NEW
YORK
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ARCHITECTURE+ DESIGN
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BOOK
CLUB
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The New York Architecture + Design Book Club, created by Head Hi and the forthcoming design journal Untapped, is a quarterly gathering for readers and creative people that takes place at Head Hi’s Brooklyn bookstore. It is a lively program series where experts, authors and readers can expand their minds and build connections with each other while discussing a recent architecture and design publication during an interactive, thought-provoking event, which is free and open to the public (an R.S.V.P. is required).
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At each gathering, the author will briefly present their book to a special guest, outlining its main topics and the process of bringing the publication to life. This introductory presentation will be followed by a conversation, open to all attendees and participants and led by the book club’s organizers, that encourages discussion and insights around the book’s content and design, and its connection to the broader architecture and design community. Ahead of each event, Untapped will publish a review of the featured book, written by a leading design critic.
JOIN + GET THE BOOKS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Our next New York Architecture + Design Book Club gathering will take place in May 2023.
Stay tuned for more details about the event and selected title.
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PAST EVENTS
Our first title for the New York Architecture + Design Book Club debut event was Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (Yale University Press).
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Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place surveys the last 10 years of Burks’s global workshop-based practice, alongside a new commission of speculative works exploring ideas concerning domesticity in the wake of global crises.
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Through photo essays, essays, and conversations, the book contextualizes objects in a concurrent exhibition of the same name, on view through March 5 at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and their underpinnings in Italian Radical Design and the New Bauhaus while charting a future for design that is more collaborative and community-driven. Beyond a portfolio of work, the book presents critical perspectives from contributors such as fellow practitioner Patricia Urquiola, design historian Glenn Adamson, and curators Beatrice Galilee, Monica Obniski, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, as well as the late cultural critic bell hooks, whose voices ground Burks’s industrial design practice within larger conversations about race, craft, and society.
Developed in collaboration with Chicago-based graphic designers Normal Studio, this is a design book for reading!
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​The book centers the industrial design and craft collaborations within Burks’s workshop-based design practice and offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of design at a time when racial, social, and environmental justice remain in jeopardy. Topics explored include an overview of the designer’s practice—from the foundational architecture culture of Chicago (Burks’s birthplace) to his latest speculative project—the workshop-based collaborative ethos of his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, and the politics of design. There is also a conversation between bell hooks and Burks, in which hooks brings her critical eye to design as it relates to the broader field of African American cultural production.
OUR EVENT GUESTS
Stephen
Burks
Christian Nyampeta
Chicago native, Stephen Burks is one of the most recognized American industrial designers of his generation. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has worked as a product development consultant in close collaboration with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. Stephen and his Brooklyn-based studio have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation including Cappellini, Dedon, Mass Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois. Stephen is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Christian Nyampeta is an artist, filmmaker and writer living in New York and working in the Netherlands and Rwanda. He organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, pedagogical experiments, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta’s recent activities include participating in the 58th Carnegie International. Nyampeta sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and he is a board member of November Magazine, also in New York.
READ THE BOOK REVIEW
Ahead of each event, Untapped publishes a review of the featured book, written by a leading design critic. Read the book review on Shelter In Place by editor and journalist Francesca Perry here.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.
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Untapped is a new design journal that looks back to look forward. It spotlights people who combine vital yet overlooked or ignored lessons from the past with new ideas, with the aim of improving our lives. Launching February 7, 2023, the inaugural issue’s thematic question, “Are things moving fast enough?”, will be answered by creative minds from across industries in the form of roundtable discussions, essays, profiles, and first-person narratives. Untapped is an editorially independent initiative of the design company Henrybuilt.
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www.untappedjournal.com
@untappedjournal
MANY THANKS TO OUR DRINK SPONSOR
The New York Architecture + Design Book Club, created by Head Hi and the design journal Untapped, is a book subscription and quarterly gathering for readers and creative people that takes place at Head Hi’s Brooklyn bookstore. It is a lively program series where experts, authors and readers can expand their minds and build connections with each other while discussing a recent architecture and design publication during an interactive, thought-provoking event, which is open to the public (an R.S.V.P. is required).
Photo from our first event by Christopher Garcia Valle
JOIN + GET THE BOOKS
BOOK 1:
Stephen Burks Shelter
in Place, $50
BOOK 2:
Touch Wood: Material, Architecture Future, $45
BOOK 3:
A Dark, A Light, A Bright The Designs of Dorothy Liebes, $50
BOOK 4:
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling, $40
UPCOMING EVENTS
EVENT GUESTS
Join us on Friday, December 8 from 6-8pm! The fourth title for the New York Architecture + Design Book Club subscription and quarterly event series is The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books) by Nile Greenberg and Matthew Kennedy.
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In the 1920s and 30s, new ideas about the body and movement, known as “physical culture” at the time, proliferated. This thinking impacted how architects designed public spaces, such as stadiums and gyms, as well as private ones, specifically the home. Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who served as director of the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1930, described the resulting work in a 1926 essay as “the advanced school of collective feeling.”
