[.ca] Life Style (ISBN 0714845205)

From Amazon.com:
Each day, the average Western citizen sees, assimilates, and recognizes 16,000 logos. Chances are that Bruce Mau has been involved in the creation, evolution, and/or devolution of many of them. But calling Bruce Mau a graphic designer would be akin to calling Mae West a playwright--technically correct, but oh-so-limiting. This mammoth catalogue raisonné of Mau's graphic work (which only Phaidon Press has the resources, and the patience, to produce) is the much-anticipated follow-up to the 1995 sensation S, M, L, XL that Mau coauthored with renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Nearly as big, but much more colorful, Life Style offers a compendium of thoughts on the conflicts and conundrums that so perplex concerned aesthetes in Western civilization, including suburban sprawl, ecological threats, the implications of identity creation, and the role of the graphic arts in architecture and design. Trying to pin down this huge undertaking to only a few highlights would be a disservice to a man who counts such luminaries as Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, John Cage, Michael Snow, Meg Stuart, and Chris Marker as friends and colleagues. The center section alone, which recounts and reprints the celebrated spreads from his publishing venture Zone Books, would be worth the price: "The times were extraordinary--the middle 1980s, the height of American yuppie culture gorging itself on wealth. The Macintosh computer had only just been introduced and was making itself felt in the world of typography by virtue of its capacity to distort fonts. It would eventually transform the field of design, disseminating expertise and clustering capacities vertically. Faxes and FedEx were making possible a new level of international collaboration that would soon put a Toronto designer at the center of a transatlantic project. That project was Zone." The collaboration at Zone Books enabled some of the most provocative book projects ever seen, and they are reproduced faithfully in Life Style (although one might need a magnifying glass to get the most out of them). Zone was the first and most satisfying of Mau's team projects, and the pleasure of its success is apparent in the book. But readers will find much more of interest documented here, including his revolutionary stint at I.D. Magazine; his brilliant realization of a book version of the underground, classic sci-fi thriller "La Jetée"; and his ideas for information interchange at several major architectural projects, including right here in Seattle, working with his friend Koolhaas in building the controversial new Seattle Public Library. All things considered, this major book will leave some readers furious at Bruce Mau's audacity and others aghast at his cross-disciplinary influences. I doubt that there's anyone working in design today who has had quite his impact. This book is a beautifully realized celebration of that impact, and very much worth the wait. By the way, Phaidon has produced this book with eight different and gorgeous fabric covers. Yours might differ from our rather inadequate representation on the site. As with S, M, L, XL, I predict that some day all of them will be (ahem) "coollectors'" items. --Charles Decker

Overrated, overrated, overrated.:
This is a good example of a well marketed product. It seem like every "modern" person got to have his copy of this book, called sometimes "the bible of style". I think is more a "pastiche" of interesting things, sometimes good things, but pointless and looong. And my version (uk) is so bad printed it makes me wonder for what have I paid 40 pounds on it. Just like the other "S,M,L,XL" with the also overrated work of the overrated "modern" architect Rem Koolhaas, this is just a beautiful object. But hey, I wanted a book!

oma envy, or bruce erases rem's name (again):
Here's the thing: Bruce Mau is a very good designer. His office turns out a lot of very refined objects, this monograph included. That said, this book is probably twice as big as it ought to be. It seems to me as though BMD wants to be more like OMA; "S,M,L,XL" was one of the best architectural books ever, and its heft reinforced the work being shown within it. "Life Style" is just big for the sake of being big. Well, as well as being self-indulgent. Because graphic designers are not asked to be deep thinkers, and most of their attempts at same do not fare very well. Bruce Mau really wants to be considered as an equal to the deep thinkers, and he just isn't. He's just a (very) good designer. Buy it anyway. It's got too much good work inside to ignore, but keep some salt handy. (p.s. indigo.ca was allowing people to choose their cover; they may still be doing that)

Thoughtful and imaginative:
Working as a management consultant I'm often turned off by the staleness of much of the current management literature. The design community is a much more sensitive antenna as to what is happening in the world today. Bruce Mau's Life Style is an imaginative survey of how the world is being transformed under the inexorable impetus of global capitalism. It is not a dispassionate account: basically Mau is trying to show us how he is dealing with a very fundamental existential dilemma. Because, as a successful designer, Mau is part of the system - developing and spreading the lingua franca of a global economy. At the same time he is rebelling against the pervasive homogenisation of our image culture: "We should not forget that the com after the dot is short for commercial. Must we define every gesture and possibility within this envelope? Is it not our role to imagine new futures more rich and complex and wild in their style than any single framework can accomodate?" Yhe book is a captivating mix of artwork and short insightful essays. Sanford Kwinter's introductory three-page essay alone is worth the price of the book. I gather this book will be very influential in the years to come.

Overproduced:
The Bruce Mau Life Style clearly intends to brand the man behind the firm, thought the work is a corporate product. The Romantic artis-genius may be dead, but the irony of the book is its insistence on Bruce Mau as just that. The inspirational tome (or semi-manifesto) is a beautiful object on par with the Tolleson book (Soak Wash Rinse Spin) and leagues beyond Cahan's I Am Almost Always Hungry. In all, this is an overhyped, well-made product, worth seeing/having as an object of production.

Ideas and images:
Whenever you may have thought of the world as image, as customer economy, as something that you probably may have to digest visually, this is the book which will give you an idea of the weight of the image. We're exposed and there's no shelter. If we want to survive sanely, we better learn to differentiate between the sublime and the ridiculous. What BMD does, is serious. They know what they're doing and, most probably, they are among the very best in visual/conceptual design in the world. This book is a huge pleasure to go through, just peeping at the pages. But then, once you start reading, it becomes clear that this is not Disney or any sort of escapism - rather, it's anti-consumer, in the sense that the text URGES you to reconsider your comfortable stance of the by-looker and go out and get real about the stuff that goes into your head by way of your eyes. We have to become active in creating a more responsible graphic/architectural/sensual surrounding; otherwise we'll all be homoequals soon. Thank you, Bruce - and team, of course, for an insightful tome of words and pictures and simply great design which I'll never forget.