Inspiring Design Books to Read on Vacation

Here is the list of our favorite titles, meant to inspire you during the Summer holidays

If design is your job or your passion, these are books for you to read, to keep at hand or to add to your collection. We have selected a few titles to inspire you during the summer, but which will surely find a place in your library as a design enthusiast.

*Some of these books may be available only in Italian 

25 ways to drive a nail, by Enzo Mari

“I am convinced that designing corresponds to a deep human drive, such as the survival instinct, hunger, sex. We are a species that wants to change its environment“. Thus Enzo Mari opens his autobiography. In addition to collecting the main moments of the life and career of this Italian design guru, the book is a true artistic and architectural manifesto that makes us reflect on contemporary civilization.

Enzo Mari is probably the most brilliant and innovative Italian designer of the twentieth century. Growing up in pre-war Milan, he lived in poverty for a long time before starting his artistic career at the Brera Academy in the post-war period. In the years of the economic boom he revolutionized the concept of design, creating what he himself calls a democratic utopia: designing and producing beautiful and useful objects for ordinary people, hitherto excluded from an art considered luxury.

 

Very difficult to say, by Ettore Sottsass

A collection of unpublished texts and letters that reconstruct the universe of the brilliant architect Ettore Sottsass. An invitation to travel with him to the places he has visited, but also inside his mind: “Communists, Africans and navigators”, “The ceramics of darkness”, “The impassive containers”, “Due to the delayed arrival of the aircraft”,“The ritual to make a Sumerian house”. The titles Sottsass chose for his texts could be enough to illustrate his world.

In this book, Sottsass speaks of his loves, of his profession, of the restless world in which he found himself. But in the meantime he travels – to Greece, India, Egypt -, designs, experiments, photographs, each time moving, as if it were the first, in a delightfully eccentric way.

 

The living house. Repairing spaces, learning to build, by Andrea Staid

An irresistible title for all those who believe that the home is more than just a place where we carry out our daily activities but, above all, is a physical place that represents what gives meaning to our life.

The book seeks the profound meaning of living, from the Peruvian Andes to the Indian mountains, passing through Vietnam and Mongolia. The living house combines anthropology and personal experience, travel and ethnography and invites us to rethink our way of imagining ourselves in space.

 

Mobitecture: Architecture on the Move, by Rebecca Roke

With this book, Rebecca Roke celebrates mobile architecture in all its forms, presenting a taxonomy of nomadic, portable and moving structures of all shapes and species.

The book lists a very rich and entertaining repertoire of all the possible types of structures that can be moved and transported: homes built for life on the go in deserts, oceans, on the beach, in the woods, in the mountains and in the city; to be moved with cars, bicycles, skis, motorcycles, tractors, mules, sledges, even with hands and feet. For lovers of transformable furniture and the infinity of applications it allows, this is definitely a book that triggers the imagination.

 

Big Book of Design, edited by Andrea Branzi

An ideal book to follow the creative path of the great masters of Design, from the 1920s to today: from Giò Ponti to Philippe Starck, from Ettore Sottsass to the Castiglioni brothers. Composed of essays that tell the story of each designer, it provides the main interpretations of their work.

An atlas of the objects also illustrates some of their most famous objects, through short cards, drawings and photographs. The intention is to offer accurate disclosure, intended for anyone interested in learning about design, be it a student, professional or simply a lover and enthusiast, offering basic information but also guidance for any further information.

 

 

Did you like this list? Did you already know these books? Would you like to add some other to the selection?

Leave us a message in the comments of this post… and enjoy your reading!