A new book of the same title deep-dives into this under-explored period of modern architecture. Exploring houses, apartments, and exhibitions by Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, Charlotte Perriand, and others—illuminated by photographs, diagrams, and plans—the book shows how architects reconciled the connections between the body, space, and objects, and how those relationships might inform the design of domestic interiors today.
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The book was published in October 2023. It was designed by Laura Coombs and includes 176 pages.
Nile Greenberg
Matthew Kennedy
UNTAPPED BOOK REVIEW
Ahead of each event, Untapped publishes a review of the featured book, written by a leading design critic. We are pleased to announce that the review of The Advanced School of Collective Feeling will be written by Jarrett Fuller, host of the design podcast Scratching the Surface.
WHAT TO EXPECT AT THE EVENT
At each gathering, the author(s) will briefly present their book to a special guest, outlining its main topics and the process of bringing the publication to life.
​
This introductory presentation will be followed by a conversation, open to all attendees and participants and led by the book club’s organizers, that encourages discussion and insights around the book’s content and design, and its connection to the broader architecture and design community.
​
Come prepared to judge a book by its cover and look back to look forward!
Nile Greenberg is a founding partner of ANY, a New York City based office that synthesizes structure, materials, culture, organizations and media as architecture projects. He is the editor of the Brooklyn Rail’s architecture section and has taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP. He curated the exhibition Two Sides of the Border, inaugurated at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery and edited the synonymous book for Lars Muller. Nile holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University and worked at MOS Architects, SO – IL, and Leong Leong in New York and Los Angeles where his work focused on cultural and public architecture such as the Los Angeles LGBT Center, The Kitchen, and the UC Davis Museum of Art.
Matthew Kennedy is a designer, writer, and educator operating between Mexico City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2020, he formally partnered with longtime collaborator Andrés Harvey to establish the architecture and design studio Cosa, which seeks to explore the relationship between local material cultures and global economic networks via architectural and interior interventions, experimental preservation, exhibition design, objects, and research. Prior to establishing Cosa, he worked in architecture offices including Frida Escobedo Taller de Arquitectura, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and The Fautory. Since 2017, Matthew has served as the assistant editor of the journal Faktur: Documents and Architecture. Matthew holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation.
IN CONVERSATION WITH
John Sorensen-Jolink is a lighting designer and founder of design studio Coil + Drift. But in his previous career he was a professional modern dancer. He earned his BFA at the conservatory at New York University’s Tisch School and went on to perform with legendary choreographers and directors such as Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Doug Elkins, and Twyla Tharp. He received the ICFF Editors’ Award for best New Designer in 2016, was included on Sight Unseen’s 2018 American Design Hot List. In 2022, Coil + Drift relocated from Brooklyn to the majestic Catskill Mountains, and opened a new studio, showroom, and production facility.
PAST EVENTS
Stephen Burks
Christian Nyampeta
Our first title for the New York Architecture + Design Book Club debut event on February 18, 2023 featured Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (Yale University Press), a survey of the last 10 years of Burks’s global workshop-based practice, alongside a new commission of speculative works exploring ideas concerning domesticity in the wake of global crises.
EVENT GUESTS
Stephen Burks is one of the most recognized American industrial designers of his generation. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has worked as a product development consultant in close collaboration with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. Stephen and his Brooklyn-based studio have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation including Cappellini, Dedon, Mass Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois. Stephen is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Christian Nyampeta is an artist, filmmaker and writer living in New York and working in the Netherlands and Rwanda. He organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, pedagogical experiments, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta’s recent activities include participating in the 58th Carnegie International. Nyampeta sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and he is a board member of November Magazine, also in New York.
READ THE BOOK REVIEW
Francesca Perry reviews Shelter in Place.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.
​
Untapped is a new design journal that looks back to look forward. It tells long-form stories about people and projects that combine overlooked or ignored knowledge from the past with new ideas, with the aim of improving our lives. The project features voices from the fields of art, design, food, science, business, and beyond—and often puts them in conversation with one another to share insights that might be useful when tackling issues in their respective pursuits. Published by the design company Henrybuilt, the editorially independent initiative seeks to offer valuable, varied perspectives on where we are, where we’re going, and how the past can enhance the future.
​
www.untappedjournal.com
@untappedjournal
Stephen Burks
Christian Nyampeta
Our first title for the New York Architecture + Design Book Club debut event on February 18, 2023 featured Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (Yale University Press), a survey of the last 10 years of Burks’s global workshop-based practice, alongside a new commission of speculative works exploring ideas concerning domesticity in the wake of global crises.
EVENT GUESTS
Stephen Burks is one of the most recognized American industrial designers of his generation. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has worked as a product development consultant in close collaboration with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. Stephen and his Brooklyn-based studio have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation including Cappellini, Dedon, Mass Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois. Stephen is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Christian Nyampeta is an artist, filmmaker and writer living in New York and working in the Netherlands and Rwanda. He organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, pedagogical experiments, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta’s recent activities include participating in the 58th Carnegie International. Nyampeta sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and he is a board member of November Magazine, also in New York.
READ THE BOOK REVIEW
Francesca Perry reviews Shelter in Place.