Dezeen Book of Interviews, our new book featuring conversations with 45 leading figures in architecture and design, is available now.
A follow-up to the hugely successful Dezeen Book of Ideas, Dezeen Book of Interviews features some of the most talented and inspiring people from the global design scene that we have interviewed for Dezeen over the years.
Interviews include our 2010 conversation with Ron Arad, who told us how his chance discovery of a car seat in a scrapyard launched his career.
"I picked up this Rover seat and I made myself a frame and this piece sucked me into this world of design," he said. "If someone had told me a week before that I was going to be a furniture designer, I would think they were crazy."
Other featured designers include Hella Jongerius, Thomas Heatherwick, Marc Newson and Ilse Crawford, who expressed her frustration that interior design is often "just seen as a shopping list" when we interviewed her in 2011.
"Interiors are so often understood as chucking a few bits of furniture into architecture," she claimed. "I come at them from the other perspective completely. The interior, I think, is essentially the life of the building."
The book also features leading architects David Adjaye, Rem Koolhaas, Neri Oxman and Richard Rogers, who explained how his iconic Centre Pompidou Centre in Paris was the product of 1960s radicalism.
"It looked as though there would be a revolution," he told us when we interviewed him last year. "It didn’t happen, but we captured some of that in the building. The facade was very much about the riots and Vietnam."
With interviews conducted on four continents around the world, Dezeen Book of Interviews offers a global perspective on design and architecture.
When we visited Chinese architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu of Neri&Hu in Shanghai in 2012, they discussed the need for a design manifesto in their country.
"A lot of architects in the US are lost, but there are no projects so they can't build," Neri told us. "Here, we are lost and we are building cities for crying out loud!"
With 45 interviews in all, the book also features a host of influential figures from the worlds of fashion, art, music and technology, including musician Imogen Heap, who showed us her gesture-control gloves that allow her to create music with hand gestures when we visited her this year for Dezeen and MINI Frontiers.
Dezeen Book of Interviews is edited by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and published by Dezeen. It is available to buy now for just £12.
You will also be able to pick up a copy from our Dezeen Watch Store pop-up shop at the Farmiloe Building during Clerkenwell Design Week from 20-23 May.
For any press or stock enquiries, please email ben@dezeen.com.
