Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung: Reading Design – The Visual Language of Common Objects

Craig Hodgetts is an architect, writer, and futurist best known for his illustrations for Ernest Callenbach’s “Ecotopia” and for the design of the Hollywood Bowl. Over the years he has written for popular magazines as well as professional journals. all while maintaining the architecture and design practice his wife and he have helmed for forty years.

Ming Fung is the former Director of Academic Affairs at SCI-Arc, and co-founder of Hodgetts+Fung. Together, they have designed everything from prize winning television ads, trade show installations and significant museum shows, most recently for “California Design” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Among their early projects are UCLA’s Temporary Library, and Blueprints for Modern Living, still acclaimed as the birthplace of Mid-Century Design, each project contributing to the development of their broad, inclusive overview of design matters.

Design is a language, just like any other, except that sentences begin and end with pictures instead of words. “Reading Design – The Visual Language of Common Objects” is meant to be an interpretive guide bridging disparate design languages, historic eras, and critical discourse in order to promote a more inclusive, discerning, and informed appreciation of contemporary principles of design and architecture.

With a spirited visual format, Reading Design is the first book of its kind to feature images drawn from fashion, architecture, and consumer products upon the same pages, and dissect their common roots. With hi-rez illustrations and analytic text by architect Craig Hodgetts, it connects the dots between, for instance, the GMC Hummer and the Centre Pompidou or the punk fashion of Rick Owens and Frank Gehry’s line of furniture.

Conceived as a way to understand how the nuances of a design might appeal to audiences as different as militant bikers and milk-toast executives, Reading Design delves into the role played by sentient details, the shared DNA of categorically different products, and the social/political posture baked (often innocently) into nearly all product design.

Fundamentally different from the typical design textbook, it will be a lively addition to the collections of nascent designers, product developers, and architects seeking a way to look beyond critical appraisal to the hidden meaning embedded in even the most humble object - to reach far beyond “taste” as a criteria - and reveal the origins and biases that lend intangible meaning to every object.

Organized in chapters that reflect clusters of taste and style, from funky to corporate and the avant-garde, Reading Design’s graphic layouts echo those of leading European design magazines like Domus and Abitare with an combative edge. The audience for such a book, given the vast increase in visual appetites brought about by the internet, is right here, waiting for a book like this to give them the insights they require to be in command of their knowledge.