Customer Reviews

Element

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really enjoyed Balmond's previous book, "Informal", so I bought this one right away.
But instead of a inspired engineer sharing his knowledge about complex design, here you can find drawings on photographs of beautiful landscapes (searching for patterns) and his "poetic" thoughts on nature.
I have to say that this book is beautiful and well designed, but is not challenging intellectually like I hoped. If you're interested in architecture, stick to "Informal", way better than this one.

Having read Informal I had high hopes for this book. I admire Balmonds' open mindedness, creativity and presentation. However, this book strongly disappointed - To put it frankly, it sucked. Pages and pages of health insurance style advertising images of nature, generic poetic meanderings with barely any relevance and certainly little to learn from. Not that I am necessarily against poetics but there wasn't much attention paid to how the reader would experience pages and pages of a mediorcre image library. Eventuallly in the last third of the book there are some Balmond work related images but most have been rehashed from previous publications or semi-relevant screen captures from semi-relevant, unexplained models. Basically this book is not worth reading, certainly not worth buying in my opinion.

The book was a surprise. As stated by other reviewers it has a hightened sense of graphic representation, with overlay line and pattern making searching out patterns in specifically chosen natural landscapes... It was this back to a base principle that was the interesting part. Basic yes. Fundamental yes. It leaves you with more a 'taught to fish' rather than 'given the fish' approach - which can be most infuriating when wishing to have a straight and direct answer. It a book that with a mind emptied of immediate questions will delight both mentally and aesthetically. I recommended this text for the simplicity of underlying basics that leads to the more complex.

This is an amazingly poetic and innovative book that brings together nature, art and science at the most basic level. "Element" provides insights into different worlds not immediately visible to the untrained eye; patterns within patterns that slowly emerge with every new reading of the different passages.
This is a wonderful blend of aesthetics and philosophical thought.
Everything about the book is very impressive, the text, the carefully selected photos, the concepts it addresses, the layout, etc.. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading it!
Element