10 Books on Design (+ Independent Bookstores to Buy Them From)

Here is a new take on last year’s Top 10 Gift Guide - Designer Edition, focusing our attention exclusively on books related to the built environment, architecture, graphic and urban design. Some of these titles have been the subject of our previous musings, which are linked in the descriptions below, and some are new titles for us to share. All have provided inspiration, education, new perspectives and sometimes a welcomed escape. Of course, these are best purchased from your local independent book store; if they are not already on the shelves, they can order for you! Some of our local favorites include Turning Page Bookshop in Goose Creek, Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, The Village Bookseller in Mount Pleasant and the Itinerant Literate Bookstop in North Charleston. Add your favorite independent bookseller in the comments.

Vignelli Transit Maps

Peter B. Lloyd with Mark Ovenden

This book chronicles the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli, respectfully called the Maestro, as he pushed the world of graphic design by reimagining the transit maps of New York City and Washington DC and forcing the question ‘Can a diagram be a map?’ (Spoiler alert: yes, it can). His designs were not always embraced by all as evidenced in the Great Subway Map Debate in New York City, but always provided a thoughtful, rigorous, innovative and modern approach. This book is for those who enjoy the behind the scenes sketches and iterations of the design process and how Vignelli navigated the very public process of iconic way finding.

Lake|Flato: Nature place craft restraint

Lake Flato Architects

We have long been fans of the regional and poignant architecture of the Lake Flato team based in Austin and San Antonio, Texas; somehow the architects create epic yet humble spaces again and again at every scale and in a range of building types. This book hones in on four priorities or aspects of their design language (nature, place, craft and restraint) by presenting several of their buildings/spaces in each category. When we were in San Antonio earlier this year we stumbled upon The Pearl and knew immediately this was a gathering place that was created with a high level of creativity, commitment to history and urban place-making. Lake Flato’s work “calls attention not to itself, but to other, more pertinent aspects of the human experience.” (Kengo Kuma)

The Home Edit

Clea Shearer + Joanna Teplin

We are big fans of creating order out of chaos. Ashton Kutcher recently shared in Architectural Digest, “To feel tranquility in a space, everything needs to be in order. If the world around you isn’t in order, it’s hard to get your brain in order.” The Home Edit is a room-by-room, how-to guide to edit, organize, display/store and enjoy your possessions. It can be a little overwhelming (and extra), but if you feed off of your built environment like we do, there are definitely some strategies here that you can make your own.

30A Living

Eleanor Lynn Nesmith

If you follow our travels you have seen images from Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach and Seaside, Florida - all coastal towns along Highway 30A. From town planning principles from the creative minds of Andres Duany + Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to the architectural fabric and details created, we find inspiration again and again. This book is a curated view and escape into nine different communities with Jean Allsopp’s photos of exterior architecture, interior design and gulf views.

CHARLESTON FANCY

Witold Rybczynski

We are a little late to the party of Witold Rybczynski’s “Charleston Fancy - Little Houses + Big Dreams in the Holy City” published in 2019 by Yale University Press, but we are here now. Rybczyncki, the celebrated architect, professor and author captures a compelling movement in Charleston metro’s built environment, urban planning and architecture world. This book shares layers of historic renovations, lessons from medieval town planning and new urbanism through interviews with local master builders, developers and designers on the reverent and humane places they have created.

Click here for our Musings Blog for a more in-depth description.

New homes for today

Paul Williams

Continuing our study of the noteworthy African-American architect, Paul R. Williams (1894 - 1980), we have been pouring over his book published in 1946, “New Homes for Today.” The plan book is light on words and heavy on images which is just how us visual learners like it. While Mr. Williams had a wide multi-faceted career based in Los Angeles, including the design of public buildings, working for the Navy and designing over 2,000 homes (even that of Frank Sinatra!), this book focuses on smaller homes, perhaps for the middle class. The structure of the book itself allows just two pages for each house design and includes the description, floor plan and classic-now-vintage perspective renderings. Home names like “The Flamingo” and “The Country Gentleman” start to paint a picture of each home’s character.

Click here for our Musings Blog for a more in-depth description.

rural studio: Samuel mockbee + an architecture of decency

Andrea Oppenheimer Dean + Timothy Hursley

This book chronicles the genesis and early years of Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s “Rural Studio”, a design-build architecture studio located off-campus in rural Alabama. The studio educates what founder, Samuel Mockbee, calls “citizen architects” through feet-on-the-ground researching, community immersion, collaborative design and hands-on construction in Hale County’s ‘pockets of poverty.’ What started as a new house per year has grown into chapels, community buildings and structures for much needed economic development. Paramount lessons beyond design and construction are those in human decency, class and racial differences and how both client and student are equally helping one another.

