Designblog

In my third research I wanted to be more concentrated on the tag “paradox” because the last two researches where more based on the focus on the object chair and the humoristic association of the presentation of a chair in those books. Anyways this research now was more extended which made it also harder to find only one book fitting to the tag “paradox” but I stumbled over one book which is besides its outer appearance, the cover work, also a really interesting book about photography. “Mapping sitting” caught my eye first of all because of the title, the word mapping sitting doesn’t make not really much sense to me, not even with the subtitle “on Portraiture and Photography”, which all start to make sense when you see the front cover, together with the back  and the back cover of the book. Under the written words you can see old photography’s probably of a square in a big city where, when you take a closer look, the ghost shapes of humans are recognizable, those are overlapped over each over and seem to first build a big and hard to identify mass, on the second and closer look the mass is building a crowd. On the Third look you are also recognizing that the square is also a overlapped collage of photos of different squares which seems to be build one big picture of a square. The impression of just these photo collages on the cover, for me, means documentation, a documentation of another time (all the pictures are in black and white and obviously from the early last century), a collection of photos which have been put together in a book, one page laying over another. Therefore the word mapping start to make more sense; the photos are documented and collected as the information’s of geographical facts on a map, which is my first association of a map.  Still the word sitting stays mysterious for me, at least as the title on the cover without knowing the content, because you see actually mostly portrait photos of people sitting, inside the book, but on the cover design I cannot really find a connection to the word sitting. All in all I would probably say that this is the reason why I have chosen the book, the paradox or the not understanding of the title, which makes the book to something exciting.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 761-bas-1

It is funny and scary in the same time to which result I was leaded this time of researching by using the tags chair, history and portrait. The book is dark on the back and the front and shows an image of a chair, the unclear shape of a phantom which covering the shine of its own ghost, heavy and stiff but the best thing is the book is German. Another German book about the history of chairs and again the title of the book is making me to laugh again. “z.B. Stühle: Ein Streifzug durch die Kulturgeschichte des Sitzens” is for me as well absurd and funny as my first choice in the library “A Chair makes history”. This time the book introduces itself as a guide through the cultural history of SITTING, which I think is the most funniest and beautiful way to find a title to describe the history of a design object, which function is mostly to relax the human bag and ass.
As well as last time the image shows no longer a simple picture of a chair, it is almost again a portrait of a chair which you can find on the front cover of the book, but this time tis image becomes for me to something strange. While the last book I took had a really bright and sort of funny, colorful, cover, which was perfectly hanging together with the title, the book “z.B. Stühle” has a really dark and heavy appearance. Without the title and the text it could be misunderstood as a book about satanic rituals with chairs or dark spiritual experiences with chairs but not as a leader through the history of sitting. The title in relation to the book cover design is for me a big paradox. The title “z.B. stühle” which means “for example chairs” sounds really easy, like “let’s talk about something, for example chairs or trees” which is really well supported by the text below. It sounds cool and relaxed, while the book cover is dark and heavy and doesn’t represents coolness at all to me, rather an image of violent and brutal history, which might be also presented in the book, for example chairs as torturing instruments. All in all the most interesting point is that the tags which I used for the research are leading back to a book which is almost as well absurd in its appearance as the first book I’d choose about the history of chairs. It seems to be not easy to write or create a good or well-chosen title for a book about chairs without letting it sounding absurd.

Rietveld Library cat.nr:774.9