Gilded New York: Design, Fashion, and Society accompanied the exhibition of the same name, exploring the city’s visual culture at the end of the 19th century, when its elite class flaunted their money as never before. In New York, this era was marked by the sudden rise of industrial and corporate wealth, amassed by such titans as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, who expressed their high status through extravagant fashions, architecture, and interior design. The exhibition presented a lavish display of some 100 works, including costumes, jewelry, portraits, and decorative objects, all created between the mid-1870s and the early 20th century. The dazzling works in the exhibition illuminated an era when members of the new American aristocracy often displayed their wealth in storied balls in Fifth Avenue mansions and hotels. It was a time when New York became the nation’s corporate headquarters and a popular Ladies’ Mile of luxury retail establishments and cultural institutions helped launch the city to global prominence.

>See exhibition

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Press

“Through jeweled tiaras and gold Ascot pins, family portraits gleaming with trompe l’oeil satin, and photos of the homes of the nouveau riche, the authors illustrate the transformations wrought by manna storms of wealth, the social mobility they encouraged and the cultural institutions they fostered, many of which continue to be cherished.”
Julie Lasky, New York Times Gift Guide
Christmas 2013

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Credits
Designer: Tsang Seymour
Publisher: Monacelli Press

Edited and with essays by Donald Albrecht and Natalie Shivers

This catalog accompanied the exhibition Keep Calm and Carry On, which traced developments in architecture, engineering, urban planning, fashion, graphics, media, and product and automotive design between 1938 and 1951, a tumultuous 13-year period that spanned the run-up to World War II and its immediate aftermath. From 1939 to 1945, Britain’s creative class mobilized to win the war on the home front. Wartime initiatives spurred new levels of design innovation in a wide range of fields. Architects and engineers created air raid shelters to protect civilians from bombs and missiles and proposed new ideas in architecture and planning to rebuild the nation’s bombed-out cities. Designers in other media conceived fashions and furnishings that saved essential wartime materials while injecting style and beauty into the harsh realities of wartime life. Graphic designers created visually dynamic posters and filmmakers produced inspirational movies that shaped the nation’s behavior and attitudes. Arts promoters also rose to the challenges, forging new and lasting relationships between museums, artists, musicians, the British government, and the public. The end of the war in 1945 accelerated these progressive trends with a series of exhibitions presenting new and innovative ideas.

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Credits
Catalog design: Pure + Applied
Photographs: John Halpern

Co-edited with Dianne Pierce

This book accompanied an exhibition of the same name, which explored the work and philosophy of Hudson River Valley resident and renowned industrial designer Russel Wright. The show and book focused on one of Wright’s most pervasive preoccupations, and one with much current relevance: the relationship of humankind with the natural world. While examining Wright’s entire career from the 1920s through the 1970s, the exhibition will focus on his work between 1945 and 1968, a less-scrutinized period when Wright increasingly designed in experimental and innovative ways.

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Credits
Co-editor: Dianne Pierce
Designer: Office of Communications & Marketing/Design Services, State University of New York at New Paltz; Senior Designer Jeff Lesperance, based on an initial concept design by Randall Martin.

Co-edited with Thomas Mellins

This catalog accompanied the traveling exhibition that explores Doris Duke’s Shangri La, a five-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Begun in the mid-1930s and developed over the course of more than fifty years, Shangri La seamlessly melds together modern architecture, tropical landscape, and art from throughout the Islamic world. Representing an approach that may be termed “inventive synthesis,” Shangri La mixes original and commissioned architectural elements, sometimes incorporating complete historic rooms that function as museum-quality period installations. Shangri La’s collections are equally diverse and encompass a broad time spectrum, from the pre-Islamic and mediaeval periods through the mid-20th century, as well as myriad media, styles, and techniques developed within the realm of the Islamic arts. The exhibition combined artifacts, photographs, drawings, and ephemera, as well as works of five artists who have participated in Shangri La’s artists-in-residence program.

> See exhibition

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Credits
Co-editor: Thomas Mellins
Principal photography by Tim Street-Porter
Designer: Abbott Miller/Pentagram
Publisher: Skira/Rizzoli

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America accompanied the first major traveling retrospective to explore the figure the New York Times recently dubbed “the Leonardo de Vinci of the 20th century.” When you drive on an interstate highway, attend a multimedia Broadway show, dine in a sky-high revolving restaurant, or watch a football game in an all-weather stadium, you owe a debt of gratitude to Bel Geddes. A promethean figure who was equally comfortable in the realms of fact and fantasy, Geddes was both a visionary and a pragmatist who had a significant role in shaping not only modern America, but also the nation’s image of itself as leading the way into the future. He was a polymath who had no schooling or professional training in the activities he mastered, which included designing stage sets, costumes, and lighting; creating theater buildings, offices, nightclubs, and houses, as well as their furnishings, from vacuum cleaners to cocktail sets; and authoring oracular books and articles that landed him and his prophesies on the front page of newspapers across the country.

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Credits
Designer: Sarah Gifford
Publisher: Abrams

Now Boarding: Fentress + The Architecture of Flight explored the work of Denver-based architect Curt Fentress, who emerged as one of the world’s leading airport architects with the completion of the terminal complex for Denver International Airport in 1995. Since then, he and his firm have designed airports in the United States and Asia that exemplify the most innovative ideas in architectural design, passenger experience, and regional planning. To provide context to the architect’s work, the exhibition included a timeline of airport and airplane history, artifacts exploring air travel in popular culture, a specially commissioned media installation about air travel today, and digital speculations on the airport of the future.

> See exhibition

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Credits
Publisher: Denver Art Museum and Scala Publishers
Designer: Robert Aufuldish/Aufuldish and Warinner

> See exhibition

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Cars, Culture, and the City explored how the car shaped modern-day New York, while, at the same time, New York shaped America’s romance with the car. From the early 20th century through today, New Yorkers’ invention of innovative ways to accommodate cars and pedestrians, such as multi-level streets, and the construction of bridges and tunnels made the city the epicenter of a vast, tri-state region. In the formative decades from the turn of the century through the 1960s, New Yorkers also built the auto showrooms and hosted the annual auto shows and world’s fairs that created the magic of American car culture. The exhibition was accompanied by a 100-page catalog.

Mr. Albrecht and his co-curator developed the idea of the show and catalog, selected all the artifacts, and wrote the exhibition text and catalog.

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Co-authored with Phil Patton

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Credits
Publisher: Museum of the City of New York
Designer: Pure+Applied