The Jasmax Book Launch

The Jasmax Book Launch

WHEN
:
6.00pm, Thursday 24th May 2007
WHERE:
:
The Icon Room, Te Papa Tongarewa
 

“…this book is a visual feast. Eclectic, almost organised chaos, it is an archive as rich and random as the drawers of a desk, or the haphazard layers of memory… It is an ebullient, cacophony of images, ideas, opinions and reflections which eschew any notion of a single point of view of the Jasmax story.”

-          Rodney Wilson, Director, Auckland War Memorial Museum

Do you recall – not that long ago – when digital technology burst upon us, and prophets predicted the end of books (or many fewer, at least)? They told us that electronic media would replace the printed book, because it was more immediate, cheaper, more flexible. They prepared us for the day when we would retire to bed at night, prop ourselves up with a pillow, laptop computer or digital reader in our hands, and close our day flicking through its electronic pages.

Have you noticed how that didn’t happen, how digital technology has, in fact, brought about a new wave of publishing? This rich and absorbing, square red book is part of that new wave. Designer, Diana Curtis, and Editor Stephen Stratford, have produced a seductive, stimulating product. It gallops through type boxes of changing fonts, palettes of colour, full-page bleeds to tiny vignettes, albums of pictures, overprinting, drawings, plans, sketches, juxtaposed thumb nail sketches and photos of the built result. It is an apothecary of visual herbs and spices, beautifully designed, crafted and printed. And it is a counterfoil for the design energy of Jasmax, the practice it celebrates. But you would expect that, wouldn’t you? A book that in its energy and design, mirrors the forty odd years of work by New Zealand’s largest architectural design practice.

About the New Zealand Architectural Publications Trust

This volume is the third in the series of the New Zealand Architectural Publications Trust’s monographs on the work of contemporary New Zealand architects. The Trust was founded in 2002 with the objective of producing a series of books describing the best of New Zealand architecture. The Trust’s intention has always been to produce publications which were neither marketing exercises nor coffee table books, but rather addressed an informed audience of architects and those interested in architecture.

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