GREAT MEADOWS
Extraordinary book project with high—
quality paper and fold-out plates, enhanced by stamping
Outside Louisville, Kentucky, lies Great Meadows, the home of Episcopal priest and contemporary art collector Al Shands. Completed in 1988, the home that he and his late wife Mary built was designed by architect David Morton and tailored to be as outstanding an artifact as each of the works it houses. The collection, accumulated over a period of thirty-five years, encompasses major handicrafts and ceramic objects and has grown to focus on large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissioned work by Petah Coyne, Sol LeWitt, Maya Lin, Stephen Vitiello, and Betty Woodman.
The volume explores the complex subtlety of Morton’s building, the beauty of the surrounding landscape, as well as the numerous unconventional surprises and tangents within the collection, which testify to the Shands’s expertise and unerring intuition.
The front cover shows the unique the smooth beige Minnesotan Kasota stone used on the exterior and partly on the “façades” inside of the house. A cut out square lets one sneak into one of the most beautiful rooms, covered completely by a stunning Sol LeWitt painting.
The block itself already shows the colourful dividing pages, inspired by the colours of this art work.
The layout
Also out of each front page of the colourful dividing pages a cut out square lets one sneak into one of the rooms, showing the detail of an art piece.
For the first time, I also provided several photographs (among Edward A. Winters and Ross Gordon), I had the opportunity to take of this most stunning building, the art and the park.
Some of the essays and informations are printed on very thin bible paper, that is bind as booklets of 8 short pages each within the main book.
The Typography
I’m extremely grateful and honoured, that for this great book, the fantastic type designers Martin Majoor and Jos Buivenga allowed me use their most beautiful Questa, Questa Sans and Questa Grande (the Questa Project).
My regards go to the most wonderful Al Shands, and Julien Robson, who gave so much trust into me and my skills.
Special thanks to Birte Kreft, Dawn Michelle d’Atri, and Katja Jaeger (with her nerves of steel and gigantic knowledge about book production) from the fantastic Hatje Cantz Berlin team.
Hatje Cantz, 2014
English
218 pp., 256 ills., 6 fold-outs
29.90 × 28.40 cm
halfcloth, in clothbound slipcase, limted edition
ISBN 978–3 7757–3775 3
