Swipe Books on Advertising and Design

Through a combination of good design and perceptive market-assessment, PlanToys of Thailand has, over 28 years, carved a unique niche in the North American and European toy market. The company has demonstrated an understanding of the Western parent that Mattel™ and the rest of the Toys-R-Us™ crowd seem incapable of achieving. For instance, instead of having to wrestle toxic Disney™ licensed action figures from the hands of disappointed toddlers, parents might prefer toys that are both safe and manufactured in a sustainable manner. With a string of ISO certifications for product safety and socially responsible management, Plan is a model for a more ethical relationship between Western consumers and manufacturers in the developing world.

PlanToys Mini Garbage / Recycling Truck

✍ 2009: Vitool Viraponsavan & Plan Creations

Part of PlanToys new eco-themed line of toys that help kids learn how to live in harmony with the environment, this sturdy truck will delight any toddler while offering parents an opportunity to introduce the concepts of waste reduction and recycling.

$24.95

PlanToys Eco Green Dollhouse, with Furniture

✍ 2009: Vitool Viraponsavan & Plan Creations

The most elaborate (and costly) item in the PlanToys eco line, this full-size dollhouse features a (pretend) wind turbine and solar cell panel, a rain barrel, a green facade and roof, and a shade canopy. There is even an adorable little set of recycle bins and all furniture is included.

$249.95

All PlanToys are made from reclaimed rubber wood with water or soy-based finishes in ISO 9001, ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001 and SA 8000 certified, locally-owned factories in Thailand.

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

Temporary and portable architecture are fashionable subjects. However, such projects are most often considered simply as novelties associated either with recreation or with the outsider lifestyle. On the contrary, in the real world, temporary and portable architecture are most strongly associated with necessity, emergency or traditional cultural nomadism. The following two books take the less superficial view, offering a more practical perspective on the subject.

Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space

✍ 2009: Charley Hailey

Oddly compelling, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space takes an almost obsessive / compulsive approach to it’s subject. An expansion of Hailey’s doctoral dissertation, the guide provides a typology of camp forms, divided into three categories: Autonomy (protest camp, peace camp, etc.), Control (immigrant camp, concentration camp, etc.) and Necessity (refugee camp, homeless camp, mass shelter camp, etc.)

Although for many of us ‘camping’ involves a temporary living condition for self amusement, Haily looks beyond the Western leisure tradition, suggesting that “Camps register the struggles, emergencies, and possibilities of global existence as no other space does.” Of the more than 100 camp types examined, fewer than 20 involve recreation of any kind. Hailey demonstrates the gravity and potential of camps as indicators of the contemporary social climate and political landscape. (2009: MIT Press; ISBN 9780262512879)

Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises

✍ 2006: Cameron Sinclair, ed. & Kate Stohr, ed.

Architecture for Humanity is a non-profit organization that provides humanitarian design services to communities in need world-wide. Since 1999, they have been challenging architects and designers to build more sustainable and socially responsible projects and have collected hundreds of proposals from design professionals around the world. Design Like You Give a Damn present the first decade of such responses to a range of global humanitarian crises. Among many fascinating examples is paraSITE, a project by Michael Rakowitz that provides ‘urban nomads’ with shelter and warmth by attaching plastic tents to building heating and ventilation exhaust ducts. (2006: Metropolis Books; ISBN 1933045256)

Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space: $39.95
Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises: $39.95

paraSITE by Michael Rakowitz

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

Rosti Basic Outdoor Dishes

✍ 1978: Koen de Winter 

As a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and President of the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers, Belgium born Koen De Winter has made a profound contribution to the establishment of industrial design as a rigorous profession in Canada. Most recently de Winter has been both designing and manufacturing a beautiful line of ceramic kitchenware and serving pieces under the brand Atelier Orange, subject of a previous Swipe post. Of the several items he designed for Danish housewares manufacturer Rosti, the Basic line of casual dinnerware in melamine, created in 1978, remains in production and is one of the manufacturer’s most popular products. While North Americans consider melamine dishes suitable only on the patio or for camping, in Benelux it is extremely common for families to eat both breakfast and lunch from plastic dishes, and Rosti sells hundreds of thousands of pieces of Basic each year. Having previously won the Design Canada Award, De Winter was, in 2005, honoured with Flanders Design’s Henry van de Velde Career Award, celebrated with a nice little photo gallery on Créativité Montréal.

