A personal tour of Tokyo’s architecture, as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most acclaimed architects who is also designing the primary venue for the Tokyo Olympic games.

Tokyo is Japan’s cultural and commercial epicenter, bursting with vibrancy and life. Its buildings, both historical and contemporary, are a direct reflection of its history and its people.

Kengo Kuma was only ten years old when he found himself so inspired by Tokyo’s cityscape that he decided to become an architect. Here he tells the story of his career through twenty-five inspirational buildings in the city. Kuma’s passion is evident on every page, as well as his curiosity about construction methods and his wealth of knowledge about buildings around the world, making this a unique commentary on Tokyo’s dynamic architecture.

Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect is an intimate and truly inspiring book, revealing the beauty that exists in the world’s everyday spaces.

50 illustrations

Body

The Photography Book

Nathalie Herschdorfer

The body remains a battleground. Politicized, conceptualized and increasingly shared, our often-paradoxical relationship with the human form is nothing new, but finds itself heightened in the digitised, virtualised era of the ‘post-industrial’ body. No longer a tool but a work-in-progress, our bodily expectations bound from fantasy to reality, beauty to tyranny, art to commerce and curiosity to obsession, leaving us dreaming of other bodies and alternate lives.

Surveying a range of over 360 photographic re-presentations from the worlds of art, fashion, scientific and vernacular photography – including the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Bettina Rheims, Lauren Greenfield, Viviane Sassen, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Daido Moriyama, Sally Mann, Pieter Hugo, Juergen Teller, Sølve Sundsbø and Daniel Sannwald – Body explores what our imaging of the human form, and the ways in which those images have been used and shared, might reflect of our relationship to the body. Supporting the broad range of photography is an essay by the psychologist Professor David Sander, Ph.D., discussing the neurological representation of our own bodies.

Bauhaus Imaginista

A School in the World

Marion von Osten, Grant Watson

From its inception in 1919, the Bauhaus was a truly international institution. Students and teachers travelled from Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland and the United States to Weimar and later Dessau and Berlin to become part of the school, drawn to the Bauhaus because of its cosmopolitan, avant-garde perspective and hands-on curriculum. This outlook was reflected in the way the school received and interpreted diverse influences, ranging from Arts and Crafts to reform pedagogy, from Eastern spirituality to constructivism, machine production and the Neues Bauen (New Building) movement. Art and design at the Bauhaus also contained a transcultural element, gleaned through exposure to non-western cultures, books and museum collections and interaction with foreign students and visiting lecturers.

The MR PORTER Guide to a Better Day

A dawn-to-dusk instruction manual for living effortlessly and elegantly in the modern world

The MR PORTER Guide To A Better Day covers all aspects of a man’s daily life, from morning rituals, to flawless grooming to handy tips for taking the work out of your working and social life.

The Monocle Book of Japan

Japan may be one of the world’s biggest economies, a global leader in everything from architecture to food and a country whose brands have flourished around the world, but it remains a bit of a mystery. Somehow it is simultaneously familiar and hard to fathom – or it has been, until now. This book is the culmination of years of reporting across the country by Monocle and it delivers a unique insight into the people, places and products that define Japan. Whether you’re planning a visit or simply curious, The Monocle Book of Japan will unpack the nation for you. We’ll take you from snowy Hokkaido in the north to the tropical southern islands of Okinawa and, along the way, deep-dive into the worlds of culture, design, retail and more. It’s Japan revealed as never before.

Features: 306 pages, hardcover with gold foil
Published by: Monocle
Printed in: Germany
Book Dimensions: 30cm x 22.5cm x 2.5cm
(11.8in x 8.8in x 1in)

André Fu

Crossing Cultures with Design

Catherine Shaw

André Fu is one of Asia’s leading interiors designers. When his design for the worldrenowned The Upper House hotel in Hong Kong opened ten years ago, he became an overnight sensation around the world. As one of Asia’s most widely sought-after interior designers, the Hong Kong–based designer has gone on to create forwardthinking interiors for other major hotels, restaurants and leading brands, including Louis Vuitton, The Berkeley (London) and Waldorf hotels. This showcase of his works to date features eighteen recent projects around the world and provides fresh insights into Fu’s creative process, including his hand-drawn sketches and mood boards, as well as an introductory essay that explores Fu’s key influences and the importance of his unique and highly refined East-meets-West aesthetic. With an illustrated chronology of all the designer’s works to date, this rich overview presents the award-winning vision of interior design’s rising star, not only in Asia but across the world.

Format: PLC
Size: 30.0 x 25.5 cm
Extent: 272 pp
Publication date: 27 February 2020

The Fashion Business Manual

The Fashion Business Manual is the world’s first visual manual for fashion business. It covers business topics including branding, production, marketing and retailing in an easy to read, visual format. Unlike traditional business books which emphasize philosophy and theory, this book focuses on the practical business skill set needed to survive in the fashion world.

Who is it designed for?

Fashion Designers
While fashion designers can be incredibly talented, they often lack the business skills to make it in the fashion world. Usually visually driven, many have never touched a business book which significantly hurts the success rate of their company. This highly-visual manual is here to change that!

Fashion Entrepreneurs
From creating branding to selling to customers, there is plenty to consider when running a fashion company. This manual aims to serve as your very own mentor, reducing the mistakes you make along the way. It’s also the perfect tool for improving your skills across a range of business areas. 

People in the Fashion Industry
Fashion is business. Whether you’re the head designer or a sales assistant, a 360° understanding of industry can help you tackle issues faced in your day-to-day role. The extra knowledge can give you the upper hand, and maybe even a career boost, too. 

Everyone
Anyone interested in fashion or looking to get their foot in the industry’s door will benefit from reading this book. By presenting a balanced overview of business insight and know-how, it’ll help prepare you for your first steps into the fashion world.

Parks

From Pictures to Words:
Persuasion and the National Parks
by Lyz Nagan-Powell

Parks, our second title with photographer Brian Kelley, is a collection of over 300 United States national park maps, ephemera, and brochures spanning over 100 years.

Part of an ongoing project, Kelley collects oft-overlooked objects within the Parks Service. The book showcases nearly a century of art, cartography, and printed materials in a compelling visual history of America’s national parks and evolving graphic design styles culminating in Massimo Vignelli’s iconic design system, the Unigrid.

Moving to Mars: Design for the Red Planet

• Edited by Justin McGuirk, Andrew Nahum and Eleanor Watson

•  Designed by Studio Julia

•  Getting humans to Mars has become one of the great challenges of our time. It will be an extraordinary technological feat, but also a feat of design. This is the first book dedicated to designing for the Red Planet. From life on a spacecraft to survival on Mars’ inhospitable surface, new forms of clothing, farming and architecture will be needed. This volume looks at the real work designers and architects are generating now – as well as more speculative proposals of what this future might look like. Some ask whether we should go to Mars at all, while others argue that the rigours of such a mission would force us to design a waste-free way of life.

•  Illustrated with more than 300 images and featuring original essays by leading thinkers in their field, Moving to Mars: Design for the Red Planet includes projects by NASA, SpaceX and the European Space Agency, as well as new work by designers and architects including HASSELL, Konstantin Grcic, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and RÆBURN. It also includes an interview with the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who addresses why speculative design is the ideal discipline for imagining the ‘material grammar' of a life on Mars