Towards a Resilient Architecture documents twenty years of work by the London-based architects Mæ.
Published by Quart and designed by fellow Londoners A Common Purpose (founded by David Hitner), the book explores past and current work and includes ‘thought pieces’ alongside each project in which Mæ explores subjects such as social equity, sustainability, environmental impact and materiality.
‘Mæ are known in the industry for this approach,’ says Dominic Hands, senior designer at ACP. ‘Therefore for the cover we wanted to convey this by flush-trimming the edges, displaying each material used throughout the book, including the 2mm board for the hard cover.’
Hands explains that the studio tested several different cloths for the cover but noticed that many of them started to fray. ‘This is when we looked into paper stocks and found the Fedrigoni Imitlin range which offers different embossing types, from Tela – a more organic natural cloth texture – to Aida, with its uniform embossing,’ he says. ‘We used Aida for this reason: it has more structure and is more architectural.’
The cover design takes inspiration from exercise books, with horizontal rules displaying a person’s name and subject or project, and the interior design uses paper stocks to distinguish between sections.