Click here for our Musings Blog for a more in-depth description.

the new old house

Marc Kristal

Practicing architecture in the history-rich Charleston metro area often has us thinking about how new buildings or additions should interact with historic ones - the coexistence of present and past. Marc Kristal tackles the dialogue in his book, “The New Old House” with eighteen built examples of homes that combine historic and modern architecture. This discussion becomes one of preservation (sometimes with a flexible approach), function, aesthetics, respect and sustainability.

Click here for our Musings Blog for a more in-depth description.

fire island modernist: Horace Gifford + the architecture of secuction

Christopher Bascom Rawlins

Architect Christopher Rawlins crafts this comprehensive look at the often overlooked architect Horace Gifford (1932 - 1992), his approach to design, portfolio of seaside pavilions and houses with in the broader context of personal challenges, social and cultural movements. “As the 1960s became The Sixties, architect Horace Gifford executed a remarkable series of beach houses that transformed the terrain and culture of New York's Fire Island. Growing up on the beaches of Florida, Gifford forged a deep connection with coastal landscapes. Pairing this sensitivity with jazzy improvisations on modernist themes, he perfected a sustainable modernism in cedar and glass that was as attuned to natural landscapes as to our animal natures. Gifford's serene 1960s pavilions provided refuge from a hostile world, while his exuberant post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS masterpieces orchestrated bacchanals of liberation.” Rawlins

Click here for our Musings Blog for a more in-depth description.

LIVING WITH PATTERN: COLOR, TEXTURE, AND PRINT AT HOME

Rebecca Atwood

As lovers of solids (usually black or grey if we are being honest) we recognize that working with color and pattern can be our blindspot. Who better to learn from than Rebecca Atwood, artist, textile designer and a recent addition to the Charleston creative space (lucky us), with her book “Living with Pattern: Color, Texture, and Print at Home.” This beautiful reference, including photographs by Emily Johnston, is organized in three main parts in addition to resources and sourcing lists. First is a design and reference ‘primer’ allowing the reader to hone their personal point of view; second is a room-by-room guide with real life examples of inspired spaces; the third section includes projects for the reader to begin their own journey. In her words, “We are all filled with contradictions, and that’s what makes life interesting. Pattern can reflect your particular oppositions, interests, aspirations, and views of the world.”

Another Way to Frame a View

We aren’t pack rats at all so to have saved a piece of paper from architecture school from a couple of decades ago, not to mention several moves and home renovations, is noteworthy. (The source is unknown so if anyone has more information, please leave a note in the comments.) The topic of this particular lecture was about framing views; through the telling of two separate stories the concept of restraint was illuminated. In the first story, we learn the concept of not over-saturating a view thus keeping it ‘alive’. In the second story, the view is actually made part of a tea ceremony ritual. Admittedly it is nearly impossible not to leverage beautiful views with large expanses of glass, yet these lessons challenge us to think alternatively about creating moments that somehow bring reverence to experiencing a view. Since the original hand-out is hard to read, the two stories are excerpted below.

“A Buddhist monk lived high in the mountains, in a small stone house. Far, far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful from the mountains. But it was not visible from the monk’s house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, and then diagonally across the court to the front door of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut through the thickness of the wall. As a person walked across the court, at one spot, where their position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, they could see the ocean. And then they were past it once again, and went into the house.

What is it that happens in this courtyard? The view of the distant sea is so restrained that it stays alive forever. Who, that has ever seen that view, can ever forget it? Its power will never fade. Even for the person who lives there, coming past that view day after day for fifty years, it will still be alive.

This is the essence of the problem with any view. It is a beautiful thing. One wants to enjoy it and drink it in every day. But the more open it is, the more obvious, the more it shouts, the sooner it will fade. Gradually it will become part of the building, like the wallpaper; and the intensity of its beauty will no longer be accessible to the people who live there.”

