5 ideas for books to offer

Discover 5 meticulously chosen books from the latest publications. On the program: cuisine, street art, architecture and urban planning.

Banksy, almost everything about the most famous stranger in the world

Hat ! concludes John Brandler in his preface. This starred chef knew how to take the basic ingredients, stencil and speed, to transform vandalism into a work of art thanks to a unique and politicized style of humor that can’t stand being taken out of context. So, should we keep Banksy? store it? destroy the walls that support his works? It is a political question that all restorers of cities ask themselves, restorers in the violent sense of the thing, those who dig tunnels, or make embankment supports for new emblems of the modern city. Because nothing stops the wind except when feelings, militancy and activism take over. Urban art is in the street and poetry in this book.

The beauty of a city, aesthetic controversies and ecological transition in Paris

The object is still controversial. Whether we talk about its site, its buildings, its gardens…no one will ever agree. Because a city is considered from multiple angles and it is not the 56 experts asked to give their opinion that will be able to pacify the subject. Designed as a walk, the book invites us to open our eyes to our environment and to wonder about an ecological transition that has arrived too soon or is late for some. Under three main themes – Heritage, Emergence, Prospective – all the subjects of our time are addressed: the urban art of market gardening, parking conflicts, the ragpicker of the future or the aesthetic laws of hospitality… eternally current and modern. From Isabelle Backouche to Chris Younes, opinions confront each other in a bible work, a feat of typography and layout where design is present everywhere, insidiously latent.

The Glass House, Cross Portraits, Dalsace/Charreau

Focus on a world whose intellectual, cultural and artistic richness never ceases to fascinate. Marc Vellay delves back into the archives of his grandparents, Annie and Jean Dalsace, who sponsored Pierre Chareau and his wife Dollie of this fantastic glass house, an architectural icon of the 20^th century. Texts, letters, photographs outline the period between the two wars when a highly cultured society flourished until the unthinkable fracture of the Holocaust. We come across Jean Lurçat, Jeanne Bucher, Jacques Lipchitz, Darius and Madeleine Milhaud, the Wolf, Dalsace and Chareau families over three generations, photographed as a family, on the front, or in the serene spaces of their marvelous house in Paris or at the Villeflix house in Noisy-le-Grand with Berthe and Edmond Bernheim, extracts from life stories, testimonies of intimidating first encounters with Pierre Chareau, photos of Dollie in Spain… war correspondence, peace correspondence in which he is about art, love and politics. And photos from all eras of the Glass House with its furniture, hangings, paintings and sculptures, and all the papers relating to the transformation of 31 rue Saint-Guillaume, the ten years of expenses and maintenance. A journey through the century.

Re: Inhabit, Reuse, Transform, Experiment

After Living in the ruins, Living in the roofs, Living in the air , Olivier Darmon is tackling a new attitude which no longer consists in razing to rebuild on them but in taking advantage of structures to offer a new way of living. The greatest architects are invited to this work with a sensitive and pragmatic approach which does not aim to destroy but to enhance the previous uses of the building. Lacaton & Vassal with the Palais de Tokyo, De Vylder Vinck Taillieu with the Caritas psychiatric center founded in 1908 around Ghent, Ensamble Studio with the Maison de la Terre, a disused quarry on the island of Menorca where there are still the blocks the scratches left by the quarry tools. All advocate an architecture that works by measuring the impact of its gestures. The interventions must reveal the space while delivering its story. Architecture becomes a gift, a revealed spatial treasure. At the border of land art, sculpture and architecture.

ten ways to cook

For thirty years, the editions of Epure under the direction of Sabine Bucquet have been delighting lovers of cooking but above all of graphics, colors, typography and folding. All the fruits, all the vegetables, all the meats and all the fish have passed through the hands of the greatest chefs to give each time “ten ways to prepare it…” tomatoes, zucchini, veal, sardines… thirty years, 331 titles have been published, made in France and at a lower cost. An ideal gift for large families where everyone can find the theme that will directly plunge the recipient into the throes of a kitchen to the nearest gram, where you have no interest in running out of Himalayan salt or poppy seeds from Sichuan. This little 24-page object book to be delicately approached with a paper cutter matches each time the color of its pages to the cooked subject. Cooks, professionals or amateurs, architects, musicians, stylists… express themselves in chorus around a subject that will always be unanimous: the meal. Last subjects: the chest, the tongue, the ass…a tad erotic but above all satiating.

Bénédicte Duhalde