Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design

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 behaviors 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. This book accompanies a major exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.

Ellen Lupton is one of America's preeminent design educators. Her books include Skin, Inside Design Now, and Mixing Messages, among others. She is currently director of the design program at Maryland Institute of Art and Design.