Book reviews

Sacha Kagan is a sociologist of art and culture whose research examines sustainability, systems thinking and complex social change. Art and Sustainability addresses a difficult question: how can societies understand environmental problems yet continue to reproduce the habits that sustain them? Kagan places artistic practice within that cultural problem. The arts help shape what people notice, desire and consider possible, and their contribution deserves critical examination.

The book begins by examining the participation of art in a culture of unsustainability. This gives its later discussion of ecological art a demanding starting point. An environmental theme or sympathetic intention cannot settle the question of what a work does. Kagan asks how practices of knowing, perceiving and organising social life might themselves need to change.

His engagement with Gregory Bateson and Edgar Morin develops an account of aesthetic sensibility that can attend to interdependence without overlooking conflict and uncertainty. Drawing also on John Dewey, he treats aesthetic experience as an interaction between people and their environments. This broadens the significance of form: a work can reorganise attention, helping an audience encounter relationships that habitual ways of seeing have obscured.

The discussion moves between systems thinking, ecological art and the social conventions through which cultural activity operates. That range matters because it connects the encounter with a work to the conditions in which art is made and recognised. Artistic agency becomes a question of how an intervention engages with existing expectations and relationships, rather than a quality that follows from the artist’s intentions alone.

The breadth is also the book’s difficulty. Its movement between philosophy, sociology and art history rewards sustained reading and makes it particularly useful for seminars and research-led projects. First published in 2011, it supplies a conceptual foundation for current debates rather than a survey of today’s material technologies. Its lasting value is to make claims of transformation more demanding: what habits of perception does a creative project disturb, which relationships does it make perceptible, and what does it leave intact?

Find out more about Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity →

Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City asks a direct but often neglected question: what would it mean to place justice at the centre of urban design? Edited by Kian Goh, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Vinit Mukhija, the collection brings together urban planners, architects, landscape architects, sociologists and anthropologists to examine how decisions about space distribute access, safety, visibility and opportunity.

The contributors address public space, mobility, housing, informality, community development and climate change. Across these subjects, the book challenges the idea that urban design is primarily a matter of physical form. Streets, parks, housing and infrastructure are also shaped by power: by who participates in decisions, whose needs are recognised and who is able to remain in a neighbourhood after it improves.

For students, this creates a valuable framework for assessing projects beyond their visual qualities. A well-designed place can still exclude people through cost, surveillance, displacement or limited access. The book therefore treats community participation and organising not as optional consultation, but as essential parts of creating more equitable urban environments.

At BE OPEN Academy, Just Urban Design works particularly well as a deeper review because it connects creative practice with public responsibility. It does not offer one universal model for the fair city. Instead, it asks designers to recognise conflict, listen to those most affected by change and consider how the built environment can support a genuinely public city. The open-access edition also makes this important discussion available to students and educators worldwide.

Find out more about Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City →

Abundance Not Capital: The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo asks what architecture might become if extraction, endless growth and the intensive use of resources were no longer treated as unavoidable conditions of building.

Edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien, the book develops the idea of non-extractivist and non-exploitative architecture through the work of architect Anupama Kundoo. Her practice combines technological experimentation with traditional craft, local materials, regional building skills and close attention to climate and environment. Rather than presenting sustainability as an additional layer applied to a finished project, the book shows how ecological and social responsibility can shape the design process from the beginning.

For students of architecture and design, this expands the usual conversation about sustainable materials. It asks readers to consider labour, local knowledge, cultural continuity and resource use as interconnected design questions. The editors use the concept of abundance to propose a different way of thinking about value and possibility in architecture, looking beyond the assumption that better building must depend on ever greater material and financial input.

At BE OPEN Academy, Abundance Not Capital works particularly well as a deeper review because it connects environmental responsibility with questions of power, economics and practice. It makes a strong case that sustainable architecture is not only about reducing damage. It can also involve designing systems of making that preserve knowledge, respect people and produce buildings that are materially expressive without depending on ever greater extraction.