“When the tea room and garden were completed, they invited a few friends to a tea ceremony for the housewarming. Knowing the host’s greatness, the guest naturally expected to find some ingenious design for the garden which would make the best use of the sea, the house being on the slope of a hill. But when they arrived they were amazed to find that a number of large evergreen trees had been planted on the side of the garden, evidently to obstruct the view of the sea. They were at a loss to understand the meaning of this. Later when the time came for the guest to enter the tea room, they proceeded one by one over the stepping stones in the garden to the stone water basin to rinse their mouths and wash their hands, a gesture of symbolic cleansings, physically and mentally, before entering the tea room. Then it was found that when a guest stooped to scoop out a dipperful of water from the water basin, only in that humble posture were they suddenly able to get a glimpse of the shimmering sea in the distance by way of an opening through the trees, thus making them realize the relationship between the dipperful of water in hand and the great ocean beyond, also enabling them to recognize their own position in the universe.”

Details of Rome

We fully recognize that as architects we are not normal tourists; we look up, we look down, we try to figure out floor plans, we look at the tiny details and run our hands over walls. It’s a little extra but this is how we learn. Therefore most of our travel photos are not of the typical framed postcard views, rather small moments that catch our breath and tell a story. Here are some details from our pre-pandemic trip to Rome.

We weren’t the first to look through the Aventine keyhole (see photo above for a close up) near S. Sabina which gives a perfectly framed view of St. Peter’s Basilica on axis, through the gardens. Read more about it here.

Our 9 Favorite Things about North Charleston

Firefly Distillery

“Good times. Great Spirits.” We were lucky enough to design Firefly’s new facility located at 4201 Spruill Avenue. Visit them Monday thru Saturday from 12-6pm to tour the distillery, sample spirits in the tasting room, or chill on their lawn with a cocktail and food truck fare. Also check out their website for their summer concert series.

WWW.FIREFLYDISTILLERY.COM

Ink Meets Paper

“Text less, write more. Let’s make the world more human, one card at a time.” If you follow our stories you see some love for Ink Meets Paper every few months as we reorder. We like our technology but hand written cards are our love language. Each card is handmade with a letterpress printing process using an antique Chandler & Price platen press from 1923.

INKMEETSPAPER.COM

Turning Leaf

“A Proven Path to Success After Prison”

Turning Leaf founder, Amy Barch, has created a non-profit that is dedicated to reducing the recidivism rate through working with men returning home from prison who are at the highest risk of re-arrest. Turning Leaf combines behavioral therapy, one-on-one counseling, on-site transitional employment, and job placement to offer a proven model of prison reentry with a 78% success rate. Learn more at the link below and support them through donations, print shop orders and t-shirt purchases.

TURNINGLEAFPROJECT.COM

Mixson Market

As we have been renovating our studio space for the past several months, there were many a visit to our new neighbors, Mixson Market. Part restaurant, part pantry and part gift shop, the market sells many local products and makes a mean breakfast sandwich.

WWW.MIXSONCLUB.COM

Lowcountry Rapid Transit

South Carolina’s first mass transit system will be a bus rapid transit (BRT) system serving the greater Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester. With a hub at nearby Durant Avenue, we look forward to the interconnectivity of the Lowcountry. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2023!

LOWCOUNTRYRAPIDTRANSIT.COM

THE STATION AT PARK CIRCLE

“Reclaim your home!” Our good friend, Sharon Payer, created a reclaimed marketplace with over 40 vendors, crafters and artists. Several years ago we helped with the adaptive reuse and renovation of this former autobody shop located at 4610 Spruill Avenue. Check it out for vintage furniture, vinyl, art, jewelry, textiles, or accents.

THESTATIONPARKCIRCLE

Fresh Future Farm

“Growing the quality of life our neighbors deserve.” Chief Farm Officer, Germaine Jenkins, has created a non-profit farm located at 2008 Success Street which grows and sells natural produce and groceries. The farm serves Chicora / Cherokee, one of eleven neighborhoods experiencing food apartheid in North Charleston. Support them through donations, volunteer work days and merchandise through their website below.

FRESHFUTUREFARM.ORG

Jackrabbit Filly

We are a bit late to the Jackrabbit Filly party, but we are here…eating their Biang Biang noodles…now. What started as Short Grain food truck (one of Bon Appetit’s Top 50 Best Restaurants, Eater Young Guns and Best Chef list, James Beard Rising Star Chef) has evolved into a fun, friendly neighborhood place located at 4628 Spruill Avenue. Named after owners Shuai and Corrie Wang’s Chinese zodiac animals, Jackrabbit Filly proudly serves heritage driven New Chinese American cuisine.

