Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1438629
J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2 | P E R S P E C T I V E 4 7 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 AT E E D I T O R THE ARCHITECTURE OF HEALTH: HOSPITAL DESIGN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF DIGNITY BY MICHAEL P. MURPHY JR. WITH JEFFREY MANSFIELD AND MASS DESIGN GROUP This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their time and found innovative ways to solve for specific medical dilemmas. Designers and professionals such as Filarete, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Albert Schweitzer, Gordon Friesen, E. Todd Wheeler and Eberhard Zeidler are studied here, while the medical spaces of more widely known architects such as Isambard Brunel, Aalvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph also help inform this history. All these characters were polymaths and provocateurs, but none quite summarizes this history more succinctly than Florence Nightingale, who, in laying out her guidelines for ward design in 1859, shows how the design of a medical facility can influence an entire political and social order. MEXICO: THE LAND OF CHARM BY MERCURIO LOPEZ CASILLAS, JAMES OLES This book gathers more than 500 pieces of printed matter: material that circulated between the 1910s and the 1960s, with print runs of anywhere from a thousand to tens of thousands of copies. These pieces are created by well-known artists and designers—flooded streets, newspaper stands, bookshops and homes, with the common aim of disseminating an idealized image of what is considered typically Mexican. Drawn from private collections and the holdings of museums, with no claim to completeness, the material inMexico: The Land of Charmranges in size from stamps to posters, and includes material such as books, illustrated magazines, photography magazines, songbooks and musical scores, almanacs and calendars, tourist guides and maps. The result is impressive, in terms of both individual examples and the collection as a whole: these images are now a part of Mexican history.