Nigel Coates Books

The book is designed to give a stimulating idea of the current direction of international interior design by Nigel Coates, one of the foremost practitioners in the field. The author has selected approximately 30 international designers whose work he thinks is especially interesting. The book will then present a selection of work by these designers in such a way that the relations between different designers (both the differences and similarities) are brought out as well as broader themes in current interior design. While each project selected will be featured over a series of pages, the same project may crop up at various other points through book. The purpose of this is to draw comparisons between each project by letting them cross over into one another’s territory. Hence ‘Collidoscope’, the provisional title of the publication. As such, it should work both as a sourcebook with reference to current tendencies in design and to the ideas that underpin them. It will foreground the designers yet raise challenging differences and overlaps between them.

Monograph, manifesto, travelog, history, autobiography, novel--"A Guide to Ecstacity" is a bit of all of these things. The brainchild of British architectural visionary Nigel Coates, it asks us to reimagine the city as a dynamic hybrid of inventive design and cross-cultural political empowerment. Produced in the spirit of Rem Koolhaas's "S, M, L, XL," it is a palimpsest of the real and the hypothetical, with fragments of seven cities from around the world--Cairo, London, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rome, and Tokyo--woven together into one multifaceted urban fabric. In addition to extensive documentation of architecture and product design by Coates's own groundbreaking firm--Branson Coates Architecture--"A Guide to Ecstacity" features projects by Norman Foster, Future Systems, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Philippe Starck, and Bernard Tschumi. Presented in a remarkable package created by the design firm Why Not Associates in close collaboration with Coates, these varied works form a fascinating kaleidoscope of metropolitan culture and suggest how the city of tomorrow might be transformed by a proactive architectural community that embraces the challenge of designing for a multicultural world.