Capitol Records – from 1942 to today
From the Beatles to Beck, Sinatra to Sam Smith, a parade of era-defining artists have passed through the doors of the Capitol Records Tower, one of Hollywood’s most distinctive landmarks and home to one of the world’s most defining labels for the past 75+ years.
To commemorate this extraordinary history of recorded music, TASCHEN presents this official account of Capitol Records, from its founding year of 1942 to today. With a foreword by Beck, essays by cultural historians and music and architecture critics, as well as hundreds of images from Capitol’s extensive archives, we follow the label’s evolution and the making of some of the greatest music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through pop, rock, country, classical, soul, and jazz, the photographic and musical history includes the label’s most successful, cool, hip, and creative stars, as well as the one-hit wonders who had their all-too-brief moments in the spotlight.
Along the way, we encounter the likes of Miles Davis, Nat King Cole, the Kingston Trio, and Frank Sinatra in Capitol’s first 20 years; the Beach Boys, the Band, and the Beatles in the 1960s; global rock magnets Pink Floyd, Wings, Steve Miller Band, Bob Seger, and Linda Ronstadt in the 1970s; Beastie Boys, Duran Duran, Radiohead, and Bonnie Raitt in the 1980s and 1990s; and such contemporary stars as Coldplay, Katy Perry, and Sam Smith. An unmissable milestone for music lovers, Capitol Records is a live and kicking celebration of the mighty giant of the industry that created the soundtrack to generations past, present, and future.
The inventor of album art
“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.” —Alex Steinweiss
Alex Steinweiss (1917–2011) invented the album cover as we know it. In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 percent.
Over the next three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest; as well as logos, labels, advertising material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. His daring designs, gathered here in all their bright combinations of bold typography with modern, elegant illustration, revolutionized the way music was sold.
The book includes Steinweiss’s personal recollections and ephemera from an epic career, as well as insightful essays by three-time Grammy Award–winning art director/designer Kevin Reagan and graphic design historian Steven Heller.
One of the greatest pioneers in the history of architecture
Acclaimed as the “father of skyscrapers,” the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was an architect of aspiration. He believed in giving cultivated American life its fitting architectural equivalent and applied his idealism to structures across the continent, from suburban homes to churches, offices, skyscrapers, and the celebrated Guggenheim Museum.
Wright’s work is distinguished by its harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture, and which found its paradigm at Fallingwater, a house in rural Pennsylvania, cited by the American Institute of Architects as “the best all-time work of American architecture.” Wright also made a particular mark with his use of industrial materials, and by the simple L or T plan of his Prairie House which became a model for rural architecture across America. Wright was also often involved in many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass, paying particular attention to the balance between individual needs and community activity.
Exploring Wright’s aspirations to augment American society through architecture, this book offers a concise introduction to his at once technological and Romantic response to the practical challenges of middle-class Americans.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, hero of fluid forms and ecology
Vivid color, organic forms, and a loathing of straight lines were just a few stalwart characteristics in the unique practice of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000). A non-conformist hero, the artist, architect, and activist left a blazing trail of imagination and ideas in buildings, paintings, manifestos, initiatives, and more.
Hundertwasser’s best-known work is considered by many to be the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, a structural synthesis of the vitality and uniqueness that determined the artist’s entire oeuvre. For Hundertwasser, rational, sterile, monotonous buildings caused human misery. He called for a boycott of the modernist paradigm championed by the likes of Adolf Loos, and campaigned instead for an architecture of creative freedom and ecological commitment. A fierce opponent of straight lines, which he called “godless and immoral,” Hundertwasser was fascinated by the spiral, drawing also on the Secessionist forms of Klimt and Schiele.
This richly illustrated book traces Hundertwasser’s style and vision not only for each building, but for society at large. From naked addresses at the end of the 1960s to worldwide architecture projects and alternative blueprints for society, author Pierre Restany explores Hundertwasser’s most high-profile and innovative ideas in a thrilling introduction to a pioneering 20th-century mind.
The roaring twenties in Berlin
It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.
This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.
Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch's The Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on Typewriter; Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens's project of theAlexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era's escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.
Based on the futuristic novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange is a masterwork of cinematic satire. When a flamboyant, Beethoven-obsessed, murderous gang leader agrees to undergo experimental violence-aversion therapy in exchange for early release from prison, he winds up "cured" of his own free will. The film's highly stylized sets, choreographed brutality, and Moog synthesizer score-conceived to heighten the effect of each scene-were so ahead of their time that, to many, they obscured the overall message. In fact, so much controversy over the violent scenes ensued that the film's notoriety became, itself, the stuff of legend. From a contemporary perspective, what stands out above all is Kubrick's extraordinary gift for entertaining us while making us think. To quote Burgess: "Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?" The ethical queries so central to this visionary film are every bit as relevant today, and every bit as difficult to answer. This collection is part of the Making of a Masterpiece series, offering a behind-the-scene glimpse into cinematic milestones.This set includes: film stills, behind-the-scenes photographs, screenplay drafts, and other exclusive material from Stanley Kubrick's archives background about the making of the film, interviews with Kubrick, and an illustrated biography and filmography a fold-out film poster a DVD of the remastered film
Big city, big bands: New York’s jazz scene of the 1920s
It’s the Roaring Twenties, and New York is aflame with jazz fever. Crowds flock to the nightclubs and dance halls in Harlem to see the likes of Louis Armstrong with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra playing at the Kentucky Club, or Duke Ellington at the Roseland Ballroom or the world-famous Cotton Club.
Designed, illustrated, and edited by Robert Nippoldt, this award-winning book pays homage to this exceptional era, via an entertaining blend of illustrations, facts, and amusing anecdotes presenting 24 leading lights of New York’s jazz scene in the 1920s. The texts, contributed by Hans-Jürgen Schaal, give a vivid account of the club scene and the “band battles,” as well as the legendary recording sessions. A splendid read, a groovy soundtrack—and not strictly for jazz fans only!
International Book Award, 2014, Los Angeles
International Design Award, 2014, Los Angeles
Joseph Binder Award, 2014, Vienna
D&AD Award, 2014, London
Good Design Award, 2014, Chicago
A’ Design Award, 2014, Como (Italy)
Best American Infographic, 2014, New York
An encyclopedia of modern architecture
With almost 300 entries, this architectural A to Z offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. Covering modern architecture from the 19th into the 21st century, pioneering architects are each featured with a portrait and a concise biography, as well as a description of his or her important work.
Like a bespoke global architecture tour, this book will allow you to travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Antoni Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and leisure center on a former factory site in São Paulo. You’ll take in Gio Ponti’s colored geometries, Zaha Hadid’s free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.
The book’s A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. With illustrations including some of the best architectural photography of the modern era, this is a comprehensive resource for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.
The King of Rock ’n’ Roll is born
The making of Elvis, behind the scenes
“Elvis who?” was photographer Alfred Wertheimer’s response when, in early 1956, an RCA Victor publicist asked him to photograph an up-and-coming crooner from Memphis. Little did Wertheimer know that this would be the job of his life: just 21 years old, Elvis Presley was—as we now know—about to become a legend.
Trailing Presley like a shadow, Wertheimer took nearly 3,000 photographs of Presley that year, creating a penetrating portrait of a man poised on the brink of superstardom. Extraordinary in its intimacy and unparalleled in its scope, Wertheimer's Elvis project immortalized a young man in the very process of making history.
Elvis and the Birth of Rock and Roll collects Wertheimer’s most remarkable Elvis shots from that magical year, along with a selection of his historic 1958 pictures of the star being shipped off to an army base in Germany. Each chapter is illustrated with a poster by Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest letterpress print shops in America, which created many early Elvis posters in the 1950s.
Paul Outerbridge’s provocative nudes and pioneering color
Whether in his sumptuous images for advertising or his soft-hued nudes, Paul Outerbridge (1896–1958) was an alchemist of desire. Color was integral to his aesthetic allure, embracing the complex tri-color-carbro process to create a seductive surface of texture and tone. His quest was for “artificial paradises”—a perfection of form, with a surreal edge.
This concise monograph introduces Outerbridge’s unique aesthetic and its commercial and artistic trajectory, from his professional peak as New York’s highest-paid commercial photographer through to his retreat to Hollywood in the 1940s after a scandal over his erotic photography. With key examples from his oeuvre, the book explores Outerbridge’s innovative style through Cubist still life images, magazine photographs, and his controversial nudes, as well as his interaction with other avant-garde photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Man Ray. Along the way, we recognize Outerbridge’s particular ability to transform everyday objects into a quasi-abstract composition and his pioneering role in championing the expressionistic, as much as commercial, potential of color photographs.
Wolfgang Tillmans compiles 30 years of his work
to draw a picture of where we are today
Like hardly any other artist of his generation, Wolfgang Tillmans has shaped our perception of the world. From early portraits of his friends to still lifes, travel shots, nudes, landscape and sky photographs, to his abstract work, Tillmans has created a multitude of iconic works in his unmistakable visual language, opening up new paths and possibilities for both photography and contemporary art. In 2000 he was the first photographer and the first non-British person to receive the renowned Turner Prize.
His first volume for TASCHEN (1995) shows the young generation of the 1990s, of which Tillmans himself was a member, in clubs, at Gay Pride, at fashion events, and in everyday life. His dense, realistic photographs conjure up tangible utopias of community and society and are important documents of their time as well. With the follow-up volume Burg (1998), Tillmans enriches his subject matter with another array of beautiful, now iconic photographs. In truth study center (2005), his images condense into even more subtle compositions and now stand alongside completely abstract works. Finally, Neue Welt (2012) documents Wolfgang Tillmans’ travels around the globe: from London to Tierra del Fuego, India, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Central Africa, we follow his ever-inquisitive eye for the realities of our planet, for social situations with people and markets, technology and architecture, and last but not least, nature and astronomy. For this volume, the artist for the first time made use of the new possibilities of digital photography. This enabled a density of information and incisiveness hardly seen in photographs until then.
This 40th-anniversary publication from TASCHEN combines the best of the four books in one volume. Wolfgang Tillmans himself has compiled this edition, partly redesigned it, added some recent works, and written a new foreword.
Paging through this collection of images, which spans three decades, there are countless moments to delight in, moments that are held not only in our collective memory but in our individual ones too.
The most comprehensive retrospective of Renoir’s work
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841–1919) timelessly charming paintings still reflect our ideals of happiness, love, and beauty. Derived from our large-format volume, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work published to date, this compact edition examines the personal history and motivation behind the legend. Though he began by painting landscapes in the Impressionist style, Renoir found his true affinity in portraits, after which he abandoned the Impressionists altogether. Though often misunderstood, Renoir remains one of history’s most well-loved painters—undoubtedly because his works exude such warmth, tenderness, and good spirit.
In an incisive text tracing the artist’s career and stylistic evolution, Gilles Néret shows how Renoir reinvented the painted female form, with his everyday goddesses and their plump contours, rounded hips and breasts. Renoir’s later phase, marked by his return to the simple pleasure of the female nude in his Bathers series, was his most innovative and stylistically influential, and would inspire such masters as Matisse and Picasso.
With a complete chronology, bibliography, photos, sketches, and brilliant reproductions, this is the essential work of reference on this enduring master artist.
Shots from the world’s greatest collection of Polaroid images
The Polaroid Corporation’s photography collection is the greatest portfolio of Polaroid images in the world. Begun by Polaroid founder Edwin Land and photographer Ansel Adams, the collection now includes some 23,000 images by hundreds of photographers throughout the world, including pieces by the likes of David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Jeanloup Sieff.
The Polaroid Book dives into these archives, paying tribute to a medium that continues to defy the digital age. Like an oversized Polaroid film pack, this collection curates works by luminaries and unknowns alike, celebrating the boundless possibilities that develop inside the white borders of the original instant photograph.
Pastel Dreams
The powerful architecture of North Korea
Erased by bombing during the Korean War, North Korea’s trophy capital of Pyongyang was entirely rebuilt from scratch from 1953, in line with the vision of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung. Designed as an imposing stage set, it is a place of grand axial boulevards linking gargantuan monuments, lined with stately piles of distinctly Korean flavor, to be “national in form and socialist in content.”
Under the present leader, Kim Jong Un, construction has ramped up apace—“Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,” declares one of his official patriotic slogans. He is rapidly transforming Pyongyang into a playground, conjuring a flimsy fantasy of prosperity and using architecture as a powerful anesthetic, numbing the population from the stark reality of his authoritarian regime.
Guardian journalist and photographer Oliver Wainwright takes us on an eye-opening tour behind closed doors in the most secretive country in the world, revealing that past the grand stone façades lie lavish wonder-worlds of marble and mosaic, coffered ceilings, and crystal chandeliers, along with new interiors in dazzling color palettes. Discover the palatial reading rooms of the Grand People’s Study House, and peer inside the locker rooms of the recently renovated Rungrado May Day Stadium, ready to host a FIFA World Cup that will never come.
This collection features about 200 photographs with insightful captions, as well as an introductory essay where Wainwright charts the history and development of Pyongyang, explaining how the architecture and interiors embody the national “Juche” ideology and questioning what the future holds for the architectural ambitions of this enigmatic country.
Lyrical forms from Finland
Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, curving, compassionate buildings, wholly set apart from the slick, mechanistic, geometric designs that characterized much contemporary European practice.