Large or Deep Plate: $9.95
Breakfast Plate: $8.95
Egg Cup: $2.95
Cup & Saucer or Mug or Soup Cup: $ $7.95
(All are available in white and most in lime green.)

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

Girder and Panel Building Sets

✍ 1956: Austin Kelk & Peter Kelk

In 1956 Toronto toy manufacturer Peter-Austin Manufacturing produced a novel toy building system consisting of interlocking polystyrene girders and thin vacuformed panels. Marketed in Canada as the Trans Canada Highway Bridge Set and later, with the addition of architectural wall panels, as Pam ‘n Andy Structural Building Sets, the system was licensed by Kenner Products of Cincinnati in 1957 and released in the United States as Grider and Panel.

This wonderful Canadian design, the first architectural toy to emulate Twentieth-Century curtain wall construction techniques, remained in production with Kenner until 1980. However, given its Canadian origins, it is not surprising that the product continued to be manufactured in Canada long after that. In fact, as late as 1994, we carried the line at Swipe (at that time manufactured by Irwin Toys of Toronto) although it did disappear altogether shortly thereafter.

In 2005 engineers Carol and Peter Flack founded Bridge Street Toys near Boston for the sole purpose of reviving Girder and Panel and the more elaborate “Hydrodynamic” pump, tank and valve building system. The line has been gratifyingly well received by a new generation of parents and educators, winning Parent’s Choice, NAPPA, and Dr. Toy awards. We offer a selection of all systems, though as these are bulky items, shipping to Canada makes them unfortunately expensive. Also, for anyone nostalgic about a particular set they had as a child, there is a comprehensive collector’s site with pictures of virtually every historic model.

Girder and Panel Tower Set: $79.95
Girder and Panel Plaza Set: $129.95
Bridge and Turnpike Set: $79.95
Hydrodynamic Deluxe Set: $149.95

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

Muriel Cooper (1926-1994) is a tragically overlooked figure in the history of graphic and interactive design. Her designs for the MIT University Press, which include its trademark, number some five hundred books, nearly a hundred of which were recognized with professional distinction. Though a monograph of Cooper’s work has yet to be realized (get on it MIT!) designer David Reinfurt, in collaboration with the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, has prepared the wonderful, online-only This Stands for a Sketch for the Future PDF which only begins to suggest the extent of her tremendous influence.

Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago

✍ 1969: Hans M. Wingler

Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, winner of an AIGA Book Design Award in 1969 is arguably, Cooper’s best known work. Weighing in at fourteen pounds and 670 pages, Bauhaus is a staggering experiment in publication design with its innovative use of grids and recycled full colour plates. Edited and compiled by Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus stands alone as the definitive text of the activities of the German design institution. (1969: MIT Press; ISBN 026223033x)

$299.95

Learning from Las Vegas, Revised Edition

✍ 1977: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

Less known however, is Cooper’s 1972 design for Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas. In what Edward Tufte would describe as an “escape from flatland,” Cooper’s edition literally animates the maps, charts, and other graphic material featured in Learning from Las Vegas. This stands in stark contrast to the better-known paperback edition, which, for economic reasons, omitted nearly all of Cooper’s experimental layouts. The difference between the two editions is so great that an Ohio State professor felt it necessary to write an entire book about the two.

