Bruno shapes up

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.