Philippe Starck - STARCK - Taschen 2000 Revised Edition - Mondino Photos

Updated/revised edition. Design by Mark Thomson, London, and Catinka Keul, Cologne; cover and back-cover photographs by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Paris. Printed in Italy. Profusely illustrated throughout in color and black-and-white; multilingual text in English, German and French. Thick flexible pictorial binding with integral folding flaps; approximately 26 cm tall. An exuberant, deliberately unconventional survey of Philippe Starck's architecture, interiors, furniture, industrial design, drawings, personal imagery and design philosophy, produced in close collaboration with Starck and incorporating material from his personal archives. Rather than presenting his career as a conventional chronological monograph, the book behaves almost like a Starck object itself: photographs, sketches, typography, oversized graphics, quotations and unexpected juxtapositions collide across the pages. Among the projects represented are architecture and interiors as well as Starck's celebrated furniture and domestic objects. The extended folding yellow cover incorporates a series of acknowledgments to figures including David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Pierre Chareau, Denis Santachiara, Alberto Meda, Frank Gehry, Francesco Clemente and James Turrell, reinforcing the unusually personal nature of the production. The copyright page explicitly states © 2000 Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH and © 2000 Philippe Starck, and credits Simone Philippi as editor, Thomson and Keul as designers, and Mondino for the front and rear cover photographs. The ISBN is 3-8228-6397-1, widely identified as an updated/revised or second edition, expanding upon the earlier 1996 Taschen edition. Condition: Very Good+. Internally very attractive: binding remains sound, pages appear clean and bright, with the richly printed photographic and graphic contents well preserved. Exterior shows moderate handling appropriate to this unusually flexible construction: rubbing and light surface wear, shallow creasing/wrinkling to the pictorial covers, some wear and compression at corners and spine ends, and a more noticeable horizontal crease across the yellow spine. The extended integral flaps remain present. No conventional removable dust jacket - the pictorial outer structure functions as the book's cover/self-wrapper. Overall a handsome, complete example whose interior presentation is considerably stronger than the exterior wear might initially suggest. The cover deserves special attention because it isn't simply generic publisher artwork. The copyright page specifically assigns the front and rear cover photographs to Jean-Baptiste Mondino, while the book's graphic design is separately credited to Mark Thomson and Catinka Keul. Mondino is a major French fashion, portrait, advertising and music photographer/director, and his photographic association with Starck continued well beyond this publication; Starck's own official archive preserves multiple later Mondino portraits of the designer. Here Mondino photographs Starck from front and rear as a kind of human manifesto: slogans handwritten over Starck's body include fragments such as "WE ARE MUTANTS," "TOMORROW WILL BE LESS," "GOD IS DANGEROUS," and, starkly across his back, "LIAR." The huge fluorescent-yellow STARCK typography then overlays the portrait. That combination of designer, body, manifesto, photography and typography turns the binding into an extension of Starck's design persona rather than merely packaging for a retrospective. Philippe Starck (b. 1949) is a French designer and architect whose extraordinarily broad career has made him one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary design. After studying in Paris, Starck gained international attention in the 1980s, notably after being commissioned to design rooms in President François Mitterrand's private residence at the Élysée Palace. His work subsequently expanded across furniture, household objects, architecture, restaurants, hotels, transportation and industrial design.