Urban Challenges, Resilient Solutions

Book coverUrban Challenges, Resilient Solutions
Book coverUrban Challenges, Resilient Solutions
Book coverUrban Challenges, Resilient Solutions
Book coverUrban Challenges, Resilient Solutions

How wonderful it must have been for all those involved over the past few years in the collaborative research venture FUR (Future Urban Regions) set up by six Dutch architecture academies in order to see the results of their research brought together as effectively as here. A broad-based study of pressing urban problems inevitably entails having a wide range of source material, including cartography, photography and texts on several levels. In terms of graphic design and printing, here all that material has been well assembled: the small maps have been elegantly designed, photographs have been used effectively and the texts have been set in a nicely coherent, almost official way. 

 

The broadly pink pages that from time to time offer a kind of breathing space have not been designed from the ground up, as it were, but are imaginative variants of the cover; they effectively lift the whole to a higher level. The concept is further bolstered by various colours of paper. Happily as regards the cover itself there has been no obeisance to laminate. Instead, the somewhat maverick choice is uncoated pink paper with among other things a fine opaque white. The book does have a tendency to shut itself. Perhaps next time it would be better to choose cold gluing for the finish: that is what a book that has had so much care lavished on it in so many departments really deserves.

Edition: 2017
Language: English / Dutch
Final editor: Willemijn Lofvers, Pia Pol (picture editing)
Publisher: Trancity x Valiz, Amsterdam
Graphic designer: Catalogtree, Arnhem/Berlin (DE), photographs by Jannes Linders
Lithographer: Colorset, Amsterdam
Printer: Wilco | Boeken & Tijdschriften, Amersfoort
Binder: Wilco | Boeken & Tijdschriften, Amersfoort
Size book block (w x h x d in mm): 160 x 240 x 24
Number of pages: 319 p.
Print run: 2,000
Price: € 27.50
ISBN: 978 94 92095 33 6 (E) / 978 94 92095 32 9 (D)
Font and foundry: Sectra (Grilli Type), Akkurat (Lineto)
Binding style: sewn soft cover with flaps
Material: 120gsm Amber Graphic (Antalis) (interior), 250gsm CLA Roze (Papyrus) (cover printed in full colour and in opaque white)