Life Style

Description

Bruce Mau describes his studio as a multi-disciplinary think tank where designers, artists and architects, curators, filmmakers and writers collaborate ... In interviews and in his own writings, Mau rarely alludes overtly to nuts-and-bolts design issues such as typography, page design, color, and proportion. Instead, his work critically engages what he calls the global image economy: a new world order characterized by the impact of sophisticated reproduction technology, the proliferation of logos and printed advertisements, digitally manipulated imagery, celebrity culture, and electronic commerce, among other late-twentieth-century phenomena.This book begins with a one-page text titled Styling Life: Declaration, which succinctly defines the firm's approach and includes the statement, Here we accept the accidents, the encounters, the interruptions and the failures of design practice along with its successes and elations.

Table of contents

Sections run side-by-side in columns in the table of contents. A sampling of headings from the contents: Life Theories; * "Getting Engaged": Essay on the global image economy; * "Reading: Shaping Time": Essay on typography; * "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth": Manifesto; * "Life Expectancy": Essay on identity; * "Twelve Strategies": Essay on collaboration; * "The Art Life": Credo; Life Projects; * Zone (documentation of projects for Zone Books); * Identity (corporate/non-profit identity programmes for such entities as Printed Matter, New York; Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Rice School of Architecture, Houston, Texas); * Signs of Life (environmental signage for Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; Secret Building; Nieuw Gerechtsbebouw, Ghent); * Exhibits (exhibition design); * Magazines (work for I.D. Magazine and a proposal for a new publication); * Advertising; * Extras (work for Documenta X in Basel; Metropolis magazine in New York; various other projects); * Art Life (theatre and performance; artist collaborations); Life Stories; * "Love Connection"; * "'I Don't Know What Happened'"; * "Meeting John Cage"; * "Mr. Monacelli isn't in ..."; * "Don't Be Fooled by Enthusiasm"; * "Management by Walking Away"