SUSAN YELAVICH

Pentagram, founded in 1972, is one of the best known and most influential graphic, product, and architectural design firms in the world. Its partners are distinguished members of the international design community, consistently generating award-winning work of the highest quality. Profile is the first Pentagram book to include the design firm’s `new guard`; partners Fernando Gutiérrez, DJ Stout, Lisa Strausfeld, and Abbott Miller. The book is a unique collection of essays on Pentagram’s nineteen partners by best-selling authors, revered design critics, editors, and other well-known cultural figures. Eloquent and insightful explorations into the personalities, thought processes, careers, and work of the different partners, the essays are generously illustrated with examples of both key projects and lesser-known works. As a whole, Profile not only sheds light on nineteen individual talents, but also provides a comprehensive overview of the legendary firm that has influenced the course of design for over thirty years. Included is a foreword on Pentagram’s history and evolution by Rick Poynor, one of today’s most respected design critics and founder of the incisive British graphic-design magazine Eye. Pentagram began with five partners; today, there are nineteen, working in London, New York, Austin, San Francisco, and Berlin. Following the firm’s unique partnership structure, they each have their own clients, and work in their own way with their teams. They share equally, and contribute equally. Similarities in style, temperament, and aspiration between them are few. What these designers do have in common, however, is Pentagram itself, and the shared commitment to producing high-quality, relevant work in the fields of graphic, product, and architectural design. .

ENGLISH TEXTSusan Yelavich The most comprehensive global survey available of interior architecture and design projects of the last 25 years Vast in scope, featuring more than 450 projects and the work of more than 400 designers and architects, including such world-renowned figures as John Pawson, Philippe Starck, Marcel Wanders and Zaha Hadid and rising stars such as UdA, Atelier Bow-Wow and LOT-EK Documents a wide range of styles and tendencies, from the clean white modernism of Richard Meier's houses and museums to the organicism of the Soft and Hairy House in Japan, by Ushida/Findlay, to a new sense of transparency in projects such as Foster & Partners' New German Parliament in Berlin Susan Yelavich is a freelance writer and curator, and a visiting assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design in New York. She was Assistant Director for Public Programs at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum from 1994 to 2002, where she co-curated the museum's acclaimed 2003 National Design Triennial.