Like Kandinsky before him, Kasimir Malevich arrived at the Bauhaus already wielding an impressive international reputation. His trip to Germany in the spring of 1927 saw him visit both Dessau and Berlin; while in the former he met with Gropius and was able to arrange for the publication of what would be the eleventh book in the Bauhausbücher series: The Non-objective World (Die gegenstandslose Welt).
As a major center of iconic postwar architecture, Berlin has featured frequently in the Blue Crow Media catalog, with various offerings covering the city’s Modernist and Brutalist architecture, as well as its fascinating Cold War-era U-Bahn stations. Brutalist Berlin, out this month, transforms and expands the corresponding map into a proper full-length book, which serves equally well as both an on-the-ground travel guide and reference book for armchair travelers and scholars.
Wassily Kandinsky was already an internationally renowned artist and thinker by the time he joined the Bauhaus in 1922, having written Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) a decade prior and exhibited his work throughout Europe yet longer. While he claimed to have written the majority of Point and Line to Plane prior to 1914, it was not published until 1926, when it would become the ninth book in the Bauhausbücher series.
International Architecture, the initial title in the Bauhausbücher series, serves as a manifesto of sorts for editor Walter Gropius. Its general subject asserts the primacy of architecture over the other disciplines covered by the Bauhaus, and the specific structures he chooses are unerringly contemporary—some so new they are unbuilt, existing only as sketches or models.
The newest book from Christopher Herwig, author of the celebrated Soviet Bus Stops series, shifts to a new part of the world but a related subject: the vivid and varied decorated vehicles of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Trucks and Tuks celebrates an art form that, while present worldwide, arguably reaches its pinnacle of devotion and self-expression in South Asia, with vehicles ranging from tiny two-seaters to massive road-spanning lorries displaying a wide array of styles.
With the new Modern Helsinki Map, Blue Crow Media extends their ever-expanding series to one of the world’s northernmost capitals. Too long seen as an outlier to the predominant cultural spheres of Europe, Helsinki is finally reclaiming its unique place in the continent: a thoroughly Nordic country that is at the crossroads of Scandinavian and Baltic, west and east, traditional and modern. Hundred-year-old wooden houses sit side-by-side with hypermodern concrete-and-glass structures, and modern buildings often have traits of traditional Finnish and Nordic architecture, built outward from a core of minimalism and functionality.
