Pasta by Design

An in-depth investigation of a beloved food, a celebration of the complexity of simple pleasures, and a delight for everyone who eats pasta.

Everyone loves pasta, but despite myriad cookbooks no one has ever seen the world’s favorite food presented like this. Created by a team of obsessive designers, this unique book reveals the hidden mathematical beauty that cooks across the globe have taken for granted since Marco Polo.

Pasta’s wonderful, sometimes whimsical, geometrical shapes and surfaces are designed to hold certain sauces or accompaniments, to be beautiful yet functional. Here are over ninety forms of pasta, each shown through especially commissioned photographs, mathematical formulae that accurately describe each shape, and drawings that reveal the hidden genius of our everyday food. Brief texts describe the special attributes of each form of pasta, along with advice on specific uses in cooking. 90 full-color photographs and 200 black-and-white illustrations

George L. Legendre is principal of IJP Architects in London and a leading specialist in complex surfaces.