Books published by Monacelli Press

Stephen Talasnik's intricate and mesmerizing work bridges the disciplines of art and architecture in this debut monograph.A polymath whose work encompasses sculpture, drawing, and architectural land art, Stephen Talasnik manifests an elaborate and evocative aesthetic vision. Inspired by visionary artists and architects such as Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Piranesi, Gustav Eiffel, Antoni Gaudí, and Buckminster Fuller, Talasnik presents a fantastical world that looks as archaeological as it does futuristic.Unearthed presents a broad spectrum of Talasnik's work spanning the last decade, starting with floating sculptures commissioned by the Denver Botanic Garden, continuing on through projects at Storm King Art Center and Russel Wright Design Center, and culminating with a 30-foot-high timber sculpture at the new, highly lauded Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana. The publication of Unearthed coincides with the first exhibition at Tippet Rise devoted to a single artist. Numerous examples of Talasnik's drawings are also included, as well as smaller-scale indoor and outdoor sculptures in diverse materials. Several key contributors help interpret diverse angles of Talasnik's practice, including renowned art critic Phyllis Tuchman, architect and critic Michael Sorkin, theorist David Wittenberg, and the late architect Lebbeus Woods, a close friend to Talasnik. Through these essays and hundreds of reproductions of Talasnik's spellbinding work, Unearthed presents the extraordinary visions of an artist on the cusp of broad recognition.

Hudson Modern showcases stunning new houses in the Hudson River Valley that embrace the dramatic settings and cultural bounty of this popular region.As the birthplace of American landscape painting, the Hudson River Valley has long been a refuge from the city and a laboratory for new aesthetic expression. Today, thanks to its ascendant reputation as a weekend utopia, architects are extending that tradition into the built environment. Designing residences that revere local climate, landscape, and history in a distinctly modernist language, these talents are sowing a new Hudson River school of architectural thought. Hudson Modern surveys this emerging domestic architecture, featuring nearly twenty houses that integrate with site and region through composition, scale, and materials, and which strike a balance between innovation and rootedness. A reconstructed midcentury house accented in cedar, walnut, and bluestone by Joel Sanders and landscaped by the late Diana Balmori blurs the edge of habitation and nature. KieranTimberlake revises the classic vision of a glass box by cladding a home on a rocky site in Pound Ridge in a tapestry of steel, aluminum, copper, and glass. In Rhinebeck, Steven Holl experiments with a radical form that has both ecological and social dimensions. Author David Sokol presents these and numerous other examples of design-forward residences that are responsive to terrain, building vernacular, and cultural legacy. Together, the new Hudson Valley houses point a way forward for rural living in the twenty-first century.

In this, the first monograph of Richard Filipowski, a major figure bridging the Bauhaus and American midcentury modernism finally gets his due.Richard Filipowski (1923-2008) was among the most gifted polymaths in the annals of American modernism. Whether as a painter, sculptor, or designer of furniture and jewelry, Filipowski developed a lush, abstract, and amazingly consistent visual language that marks him among the finest figures of midcentury art and design.As a student at the Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus) in Chicago, he quickly became a protégé of founder László Moholy-Nagy, who featured several of Filipowski''s works in his seminal text Vision in Motion (1947); Filipowski was the only student Moholy-Nagy called upon to join the faculty, where he taught alongside Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Recruited by Gropius to develop a course in design fundamentals at Harvard, which remains a cornerstone of design pedagogy to this day, he would move to MIT where he taught for more than three decades, until his retirement in 1988. With a foreword by László Moholy-Nagy''s daughter Hattula, Richard Filipowski: Art and Design Beyond the Bauhaus is the first monograph of this master, who over the course of his career created a unique body of work in diverse media that has largely, until recently, been held in private collections due to his relative lack of compulsion to seek media attention or worldly rewards. But now through the efforts of the Filipowski family and new attention by design scholars--several of whom contribute essays here on Filipowski''s graphic and painted works, sculpture, furniture, and position in design history--the work is being revealed to a new generation of aficionados. Richard Filipowski is a rich document of a life and career that is poised to reenter the canon of modernism.

From simple 18th- and early 19th-century gardens to the lavish estates of the Gilded Age, the gardens started by 1930s inmates at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay to the centuries-old camellias at Middleton Place near Charleston, South Carolina - Rescuing Eden celebrates the history of garden design in the United States, with 28 examples that have been saved by ardent conservationists and generous private owners, and opened to the public. The United States has a rich tradition of landscape design, with gardens on a scale that rivaled the great gardens of Europe, but in the absence of specific institutions dedicated to their preservation, many of these "ephemeral collaborations between man and nature" were lost - during the wars, economic depressions, and social upheavals that swept the country in the mid-20th-century, or to creeping development and urban sprawl. The surviving gardens presented here were selected for the drama of their original creation and rescue and for their historical and horticultural importance. Ranging from wonderful to woebegone, each has its own character, and each has been brought back from the brink through a combination of imagination and tenacity. Discover The Kampong in Miami, Florida, planted with hundreds of tropical rarities from Southeast Asia by legendary plant explorer Dr. David Fairchild; Barnsley Gardens in Georgia, one of the few antebellum gardens surviving in the South, planted with 200 varieties of roses; the Lynchburg, Virginia garden created by Harlem Renaissance poet and civil rights activist Anne Spencer; the eccentric Ladew Topiary Gardens, with 15 garden rooms and a topiary foxhunt; the Belle Epoque grandeur of the Untermyer Garden in Yonkers, New York; and many others across the country, in Kentucky, Texas, Michigan, Maine, Rhode Island, and California. Each garden has been specially photographed by noted landscape and garden photographer Curtice Taylor, and introduced with authoritative and engaging text from design historian Caroline Seebohm, encouraging readers to appreciate the landscapes that serve not only as windows on American history, but living, flourishing pleasure grounds for botanists, horticulturalists, and nature lovers throughout the United States.