JACKRABBITFILLY.COM

Iola Modern

Our favorite modern furniture store in town is located at 1021 East Montague Avenue. Both a brick and mortar and online store, Iola Modern offers collections for outdoor, workspace and lounging furniture; the owners and modern design experts also provide interior design services.

IOLAMODERN.COM

Bookshelf: Charleston Fancy

We are a little late to the party of Witold Rybczynski’s “Charleston Fancy - Little Houses + Big Dreams in the Holy City” published in 2019 by Yale University Press, but we are here now. Rybczyncki, the celebrated architect, professor and author (“The Most Beautiful Home in The World”, “Waiting for the Weekend”, “A Clearing in the Distance: Fredick Law Olmstead + North America in the 19th Century”) captures a compelling movement in Charleston metro’s built environment, urban planning and architecture world. This book shares layers of historic renovations, lessons from medieval town planning and new urbanism through interviews with local master builders, developers and designers on the reverent and humane places they have created; three of which are highlighted below.

MIXSON - North Charleston

Chapter Ten heads north to the Park Circle area of North Charleston, the site for a new development by Vince Graham ultimately named Mixson. Park Circle was envisioned in the early 1900s as the New South Garden City. “The idea of garden cities, which were satellite communities that combined the amenities of urban living in a country-like setting, had originated in Britain at the turn of the century as a reaction to the crowded Victorian industrial metropolis.” The Park Circle masterplan is the work of William Bell Marquis and has a circular park with eight radiating avenues that contain a mix of commercial, residential and civic uses. Due to the strong military presence in North Charleston, in 1941 the Defense Homes Corporation, a wartime federal agency which provided emergency housing for defense workers, built a residential complex of pre-fab wooden buildings on the 44 acres that would become Mixson. Over the decades these homes fell into disrepair and the property for listed for sale. In the mid-2000s, Graham had acquired it and with collaborators like Tim Keane, Jacob Lindsey, George Holt and Andrew Gould set out to create a “more affordable I’On” with prospective buyers as small professional households and first time home buyers. As the masterplan process unfolded, team members questioned how a village might have developed over time and while medieval towns began when people gathered around a sacred stone or well, Holt and Gould noted two things 1) there were no sacred stones on this site but 2) ‘People gravitate to trees.’ In turn, the buildings of Mixson are arranged around existing live oak trees on the site with a familiar density and architectural robustness of the designers’ previous projects. The City of North Charleston was very agreeable to this redevelopment. “The new zoning included attached houses and some apartments as well as shops. We were even allowed to create roadways beneath buildings to reach rear courtyards, which is unprecedented.” Vince Graham

As with many projects and good ideas, the Great Recession had its way with the Mixson development. Only a small portion of the original concept was realized with the remainder of the acreage ultimately being filled with a similar density, but divergent architecture styles, quality levels and village planning techniques. Still, for a couple of blocks, one can experience the original vision.

TULLY AND CHARLES - CHARLESTON “Creating a sense of place in a neglected neighborhood”

Chapter Two maps out the evolution of Tully Alley near the intersection of Saint Phillip and Cannon streets on Charleston’s peninsula with local renovator / developer George Holt at the forefront. During the early 1990s, this part of Charleston had many vacant and neglected houses as well as high crime rates. Over the next several years, George and his partners invested in, repaired and renovated the existing structures allowing them to be occupied thus creating a critical mass of permanent residents. New homes were designed in varying architectural styles, which along with the organic, dense master plan were supported by former the City of Charleston Planning staff. “I don’t think we would have been allowed such architectural exuberance without the support and encouragement of the city architect, Charles Chase. Charles explained to the individual board members what was going on architecturally and why he thought what we were proposing would work for its location.” George Holt. The resulting micro-master plan marries urban density, architectural diversity with pride of place - a win for its occupants and the Charleston at large.

I’ON - MOUNT PLEASANT “They had it right the first time.”