I Am A Monument

✍ 2008: Aron Vinegar

Aron Vinegar’s I Am A Monument explores the tension between Muriel Cooper’s 1972 design of Learning from Las Vegas and its subsequent revision in 1977 by Denise Scott Brown. The authors, particularly Scott Brown, were so incensed by Cooper’s design that plans to publish a second edition of the book were already in the works before the printing of the first edition. (1977: The MIT Press; ISBN 9780262720069; 2008: The MIT Press; ISBN 9780262220828)

While Cooper’s first edition now fetches thousands of dollars in the antiquarian book trade, Venturi and Scott Brown’s paperback can be had for under thirty dollars. If however, you’re looking to approximate the look and feel of the first edition, may we suggest a parallel reading alongside the very popular Las Vegas Studio, featured in an earlier Swipe post. Las Vegas Studio includes a selection of the photographic research collected for the publication of Learning from Las Vegas. These photographs were unceremoniously omitted from the second edition, but are here beautifully reproduced, with essays by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli. The Rem Koolhaas contributions don’t hurt, either. This title is the sort that is unlikely to be reprinted, so please stop by Built to have a look before it disappears! We guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Learning from Las Vegas, Revised Editon: $31.95
I Am A Monument: $39.95

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

NoiseFive

✍ 2008: Attik

Founded in Huddersfield, England in 1986 by Simon Needham and James Sommerville with a £2,000 grant from the Prince’s Trust, ATTIK has since grown into a multi-discplinary brand development company with 200 designers employed in five studios on three continents. ATTIK’s success can be traced to two key projects: the publication, beginning in 1995, of a series of self-initiated, experimental design books with the shared title Noise; and its revolutionary work for Toyota in launching the groundbreaking youth brand, Scion, in 2002.

It’s been 7 years since the release of Noise Four and, with the acquisition of ATTIK in 2007 by Dentsu Inc., the world’s largest advertising agency, we feared that Four would be the last. Thankfully we were wrong. Three years in the making, NoiseFive is the most elaborate production yet in a series noted for extravagance, with nine paper stocks, 30 spot colours and a staggering range of print finishes, from foil blocking and laser cutting to heat-sensitive ink and scratch-and-sniff. In addition to experimental designs contributed by ATTIK’s UK, New York, San Francisco and Santa Monica offices, the book offers a detailed retrospective of the agency’s work and profiles of its principals. Limited to 1,000 copies in distribution, Swipe is the exclusive Canadian source for highly anticipated publication. (2009: Attik; ISBN 9780955883002)

$129.95

Shipping is available across Canada and to the United States (where, in all likelihood, the book will sell out prior to release). Along the same lines, Pentagram Marks, which sold out immediately worldwide, is currently trading at somewhere around US $1,000 a copy on Amazon and E-Bay. Swipe sold all 20 copies reserved for Canada and now has a couple of customers willing to resell their copies at US $750. If you are genuinely interested in acquiring Pentagram Marks at this price, please e-mail us.

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World

✍ 2008: David B. Berman

As ethics chair for the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, David Berman was responsible for the develpement of the RGD and GDC code of ethics, now used by Icograda as a template for national graphic design organizations worldwide. In Do Good Design Berman goes beyond conventional design ethics, taking to task a profession that, too often, is paid to create deceptive or exploitative images in support of a highly destructive form of consumerism based on invented needs. “Overconsumption,” he writes, “is fueled most powerfully by clever visual arguments to convince everyone (including larger, growing Developing World populations) to consume more and more. Our impact as designers and as consumers of design is huge. We should be held responsible”.

The great American industrial designer Raymond Loewy famously refused only one job in his career: that of creating a more lethal anti-personnel hand-grenade for the American military. Berman could rightly be accused of overestimating designers’ influence in the battle between global consumerism and more humane values. Yet, while designers didn’t start the war, there is no denying that they often do help make the “weapons of mass deception” more lethal. Designers are not defense lawyers, they are not obliged to defend their clients’ malevolent actions, indeed they are ethically bound to refuse to do so (and even defense lawyers are legally prohibited from knowingly lying). Designers must not excuse their involvement in the creation of damaging messages by hiding behind the design brief. Rather Berman demands that they be guided by the overwhelming contemporary imperative to do good. (2008: Peachpit Press; ISBN 9780321573209)

$26.99

Watch here for news of a possible upcoming Toronto panel-discussion featuring Mr. Beman. In the meantime, listen to the a pair of interviews with the author, the first is Author Talk with Peachpit Press publisher Nancy Aldrich-Ruenze, about the book itself:

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the second, about the democratization of design, is from CBC Radio’s All In A Day with Adrien Harewood:

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

With Doors Open Toronto 2009 just around the corner we here at Swipe and BUILT are more thankful than ever to be part of the extraordinary culture complex at 401 Richmond Street West. A prime destination during the festival, 401 is expecting several thousand visitors over the weekend of May 23rd and 24th. Accordingly, Swipe and Built will be open both days from 10 am to 6 pm.

