By: Steven Heller | March 22, 2010
It’s not a book, it’s not a magazine. It is the Unit Editions‘ Unit: Design/Research papers, and the first is devoted to Folkways records. As co-publisher and radio personality Adrian Shaughnessy tells me, the project is lo-cost, lo-fi: “We’re trying to mop up some of the stuff that is on fffound, Flikr, and the hundreds of blogs, but which almost never comes with any commentary. Our plan is to collate this stuff and give it some contextualization. We’ll do one every two months or so.”
Next is a profile of an extraordinary magazine called Form that appeared in the UK in the mid-’60s. “It was a piece of hard-core European modernism, and unlike anything else that was happening in day-glo, psychedelic, swinging London. It is called U:D/R 02 Space and Structure.” This quarterly magazine of the arts (1966—69) has, says Shaughnessy, “never been written about before.”
Check out Unit’s first book Studio Culture and keep your eyes open for their next opus on Supergraphics. It will look at early Supergraphics from the 1960s and 70s, and will come up-to-date with experimental digital collaborations between architects and designers.