Interior design firm Cullman & Kravis infuses traditional interiors with a modern perspective, embracing historicism and referencing a wide range of cultures and contemporary design motifs. In From Classic to Contemporary: Decorating with Cullman & Kravis, Ellie Cullman and Tracey Pruzan explore the lessons from modernism that add a new and welcome dynamism to the firm’s most recent projects, both traditional and modern.   “We believe in the alchemy of old and new,” observes Ellie Cullman, founder and principal of Cullman & Kravis. “We approach every project with the rigor of a jigsaw puzzle, but with the desire to create a magnificent tapestry.”   Cullman and Pruzan share how the venerable interior design firm applies principles of modernism to add a new and welcome tension to their more classical work, while in their more modern schemes, the classic principles of design guide their process.   The fourteen distinct projects in this book are collaborations between Ellie Cullman and her partners Lee Cavanaugh, Sarah Ramsey, Claire Ratliff, and Alyssa Urban. Running the gamut from modest revisions to ground-up construction and complete renovations, these interiors include a sumptuous New York City duplex that is a clever mix of traditional furnishings and an impressive contemporary art collection; a glass-clad modern Miami villa with vivid colors and bold prints; an oceanfront Palm Beach house with museum-quality art and antiques; an historic Westchester estate once owned by Brooke Astor; and Ellie Cullman’s own home, whose “refresh” illustrates how to renew, modernize, and reinvigorate any project.

As one of Miami’s most influential architects, Rene Gonzalez revolutionizes the way luxury buildings are equipped for climate change. Tactile, experiential, and holistic, the work of his namesake office demonstrates a belief in the inseparable connection between nature and architecture, creating spaces that are memorable and timeless. Surveying fourteen residential, commercial, and cultural projects in Florida, marking the first phase of his career, Rene Gonzalez Architects: Not Lost in Translation illustrates Gonzalez’s ability to distill the essence of place, distinguishing his work both in his home state of Florida and in the global landscape of contemporary architecture. Projects featured in the book include three Alchemist boutiques, the first of which won the 2011 National AIA Institute Honor Award; the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, whose one million glass mosaic tiles create the illusion of a jungle oasis on the exterior; the eighteen-story GLASS Residential Tower in Miami Beach; the “pocket sanctuary” that is vegan restaurant Plant Food + Wine; and the North Beach Oceanfront Center, which serves as an inviting gathering ground to the North Miami Beach community.   Gonzalez is especially attuned to environmental issues that are affecting the world, and which will drastically alter design practice in the coming years. RGA is receiving widespread attention for its efforts to respond to these emerging conditions, and these projects reveal Gonzalez’s commitment to embrace and celebrate the environment, seizing the opportunity to enhance our future.   Rene Gonzalez Architects: Not Lost in Translation is a deeply personal book that illustrates Gonzalez’s fascination with the world that surrounds him. Featuring a conversation with Gonzalez’s colleagues Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, essays by journalists Caroline Roux and Beth Dunlop, as well as his own photographs of Miami’s vernacular architecture, this book documents Gonzalez’s progressive and responsive architecture that is of its place yet universally resonant.

Cities are where solutions to the twenty-first century’s key challenges—addressing inequality, fostering political participation, responding to climate change—will be tested. And as cities adapt to new developments in technology, infrastructure, public space, transportation, and housing, so too must urban practices and our understanding of how to effect positive change evolve. In Citymakers, Cassim Shepard—2019 Guggenheim Fellow for Architecture, Planning, and Design—offers a vivid survey of how urbanism today is no longer the domain of just planners, politicians, and power brokers removed from the effects of their decisions, but an array of citizens working at the vanguard of increasingly diverse practices, from community gardeners to architects to housing advocates.   Drawing on six years as the editor of Urban Omnibus, one of the leading publications charting innovations in urban practice (launched in 2009 by The Architectural League of New York), Shepard explores a broad variety of projects in New York, a city at the forefront of experimental and practical research: a constructed wetland in Staten Island, a workforce development and technology program in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a public art installation in a Bronx housing project, a housing advocacy initiative in Jackson Heights, Queens. These and a wide variety of other examples in Citymakers comprise a cross-disciplinary, from-the-ground-up approach that encourage better choices for cities of the future.   By blending intimate portraits of individuals and projects with incisive social analysis, Citymakers reports from the front lines of urban practice with up-to-the-minute examples and arguments that reframe our understanding of urbanism. With original photography by Alex Fradkin, the book fuses the rich visual and graphic sensibility of architectural publishing with the informative readability of sophisticated, long-format journalism. Revising traditional notions of urban intervention and providing new directions for the next generation of citizen-practitioners, Citymakers is a lasting document of the perspectives driving cities today, and tomorrow.