In celebration of this celebration of our city’s cultural, social and architectural heritage, BUILT offers the following selection of recently published Torontoiana, beginning with a look at the history of local urban sprawl from one of the most sagacious figures in Toronto municipal affairs, ‘Mayor Blue Jeans’ himself, John Sewell.

The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl

✍ 2009: John Sewell

A meticulous and thoughtful account of how Toronto became ‘Greater’ Toronto, expanding on the author’s classic study The Shape of the City. When BUILT opened it’s doors for the first time last week a photo was needed for the 401 Richmond Street newsletter and it was (rightly) deemed unnewsletterworthy to simply shoot one of us behind the counter so, on the flimsy pretext of a book signing, former Mayor John Sewell was lured down to the shop where he graciously agreed to have his picture taken. After recounting a series of fascinating anecdotes, taken from the book, on the origin and purpose of Toronto’s expressway system, the economic and political history of infrastructure in the 905, and the unlikely connection between the QEW and Adolph Hilter, Mr Sewell was off on his bicycle and back to work (despite the fact that he has every right just to sit at home all day muttering “I told you so.” over and over). Hard to imagine that, back in the Seventies, riding a bike to Council meetings was an occasion for snide derision in the Toronto SUN and elsewhere. (2009: University of Toronto Press; ISBN 9780802095879)

$24.95

Toronto’s Visual Legacy: Official City Photography from 1856 to the Present

✍ 2009: Steve MacKinnon, Karen Teeple & Michelle Dale

This unexpectedly beautiful book, published in conjunction with the City of Toronto Archives to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the city’s incorporation, brings together a selection of official City of Toronto photographs chosen by City archivists from their collection of hundreds of thousands of images. Among our favourites, this 1913 scene at 21 Elizabeth Street with the perfect juxtaposition of poverty and power which, unfortunately, characterizes the area around City Hall to this day. (2009: Lorimer; ISBN 9781552774083)

$44.95

Art Deco Architecture in Toronto: A Guide to the City’s Buildings from the Roaring Twenties and the Depression

✍ 2009: Tim Morawetz

With a friendly and accessible writing sytle, Art Deco Architecture in Toronto combines the elegance and flair of a coffee-table book with the accurate, practical information and anecdotal background of a guidebook. This important new book will provide the lay-person, architectural historian or Art Deco aficionado with a meaning ful appreciation of this important architectural style as it manifested itself in Toronto.

Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies

✍ 2007: Micheal McClelland & Graeme Stewart

Concrete Toronto acts as a guide to the city’s extensive inventory of significant concrete buldings and re-examines the unique value of the material and design idiom. Included are the insights of many of the original concrete architects along with a wealth of new and archival photos and drawings. (2007: Coach House Books; ISBN 1552451933)

Endangered Species

✍ 2007: John Martins-Manteiga, ed.

In partnership with The School of Design at George Brown College, Dominion Modern catalogues twenty-six formative examples of Canadian Modernist architecture threatened with demolition and seeks to engender a wider debate about the value of this aspect of Canadian design heritage. (2007: Dominion Modern; ISBN 9780968193327)

GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto

✍ 2007: Alana Wilcox, ed. with Christina Palassio & Jonny Dovercourt

In this third volume in the influential uTOpia series, green-minded Torontonians are invited to imagine a more environmentally responsible and humane city. Included is a directory with profiles of green organizations in the GTA, as well as a how-to guide and a fun-facts section. (2007: Coach House Books; ISBN 9781552451946)

Historical Atlas of Toronto

✍ 2008: Derek Hayes

In this new addition to the acclaimed series, geographer Hayes charts Toronto’s history with more than 200 period maps, providing a unique visual record of the city’s development. (2008: Douglas & Mcintyre Ltd; ISBN 9781553652908)

Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s

✍ 2006: Sally Gibson

Recognized with a Heritage Toronto award in 2006, this lovely book combines 260 vintage images with extensive original research to document the rarely recorded places where Torontonians lived and worked at the turn of the last century. (2006: Cormorant Books; ISBN 189695195)

Mean City: From Architecture to Design: How Toronto Went Boom!

