Bruno Munari: Circle Square Triangle [Paperback]

In the early 1960s Italian design legend Bruno Munari published his visual case studies on shapes:Circle,Square, and, a decade later,Triangle. Using examples from ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as works by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, Munari invests the three shapes with specific qualities: the circle relates to the divine, the square signifies safety and enclosure, and the triangle provides a key connective form for designers.

One of the great designers of the twentieth century, Munari contributed to the fields of painting, sculpture, design, and photography while teaching throughout his seventy-year career. After World War II he began to focus on book design, creating children's books known for their simplicity and playfulness.Bruno Munari was one of the greatest graphic designers of the twentieth century. Even if you're not a designer, the trilogy on shapes encourages a closer look at the repeating structures around us and their deep human and natural histories, in which the simple square can simultaneously be an ancient symbol with the power to drive out the plague, and the boundaries for a game of chess. - Hyperallergic Picasso once called Munari the Leonardo of our time, and now is the time to invest time in one of the great thinkers of the last hundred years. - Juxtapoz Like shapes structured into a pattern, the works form something greater than the sum of their parts. - Surface I would consider it required reading for everybody engaged in a design discipline. No matter what field-be it architecture, industrial design, urban designer, painting, etc.-you are sure to find a lot of meaningful and relevant content, as it covers the fundamentals of these shapes, so rarely available in a single volume. As such, Bruno Munari: Square Circle Triangle certainly does justice to one of the great designers and thinkers of the twentieth century. - Spacing