Skin

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 and 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 behaviours 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.