People in Glass Houses: Anarchist Architecture and Objects for Complex Interiors

Sometimes you want to throw a rock through the window and watch the house fall! This list brings together our favourite publications that go against the grain of architectural and interior conventions, showing that sometimes in order to build something, first you have to tear it down.

Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California - Edition Patrick Frey

If your home isn’t quite right, these young idealists say make it yourself. In one of the largest urban-to-rural migrations in American history they dropped out of society and went “back to the land,”, with Northern California becoming this cultural movement’s epicentre. Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California traces those still committed to this way of life and how, these utopian communes gave rise to radical, hand built, sometimes otherworldly homes. It travels through Northern California, along hidden dirt roads and into redwood forests, uncovering handmade homes concealed for decades. Although never constructed for their resale promise, and anti-capitalistic to their foundations, they are rapidly disappearing. This publication presents them as artworks in their own right—captured before they are lost.

Edition Patrick Frey

MISANTHROPOZINE #4: Car Tuning for Architects - S.P.A.M. BOOKS

MISANTHROPOZINE is an art & architecture journal that explores the outer edges and inner contradictions of architecture as both discipline and cultural practice. Each issue operates like a curated detour—gathering essays, artefacts, souvenirs, and speculative theory to probe architecture’s entanglements with other domains. This issue dives into that blur, modifying cultures in which both performance and looks are altered.

S.P.A.M. BOOKS

Radical as Folk: The Emeryville Mudflat Sculpture Garden - Colpa Press

Step outside the house and into the Emeryville Mudflat Sculpture Garden: an art space viewed at freeway speed. In the wake of the 1960s, while the Bay Area shook with political and social change, this radical sculpture garden bloomed on the side of Interstate 80, pushing the boundaries of public art. An anonymous, drive-through environment on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Constructed out of the debris piled high along the marginalized waterfront of the Bay, the sculptures were large and chaotic. Even at sixty miles per hour, they demanded your attention. They also possessed a unique duality: both timeless relics and reflections of the present moment.

Colpa Press

Outdoor Furniture - Art Paper Editions

There is a WHOLE world of interiors right on your doorstep…literally. Pippa Garner’s  Outdoor Furniture collects pictures of jiggered sofas that were abandoned in the streets of the Californian city. Her multidisciplinary practice, which is receiving a renewed visibility and institutional attention, features a wide, and for the most part still undiscovered, photographic archive of thousands of images. Consisting of personal documentations spanning fifty years, her photography work also encompasses street photography shots from the late 70s and early 80s, captured on her daily explorations of Los Angeles.

Art Paper Editions

PIN–UP Issue 40: "INDEPENDENCE"

It’s PIN-UP’s birthday! To mark 20 years of architectural entertainment, one issue simply wasn’t enough, so they made ten: packaging them up in a specially designed party box. Each issue seeking to ask a different question: what marks the early 21st century? Which houses built since 2000 matter most? Which objects will come to represent its first quarter? And where do architecture, design, and culture stand today? This extensive collection is sure to keep you inspired…up until the next issue.

PIN–UP Issue 40

The Apartment: Home As Artspace - Independent Publishing Network

WFH isn’t always lonely and The Apartment: Home As Artspace proves it. Offering an intimate exploration of exhibition practice and first-hand accounts of domestic art spaces, this book documents three exhibitions held in a Bermondsey home. Featuring writing and interviews from: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jeremy Deller, Shaun McDowell, Bobby Dowler, Matthew Stone, Daisy Sanchez, the work reveals these homes not as neutral containers for art, but active, multifaceted sites that form a rich niche of cultural production.

Independent Publishing Network

Inside the Burlesque Boudoir - Blurring Books

Bedrooms are for then just sleeping; often they’re for storing clothes. In Debby Besford’s Inside the Burlesque Boudoir, she researched and photographed a complexity of issues around the representation of the contemporary female, with emphasis on the Burlesque Stage Performer. This particular body of work evolved from a deep-rooted curiosity about female sexuality, and how it can be expressed and represented in a positive and more complex way.

Blurring Books

Objects Time Offerings - Pre-Echo

Minimalism belongs in the 1960s and Ken Tisa knows it. An acclaimed painter and ceramist, Objects/Time/Offerings presents their personal archive of handicrafts, dolls, puppets, gag gifts, and unique objects from around the world. Objects hail from across the globe: Haiti, Java, Czech Republic, Africa, Argentina, from a time before the handicraft industry was commodified by tourism; each item pulsating with the unique craftmanship that birthed it. This publication presents pieces from the archives, photographed by Josie Keefe and juxtaposed with personal photos and early ephemeral installations.

Pre-Echo

Inframundi - Note Note Editions

For those planning their homes both in this life and the next Inframundi imagines a catalogue of objects one might need in the afterlife. Born from several years of research, Elisa Valenzuela based her project on the study of pre-Columbian, Oceanic, and ancient art catalogues; borrowing their visual conventions and shifting them toward fiction. The book unfolds in chapters that echo the major spheres of existence: beauty, style, utensils, the rites of passage, rituals, childhood. Each section explores the gestures, beliefs, or needs one might wish to carry into another world. Combs, sound amulets, ritual shoes, domestic tools, or articulated toys form an ideal funerary collection—plausible, yet entirely imagined.

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