Bruno Munari: Circle Square Triangle

Bruno Munari's wonderfully concise Square, Circle, Triangle is a dedicated case study of the three shapes. This book is perfect for everyone from historians of visual form, to graphic design students all the way up to professional designers and artists. Munari makes parsed connections between the shapes we all see everyday as conveyances in contemporary design (communication, products, architecture), and reaches back into the history of various civilizations in order to uncover archetypes, uses, symbology, significance, meaning and best practices. It's a pleasure to behold Munari's style: his combination of economical writing and visual case study.

Art, graphic design, architecture. It's all covered by Munari's strange and eccentric for of organization. A great book for the aesthetically minded.

Excellent book. Arrived on time!

thanks

OK

Art books come in all subjects, shapes, and sizes, often presented as the heavy, oversized variety. This unassuming, small softcover by prolific design master, Bruno Munari packs as much as any coffee table book putting the prime focus on shape. Munari explores in-depth the specific qualities of basic design forms: the square, which signifies safety and enclosure; the circle relating to the divine; and the triangle, providing a key connective form for designers. Originally written in 1960, 1964, and 1976 respectively, his trilogy, “Square, Circle, Triangle” (Princeton Architectural Press) was revived in 2005-2007 with new Italian/English translations, and collected as a singular guide of thematic visual references inherent throughout history. Whether focussed in disciplines of architecture, painting, textile, trademark, interior, or general design, the understanding of visual form and composition is vital, particularly to how it relates to its surroundings and human experience. However, Munari's international coverage of subjects goes further into areas of mathematics, science, world cultures, language, nature, physics, puzzles, and so on. Collected as a digestible visual diary, each entry validates the application of each physical form within the visual history of world art. Either with a brief statement or a expository lesson supported by visuals, the range of subjects go beyond everything we learned in school, full of interesting details and thoughtful relevance to everyday life. There’s something for everyone in this resourceful collection that is both insightful and engaging. In conclusion, "Square, Circle & Triangle” is overflowing with significant case studies from ancient learnings to artistic impressions. The overall feeling is that everything in art and nature has structure, systems and beauty. Our job as humans is to learn how to see and use them in different, unique and useful ways to benefit our world... past, present and future.

Good

Three fascinating books written by Munari between 1960 and 1976 and now reprinted in one handy title. He explores the three basic shapes as they occur in the man-made world over the centuries but especially in the way that artists and designers have used them creatively for practical solutions like buildings, Mies Van De Rohe's square house or for fun like the impossible triangle conceived by Lionel Penrose. This three-in-one title is essentially visual and arranged alphabetically with deep captions for some of the illustrations. There is an interesting hands-on aspect to some of the entries, they could easily be constructed, for example, page sixty-one has a pyramid formed by cutting a square piece of card or page 190 shows a tetrahedral made from interlocking hexagrams and made from corrugated cardboard. These simple constructions will give any reader a deeper understanding of shape and form. I thought it was a pity that some of the illustrations weren't in color, especially the paintings like Verena Loewensberg's Composition (1956) Richard Lohse Horizontal divisions (1949) or Mary Vieira's 1953 sculpture of mobile circular surfaces. The book, though, is full of thought provoking entries and it'll make you want to find out more via Wikipedia and Google.