✍ 2007: John Martins-Manteiga

Mean City captures the spirit of an unparalleled boom period in Toronto architecture and industrial design when, from 1945 to 1975, young architects and designers attempted to defy convention in a most conventional city. The book also persuasively laments the indifference that has lead to the loss of so many great modernist buildings in Toronto. (2007: Key Porter Books; ISBN 1556239126)

TSA Guide Map: Toronto Architecture 1953-2003

✍ 2005: Toronto Society of Architects

This Guide Map is intended to encourage the public to explore modern architecture in the City of Toronto, cataloguing both well known buildings and those deserving of wider recognition. We are happy to report that he TSA is currently working on a new Guide Map on Open Spaces, which is scheduled to be completed later this year.

Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been

✍ 2008: Mark Osbaldeston

A tremendously engaging approach to the social history of architecture and urban planning, Unbuilt Toronto examines the aspirations of the city by looking at significant building projects that were never realized, from St. Alban’s Cathedral and Eaton’s magnificent College Street tower, to the Spadina Expressway and the Queen subway. The book inspired a very successful exhibition at the ROM last winter, which is currently being remounted at Urbanscape in the Junction. (2008: Dundurn Press; ISBN 1550028359)

Concrete Toronto: A Guide to Concrete Architecture from the 50s to the 70s: $29.95
Greentopia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto $24.95
Historical Atlas of Toronto: $49.95
Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s: $59.95
Mean City: From Architecture to Design: How Toronto Went Boom!: $26.95
TSA Guide Map: Toronto Architecture 1953-2003: $7.95
Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been: $26.95

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To purchase any of the products or titles mentioned here, please visit our downtown Toronto location, call us toll-free at 1-800-56-swipe or e-mail us at: info@swipe.com.

The rumours are true, Swipe has opened a second shop in a beautiful, high-profile suite on the ground floor of 401 Richmond Street West. BUILT, Books on Architecture is hoped, in the fullness of time, to fill the void left by the (really, really depressing) closure last year of the venerable Ballenford Books. For more than 30 years a succession of Susans served the community with a commitment and a level of expertise that we cannot hope to match, at least in the short term. In fact, so as not to make matters worse for our colleagues, Swipe avoided architecture as a subject area altogether for as long Ballenford was in business, with the result that we now feel embarrassingly ill-prepared and uninformed. So … um … help!

E-mail us and let us know what you need, want, or would just like to see at the new shop. Or drop by and see what’s here and what’s missing. We’re open Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and we’ve even got windows! Please help us to make this your community bookstore.

Graphis was launched, rather optimistically, in Zurich in 1944 at the height of the Allied advance on Germany. In the following decades, the journal and founding editor Walter Herdeg were among the foremost proponents for rationalism and quality in the graphic arts. Herdeg continued to run the magazine until 1986 when it was sold and moved to New York under the editorship of B. Martin Pedersen.

Under Herdeg, Graphis never charged an entry fee for submissions, so that Graphis annuals regularly featured high-quality work by young talent. This has been particularly true in the case of Photographis, with arresting personal work being displayed alongside the best international commercial projects. There is an unfortunate perception that these publications stand somewhere behind the cutting edge, however, taking the current issues as an example, this seems unwarranted. That said, the Gold and Platinum winners categories do make the whole endeavour sound a bit like a travel rewards program.

For fans of Graphis publications in Canada, availability has been a much larger concern as the publisher has, for some years, struggled with an inconsistent release schedule and poor Canadian distribution. By the end of last year Graphis was behind by up to two years on several (formerly annual) series. We at Swipe were worried that the whole program might simply disappear. Happily, these problems seem finally to have been resolved with improved Canadian logistics and an almost overwhelming raft of new releases.

Graphis Annuals 2009

✍ 2009: B. Martin Pedersen, editor

All series: $78.95