Find out more about Abundance Not Capital: The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien →

In Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby ask what design can do when familiar ideas of progress, prediction and problem-solving no longer feel sufficient.

The book moves between design, science, philosophy and literature to explore worlds and objects that are deliberately impossible, uncertain or incomplete. Through essays, images, imagined archives, glossaries and speculative artefacts, Dunne and Raby treat design not only as a way to produce solutions, but as a method for questioning the boundaries of reality and expanding what people are able to imagine.

For emerging designers, architects and artists, this is a challenging but valuable proposition. Creative education often asks students to respond to a brief, identify a problem and develop a plausible outcome. Not Here, Not Now creates space for a different kind of practice: one that uses fiction, ambiguity and impossible propositions to expose assumptions, resist predictable futures and discover questions that conventional methods may overlook.

At BE OPEN Academy, the book works particularly well as a deeper review because it connects speculative design with intellectual and cultural inquiry. It presents imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a critical tool for recognising that the present is only one possible arrangement of the world — and that design can help us perceive alternatives before they become practical or even fully thinkable.

Find out more about Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby →

The Primacy of Drawing by Deanna Petherbridge is a comprehensive and deeply researched study of drawing as a way of thinking, observing and making. The 2026 revised edition reconsiders drawing’s role in contemporary art at a moment when digital tools, performance, installation and new technologies have expanded what artistic practice can be.

The book argues that drawing is not only a preparatory stage before “finished” work. It can be a record of touch, movement, memory, construction and decision-making. Through historical and contemporary examples, Petherbridge shows how lines, diagrams, sketches and material traces help artists understand bodies, spaces, emotions, power and the world around them.

For emerging artists, sculptors, architects and designers, this is an important book because drawing remains one of the most direct ways to test ideas. It can clarify a structure, reveal a rhythm, explore scale or capture something too fragile to explain in words. The book encourages young creatives to treat drawing not as a narrow technical skill, but as a flexible language for research and imagination.

At BE OPEN Academy, The Primacy of Drawing would work well as a deeper review rather than a quick recommendation. It invites students to slow down, look carefully and recognise drawing as a practice that connects hand, eye, thought and material.

Find out more about The Primacy of Drawing by Deanna Petherbridge →

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza-Chock challenges one of the most common assumptions in design: that good design can be universal if it is simply well intentioned.

The book argues that design processes often reproduce existing inequalities when they fail to include the people most affected by the systems, tools and environments being created. Instead of treating users as passive recipients, Costanza-Chock focuses on community-led practices and asks how design can support collective liberation, accessibility, ecological sustainability and social transformation.

For emerging designers, this is a particularly relevant book. It moves beyond the language of “design for good” and asks deeper questions: Who is involved in defining the problem? Who has decision-making power? Whose knowledge is treated as expertise? And who benefits from the final outcome?

Design Justice is valuable for students working across design, technology, architecture, social innovation and public-interest projects. It encourages young creatives to see design not only as a method for making things, but as a way of redistributing power, listening more carefully and building more responsible futures.

Find out more about Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock →

The historical and cultural richness of Palestine is reflected visually in its costume and embroidery. Distinguished by boldness of color, richness of pattern, and diversity of style, and combined with great needlework skill, these textiles have long played an important role in Palestinian culture and identity and manifested themselves in every aspect of Palestinian life.

Based on over twenty-five years of extensive field research, this lavishly illustrated book presents the most exhaustive and up-to-date study of the origins of Palestinian embroidery and costume—from antiquity through medieval Arab textile arts to the present.

With sumptuous photography and well-informed text, it documents region by region the evolution of costume and the textile arts in Palestine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and displays this unique art in all its splendor.

Find out more about Traditional Palestinian Costume: Origins and Evolution by Hanan Karaman Munayyer →

A comprehensive volume covering five seminal genres that shaped art, from the late 19th century and well into the 20th: Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Each approach was distinct in aesthetic and philosophy, but all had immediate impact and enduring influence. Many great names were indelibly associated with one, some explored several during their careers.

