NOTE: You know what’s weird? I was searching the database for this book to write the caption for this book, whose title is ‘Skin + Bones’*, and so I just typed ‘skin’… and like, 255 of the current 280 books came back, for ‘skin’. Most of them didn’t look like ‘skin’ was the topic, so there are only a few choices here to consider: One, the some of book data I imported from the Library of Congress is actually riddled with heinous typos — government archivists kept typing ‘skin’ when they meant to say ‘typography’ and ‘aesthetics’. Two, I am secretly a porn collector with a database full of so-called ‘skin mags’, and I tell myself I’m into design because I’m in total denial from being so grotesquely perverted, and the search results are my first conscious awareness of it right now (eww). Three, the word ‘skin’ is one of those statistical quirks of linguistics, where like all the graphic designers use the word ‘skin’ with some sort of abnormal frequency, and they are predisposed to keep saying it because no one knows that it’s actually a statistical quirk, so no one thinks anyone else sounds gross or strange or whatever. There was totally a sciencey TV show about something like that once so maybe. Yeah so yeah. In any case, this book looks very nice on a coffee table, BUT! It’s more on-point than one might think. Sure, there is a bunch of fluffy nonsense about how Gehry and DS+R all had their minds completely blown by the fact that an Issey Miyake space-gown thing kind of looks like a building that they both once might have doodled. And yes, the books’ impressive size and nifty perforated cover are laudably adept at distracting you from the sort of flaccid photography they seem to have ended up with. But yeah it actually comes together very pointedly if you embrace these facts, because let’s say it — architecture is basically fashion. When the architectural profession figures this out, we’ll all win. The more the self-consciously hypercritical baby-boomer academics who teach architecture argue pedantically about their professions’ unique perceptive power as the synergy of art, engineering, design, and science, the more time they eventually log helping fussy yuppie couples pick out tile. And yeah guys like Reiser and Diller are totally aging boomers, just like your down-the-street sweater-vest-wearing asshole neighbor who maybe steals your newspapers even though he drives a 550SL, think about it. Koolhaas too (although he is friends with non-boomers like Michael Rock, who is totally awesome). But yeah the book — I think the book makes this point kind of nicely in a roundabout way. * speaking of academics, don’t you love how their titles are always “Something Something: the Something Something of the Something Something.”? Where like the first two Somethings are always kind of a pun thing that’s not quite as wry as it wants to be? So adorable. Anyway this book’s title is more or less that so there you go.

TAGS: architecture, bones, coffetablebook, fashion, hardcover, nicelooking, perforatedcover, and skin.

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... little shoutouts of that sort always warm my heart — but no yeah I am happy to see you here regardless, tho, srsly. Also, if you like Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, you can also explicitly say so via Facebook: