This article is part of our latest special report on Design, which is about getting personal with customization.
A little respite from geopolitical and health crises can perhaps be found in five new design books, which demonstrate our ability to transform humble materials into enduring refuges.
In “The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future” (Princeton Architectural Press, $125, 512 pp.), 20 experts analyze how buildings made of textured multihued dirt can offer “a comforting material with a strong emotional charge.” The construction technique has been used in Neolithic villages, Sumerian temples and Nubian fortresses. Its fans over the years have included Thomas Jefferson and Georgia O’Keeffe, and it has persisted in Alabama subdivisions and Moroccan resorts. The book’s 800 illustrations reveal similarities between sinuous walls along Japanese gardens and Libyan medina alleyways, and kindred-spirited caretakers at work on New Mexican pueblos and colorful earthen homes in Burkina Faso. Untold numbers of dirt buildings have been obliterated by wars or misguided modernizations, but earth remains relevant. Skyscraper engineers are strengthening soil components with plant fibers, and robots are fashioning shelters out of 3-D-printed mud.
Earthen barriers have reinforced mountainside rice beds in Bali for thousands of years, channeling rainfall, curbing erosion and providing habitats for ducks that feed on agricultural pests — while also resulting in astonishing beauty. The tiered topography “when flooded in moonlight resembles a multifaceted diamond,” the environmentalist and designer Julia Watson observes in “Lo-TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism” (Taschen, $50, 420 pp.). The book’s 18 case studies, along with the Balinese terraces, include thorny acacia corrals in Kenya that protect livestock and are covered in edible seedpods, and midair footbridges in northern India made of interwoven tree roots and navigable during monsoons. Ms. Watson warns of deforestation and chemical fertilizers, among other contemporary threats, yet she maintains optimism for sites still densely occupied and vigilantly preserved. In some cases even bureaucrats care; Kolkata’s wetlands have been adapted for farming, fishing and treating sewage at minimal cost, “saving its taxpayers millions of dollars every year,” Ms. Watson writes.
Until 2010 or so, bureaucrats paid little heed to Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, N.Y., a century-old swath of flower beds and replicas of Mediterranean and Persian architecture on steep Hudson River frontage. “Graffiti-covered walls, fragments of crumbling statuary, and shapeless shrubs created a theater of menace” for many late-20th-century visitors, the historian Caroline Seebohm writes in “Paradise on the Hudson: The Creation, Loss, and Revival of a Great American Garden” (Timber Press, $27.95, 224 pp.). The property’s original owner, the lawyer Samuel Untermyer, practiced brutal tactics in the courtroom while keeping his suit buttonholes stocked with fragrant orchids from his greenhouses. Dozens of gardeners were on staff, placing plant orders as ambitious as “15,500 hardy chrysanthemums of over 50 different species,” Ms. Seebohm notes. After Mr. Untermyer’s death in 1940, the city begrudgingly took over the property and could afford little maintenance. A young nonprofit run by the architect Stephen Byrns has been excavating wonders from the undergrowth, including rocky water cascades, crisscrossing canals, ancient stone pillars and a domed Temple of Love.
The British Arts and Crafts architect Ernest Gimson sometimes walked miles a day, sketching flora, vegetation, birds and squirrels around his Cotswolds home. “Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect” (Yale University Press, $65, 372 pp.), by the historians Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted and Barley Roscoe (a relative of Mr. Gimson’s), explores how he adapted his observations of nature into buildings and objects. During his relatively short career — he died of cancer in 1919, at 54 — he outfitted interiors with hewn timbers, delicate plaster ornaments, botanical embroidery and filigreed hardware. He enlivened surfaces with “just the right amount of veining on leaves,” the authors point out. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos of surviving works alongside Mr. Gimson’s sketches. Much of the archival material was rescued during World War II from a bonfire heap in his garden, dumped there by auctioneers dispersing his widow Emily’s estate.
Beachcombing finds and glass game board pieces collected by the sculptor Lenore Tawney have been kept pretty much in her original collaged arrangements. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis., has been exhibiting vignettes from her whitewashed Manhattan apartment, where Ms. Tawney, who died in 2007 at 100, hung her gossamer weavings all around. She stocked shelves with “time-polished river rocks, bleached bones, feathers, eggs, objects collected during travels around the world, and chests in which each drawer held a small assemblage,” Kathleen Nugent Mangan, the executive director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, writes in “Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe” (Kohler Arts Center/University of Chicago Press, $45, 304 pp.). Ms. Mangan is one of half a dozen scholars contributing to the volume, which covers Ms. Tawney’s origins in a blue-collar Ohio community, two brief marriages, mentors including the artist Alexander Archipenko and self-reinvention in early middle age as an avant-garde Manhattanite. She filled atriums with clouds of knotted thread, and she wrapped cryptic messages around shoemakers’ wooden foot forms. In the book’s quotations from her stream-of-consciousness journals, readers can trace her path to peace of mind. She would ponder the passage of time while mesmerized by birds “darting in all directions,” or a fountain’s flow that “splashes up, the drop in endless formations.”
