Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
4 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0 R E S O U R C E S Best New Design Books B Y N I K K I R U D L O F F, A S S O C I A T E E D I T O R THE STORY OF BUILDINGS: FROM THE PYRAMIDS TO THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND BEYOND BY PATRICK DILLION This book explores why people started creating buildings and how people made them larger, stronger and more comfortable over time. The Story of Buildings also questions and explores why people decorated buildings in certain ways. Overall, this book showcases a variety of diff erent buildings; for example, this book explores places like Egypt and Greece in ancient times, and India in the 17th century. Each building presented in the book was drawn by Stephen Biesty; and according to Horn Book Review, they are very detailed and done in colored pencil. Biesty's sketches take readers inside of these historic buildings. The Story of Buildings would appeal to history and architect lovers because they would learn what motivated diff erent people groups to build the world's most famous structures, and they would see the similarities that certain buildings shared. BLACK LIVES 1900: W.E.B. DU BOIS AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION BY JACQUELINE FRANCIS (Introduction), STEPHEN G. HALL (Introduction), DAVID ADJAVE (Forward), HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. (Contributor) At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the pioneering sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois presented an exhibit representing the progress of African Americans since the abolition of slavery. In striking graphic visualizations and photographs (taken by mostly anonymous photographers), he showed the changing status of a newly emancipated people across America and specifi cally in Georgia, the state with the largest Black population. This beautifully designed book reproduces the photographs alongside the revolutionary graphic works for the fi rst time, and includes a marvelous essay by two celebrated art historians, Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall. Du Bois' hand-drawn charts, maps and graphs represented the achievements and economic conditions of African Americans in radically inventive forms, long before such data visualization was commonly used in social research. Both the photographers and subjects are mostly anonymous. They show people engaged in various occupations or posing formally for group and studio portraits. Elegant and dignifi ed, they refute the degrading stereotypes of Black people then prevalent in White America. Du Bois' exhibit at the Paris Exposition continues to resonate as a powerful affi rmation of the equal rights of Black Americans to lives of freedom and fulfi llment. Black Lives 1900 captures this singular work. HULU