Chapter Eight and Nine introduces the reader to Vince Graham, a “passionate advocate for advancing human-scaled urbanism” through his early development work in Beaufort (Newpoint which took cues from Beaufort’s “Old Point”) and subsequent introduction to the principles of New Urbanism. “New Urbanism is a planning and development approach based on the principles of how cities and towns had been built for the last several centuries: walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban design.” (Congress for the New Urbanism) It was these principles along with studying historic neighborhoods like the Old Village in Mount Pleasant, that Graham used to create a new community in Mount Pleasant called I’On in the mid-1990s, building out his team with Andres Duany and Victor Dover. Despite the Town of Mount Pleasant recently adopting a master plan sympathetic to the new urbanist principles and calling for “a compact mix of residential, commercial and civic uses”, the development met a great amount of resistance / nimbyism mainly stemming from the levels of density proposed. Ultimately, the density and mix of uses was dialed down for a proposed master plan that would eventually be approved. Nearly two decades later, I’On is an established community, primarily residential with robust architectural standards. “Community can’t be created by one person, it has to emerge from people living or working some place. But you can create the conditions the enable it…create conditions where people can connect with one another.” Vince Graham

Charleston Artist | Mary Edna Fraser

Our charge for the design of the Daniel Island Recreation Center for the City of Charleston, SC was to tie the new facility to the surrounding Charleston and Daniel Island context. This carried through to the interior art and graphics design with a main focal point by renowned Charleston artist, Mary Edna Fraser. “Daniel Island Nocturne” in a triptych format will proudly grace the community room ante room.

Photograph by Carolyn Russo, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

We first learned of Mary Edna Fraser when we moved to Charleston in the early 90s; her batiks are captivating and her process is inspired through her own aerial photography. Beyond that, is a commitment to the environment, education and activism. In her own words, “Photographing from the open cockpit of my family’s vintage plane, wind in my face translates to batiks on silk, distilling the adventure into a moment of visual poetry…Conveying breathtaking perspectives of space, earth, and deep sea is my life’s work, developed with leading experts in the fields of planetary science, coastal geology, and oceanography.” Please visit her website here.

We are fortunate to have clients like the City of Charleston who believe in and support not only public art but local artists. This facility will be open to the public beginning in the summer of 2021; stay tuned for project completion and professional photos of the installation.

Rush Dixon Architects rendering for the interior installation at the Daniel Island Recreation Center’s community room.

Ruins of Glendale Mill

Our design inspiration travels are a little closer to home these pandemic days with a recent trip to Glendale, just outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Truth be told, it was our son who suggested the field trip to the Glendale Mill site, after researching abandoned buildings to photograph. In this case all that remains of the original cotton mill are two smoke stacks and two stair towers.

Built in the 1830s and originally called the Bivingsville Mill, this was one of SC’s most important and continuously operating mills. (Click here for a video on the history of the mill.) In 2004 a catastrophic fire destroyed the majority of the building; the remains of which and surrounding land have become a preserve thanks to Spartanburg County.

Photos by Rush David Dixon IV:

Bookshelf: Picasso's One-Liners

In the continued exploration of minimalism and the power of simplicity, we gravitate toward architecture that conveys a point of view with few, albeit perhaps bold, moves; designs that resist being over-worked rise to the top. Suggestions that “less is more” and its derivation “less but better” guide our focus with inspiration coming from building design, product design or, like today, art. Until recently, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) was best known to me for his paintings (The Old Guitarist, Guernica, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) but looking at his drawings provides insight into his process, play / study and brilliance. A new favorite book, “Picasso’s One-Liners” (1997) with an introduction by Susan Grace Galassi, currently the Senior Curator of The Frick Collection, assembles single line drawings by the artist - “single line” as in he puts pen to paper and doesn’t pick it up until the drawing is complete…hence one-liners. Mind blowing to say the least.

“Freedom of gesture, sureness of hand, and a genius for capturing the essence of a character through movement, are integral to these deceptively simple, whimsical drawings.” Susan Grace Galassi

While I could trace his lines with my finger all day and be perfectly content without knowing more, there is always a need to know more. Galassi’s introduction provides just that: history, context and framing that is needed to truly understand and appreciate his drawings. I am not entirely sure how finding this book, reading Galassi’s words and tracing Picasso’s lines will influence our work, but I do know it underscores one’s process, craft and expression. So back to work we go.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. “ Picasso

Bulls’ Heads, 1956. “If there was a single truth, you couldn’t make a hundred paintings of the same subject.” PP

Horse and Trainer, 1920. “The wizardry of Picasso’s drawing is best expressed in his suite of images of the horse and its juggler / trainer carried out in pencil in 1920. These capture most effectively of all the showmanship, wit, and mastery of means integral to his one-liners in an elegant allegory of art.” Galassi

Pencil sketch, 1924

Rooster, 1918.

Picasso once said “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Back to work, folks!