Impressionism, led by Monet and Renoir, focused on light and color, capturing fleeting moments and challenging academic art’s rigidity. Expressionism was driven by artists like Edvard Munch and Wassily Kandinsky to convey raw emotion, distorting reality to reflect the angst of human experience. Surrealists, like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, explored the subconscious, dreams, and the irrational, blending reality with fantasy across art, literature, and film. With Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko leading the charge, Abstract Expressionism emphasized spontaneity and emotion through bold, gestural brushstrokes, and established New York as the post-war art world’s new Mecca. Finally, artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol gained fame and dominated the zeitgeist by synthesizing advertising, pop culture, and high art into Pop Art.

Find out more about Art for All. Art History →

Ai Weiwei is famous for much more than his art. As a champion for the right to free expression and against arbitrary state power, his actions reach far beyond the art world. His work is infused with a deep social and political commitment: when he brings 1,001 Chinese citizens from all classes and regions to Documenta 12, when he strews over 100 million hand-made porcelain sunflower seeds across the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, when he creates a frieze of school bags commemorating the many children who fell victim to the tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake, or when he visits the refugee camps of the world to engage with often-ignored individual fates in his film Human Flow. In 2011, Ai was detained for 81 days by the Chinese police for his relentless questioning of authorities, and his passport was taken away. Despite international protests he received it back only in 2015. Finally traveling outside of China again, setting up base in Berlin and lately in Portugal, he has now become a truly global artist, whose work is always informed by his activism and vice versa.

Focusing on the recent decade of art and activism by one of the most outspoken artists of our time, this edition provides TASCHEN’s previous Ai Weiwei monograph with a comprehensive update. Now exploring 40 years of work, the book ranges from the artist’s exile in ’80s New York, through sculptures based in Chinese traditions and craftsmanship after his return to China, to his latest works conceived in Europe: toy-brick mosaics, films, and installations championing human rights. This book is itself a historical document: initially produced as the first in-depth monograph in close collaboration with the artist during a time when he still couldn’t travel abroad, now the same team has reconvened to continue the story. Countless images from Ai’s archives show the studio day-to-day, the artwork production, the political actions. They are accompanied by artist’s statements made especially for this book, and by three far-ranging essays: independent curator Roger M. Buergel and art historian Alfred Weidinger, who both worked with the artist on major exhibitions, discuss the work and its development in thematic detail, while long-time friend, the entrepreneur and collector Uli Sigg, delivers a personal portrait of the artist from two points in time.

Find out more about Ai Weiwei. Updated Edition →

by Tami Christiansen (Author), Richard Powers (Photographer), Eugenio López Alonso (Foreword)

A captivating exploration of Mexican architecture, from iconic homes by legendary masters to new groundbreaking work shaping the future of design.

Mexico has long been a wellspring of inspiration for designers, with its rich architectural heritage shaping both national and international discourse. Visionary architects featured in this book such as Agustín Hernández Navarro, Luis Barragán, Ricardo Legorreta, and Javier Senosiain have left an indelible mark on modern architecture, as can be seen in the groundbreaking recent works that are also showcased in these pages.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Christiansen explores Mexico’s architectural diversity, presenting homes that embody a profound sense of place through exceptional design. From organic dwellings that merge seamlessly with rural landscapes to bold urban structures that challenge conventions of form and space, to sculptural seaside sanctuaries that rise like temples from the sand, each project offers a unique perspective on the country’s evolving design language.

Profiling both established masters and emerging talents, this book highlights the fearless innovation and artistry that define Mexican architecture. These visionaries have pushed the boundaries of convention, transforming spaces into works of art that transcend mere functionality. Through their bold experimentation and creative mastery, they shape the future of design while paying homage to Mexico’s rich traditions, skilled artisans, and cultural heritage. An essential resource for design aficionados, this volume is an inspiring testament to Mexico’s enduring influence on the world of architecture.

Find out more about Mexico Modern: Architecture and Interiors →