filled it with the books he uses the most. Davis whimsically calls the space his “Navajo kiva of knowledge.”
Washington Life

Travis Price Architects

Thursday 9 February 2012

A Bookshelf

In nearly every household they are to be found – old books not read for quite a long time. books are mostly presented in a shelf like trophies or remembrances although they probably will never be read again. This book shelf offers for these books which became precious just a new presence and aditional function in the special "shelf architecture". A quite arbitrary number of shelf boxes in different heights, cutting and turning round each, are forming this shelf. Every crate is oriented in its height and depth on a pair of books and forms an individual frame for it. Put into grooves, with an extended lid each, the books are forming small hinged storage spaces in the shelf.
Miriam Aust

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Bookshelf book featured in Elle Decoration


Des bibliothèques design et surprenantes
La folle passion du journaliste anglais Alex Johnson ? Dénicher les bibliothèques excentriques de designers surinventifs. L'homme les affiche depuis 2007 sur son blog exclusivement dédié à ce meuble-rangement. Il dévoile aujourd'hui 224 bibliothèques, toutes regroupées dans un ouvrage paru aux éditions Thames&Hudson.
En exclusivité pour Elle.fr, découvrez une sélection de ces bibliothèques. De l'étagère XXS à la bibliothèque sculpturale qui recouvre toute une pièce en passant par la bibliothèque-brouette, difficile de ne pas trouver des idées pour aménager son intérieur.
224 bibliothèques design, Alex Johnson, Ed. Thames&Hudson, 25 €

Elle Decoration

Saturday 4 February 2012

Bookshelf book in The Times - 'Books are the new vinyl'


"...as with the fetishisation of vinyl by the fortysomething North London male, books and, specifically, their organisation and categorisation, have retained a sort of totemic significance. The art publisher Thames & Hudson is about to bring out two books (not available on Kindle) on the subject of book classification and arrangement: the paperback edition of Living With Books by Dominique Dupuich and Roland Beaufre (out at the beginning of April) and Bookshelf by Alex Johnson (February 20). Both are visual explorations of how we curate our own domestic Dewey systems.
Books are the new vinyl: take it as read

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

2012 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short. Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques, including miniatures, computer animation, and 2D animation, award‐winning author and illustrator William Joyce and co‐director Brandon Oldenburg present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM
Technicolor musicals.
Moonbot

Friday 3 February 2012

book shelf


These shelves use the wall to redistribute the weight, allowing a wide span with minimal hardware.
Jason Neufeld

Thursday 2 February 2012

Bookshelf book reviewed in Marie Claire

"Does World Book Day (March 1) mean very much as we recline with our Kindles? Possibly not, but Bookshelf by Alex Johnson (£14.95, Thames & Hudson) - the first ever book on bookshelf design - should see a resurgence in paperback appreciation. What's not to love about a sofa made out of books? Or a lamp? Or a dress?! Alex Johnson's Bookshelf is full of novel ideas."
Marie Claire, p190, Pageturners

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The Hundred Story House


The Hundred Story House is a piece of interactive public art. It is a miniature Brooklyn brownstone whose windows open upon shelves of books (about 100 of them) which can be borrowed by the community. Situated in the Cobble Hill Park on Clinton Street, the House is a tiny lending library open to all and operating on the honor system -- take-a-book, leave-a-book. This is an effort to celebrate the BOOK as a physical object, and the pleasure of holding one in your hand. Or better yet, placing one in someone else’s.
Kickstarter

Book-harp



The strings of the book-harp are a play of light and statics, three-dimensional picture and bookend, transparent and complete simultaneously. Depending on the angle of the literary instrument it seems once closed, sometimes translucent – and turns to life upon passing. It captures the passer-by at the corner of his eye and draws attention to itself, the variegated content, or out into the sky.
Constructed with colour coated MDF
Hanspeter Steiger