Skin: Surface, Substance + Design

By Ellen Lupton

Every object has a skin. Thick or thin, smooth or rough, porous or impermeable, the skin is the line between the hidden inside and the outside we experience. Skin: Surface, Substance + Design presents products, furniture, fashion, architecture, and media that are expanding the limits of what we understand as surface. Reflecting the convergence of natural and artificial life, this provocative and stimulating book shows how enhanced and simulated skins appear everywhere in our contemporary world. Designers today manipulate the relationship between the inside and outside of objects, garments, and buildings, creating skins that both reveal and conceal, skins that have depth and complexity as well as their own behaviors and identities.

Skin features the work of such notable designers and architects as Greg Lynn, Petra Blaisse, Speedo, Morphosis, Ross Lovegrove, Marcel Wanders, and many others. It also contains essays on artificial skin and digital surfaces, and a glossary of surface materials. It reminds us that beauty is indeed only skin-deep.

'Lupton regards skin as a cultural metaphor, which is what makes this beautifully produced book, with its often-disturbing images, so provocative.' ―Architectural Record

Reading age: 13 years and up | Grade level:‎ 8 and up

Ellen Lupton is a curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the director of the graphic design MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the author of numerous books, including D.I.Y. Design It Yourself and Thinking with Type. She received a Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the AIGA in 2007.

Princeton Architectural Press and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2002, hardcover, 13 x 9 inches, 240 pages.