Whether a church, a villa, a sauna, or a public library, Aalto’s organic structures tended to replace plaster and steel with brick and wood, often incorporating undulating, wave-like forms, which would also appear in his chair, glassware, and lamp designs. An adherent to detail, Aalto insisted upon the humanity of his work stating: “Modern architecture does not mean using immature new materials; the main thing is to work with materials towards a more human line.”
Many of Aalto’s public buildings such as Säynätsalo Town Hall, the lecture theatre at Otaniemi Technical University, the Helsinki National Pensions Institute and the Helsinki House of Culture may be seen as psychological as well as physical landmarks in the rebuilding of Finland after the ravages of war.
A Mountain Tour of the Alps
The Alps are Europe’s biggest and greatest mountain range. Formed millions of years ago, they became a popular destination for travelers in the late eighteenth century – first for adventurers and explorers, then for artists and writers, and finally for everyone who wanted to spend summer in the fresh air of this wonderful scenery or take part in winter sports. Angelika Taschen has followed in their footsteps and collected the finest hotels in the Alpine nations of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Italy.
They include the Kranzbach near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, built for a British aristocrat, Gasthof Hirschen in the Bregenzerwald, where art-loving visitors have been welcomed since 1755, and the Seehof near Salzburg with its emphasis on contemporary art and fine cuisine. The journey goes to Waldhaus Sils in Sils Maria, where many creative guests have found inspiration, to the Schatzalp in Davos, which Thomas Mann immortalized in literature in “The Magic Mountain”, and to picturesque bed & breakfasts with a personal touch such as Brücke49 in Vals and Maison Bergdorf in Interlaken.
High above Chamonix, mountaineers have stayed overnight for more than 140 years at Refuge du Montenvers with its view of the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in France. In the exclusive Megève, too, which Baroness Noémie de Rothschild put on the tourist map, travelers experience the Alps à la française in the chalet hotel L’Alpaga; and a bit of Italian dolce vita is provided by stunning addresses in the South Tyrol such as the Ottmangut in Merano, Villa Arnica in Lana with its nostalgic atmosphere, and Pension Briol near Barbiano, constructed in 1928 in the Bauhaus style and extended in 2021 with the addition of two extremely modern buildings.
The Egyptian explorations of Émile Prisse d’Avennes
A lifelong devotee of ancient Egyptian and Oriental culture, the French author, artist, and scholar Achille-Constant-Théodore-Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807–1879) is famed as one of the most influential Egyptologists, long before the discipline was even properly established.
Prisse first embarked on his explorations in 1836, documenting sites throughout the Nile Valley, often under his Egyptian pseudonym, Edris Effendi. Prisse’s first publication of notes, drawings, and squeezes (a kind of frottage) came in the form of Les Monuments égyptiens, a modest collection of 51 plates, but one met with considerable acclaim in popular and intellectual circles. Encouraged by his success, Prisse returned to Egypt in the late 1850s to expand his work into the collection L’Histoire de l’art égyptien—together with his first volume, these two tomes make up a truly complete survey of Egyptian art.
His albums cover architecture, drawing, sculpture, painting, and industrial or minor arts, with sections, plans, architectural details, and surface decoration all documented with utmost sensitivity and accuracy. Even when compared to the products of the great state-sponsored expeditions to Egypt of this period, Prisse’s compendium remains the largest, single-handed illustrated record of Egyptian art in existence.
Discover the complete collection of Prisse’s unsurpassed illustrations in a visual and archaeological feast of symmetry and complexity. Once exclusively available as an XL-sized title, this Bibliotheca Universalis edition captures all the mystery and opulence of Prisse’s groundbreaking collection in an affordable, compact format.
From emergency relief shelters to a cardboard cathedral and exhibition spaces in shipping containers, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban has made his name with his restlessly inventive response to material and situation, as much as with his humanitarian work at the sites of natural and man-made disasters. According to scholar Riichi Miyake, Ban's work represents "an architectural iteration of Doctors Without Borders."
In the spirit of three-dimensional poetry, Ban uses materials as an integral part of his design, selected not for their cutting-edge credentials but rather for their expressive ability, their capacity to convey the building's overall concept. In particular, Ban has made regular use of paper tubing in projects as varied as the Japanese Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover and emergency shelters for Rwanda's Byumba Refugee Camp.
This essential introduction, compiled with Ban's own collaboration, presents his most important projects to date, surveying the full reach and importance of, in the words of the Pritzker Prize jury, a "committed teacher who is not only a role model for younger generations, but also an inspiration."
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