Starck

"We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept." – Philippe Starck

Philippe Starck wants to bring love and happiness into your life by designing objects, environments, and appliances that will brighten your days. He spent his childhood under his father's drawing boards, sawing, cutting, gluing, and sanding, dismantling bikes, motorcycles and other objects. Several years and several prototypes later, he has changed life at the French presidential palace, the Italians have asked him to renew the notion of furniture, and he has turned the Royalton and Paramount in New York into the first classics of the new hotel world.

Starck's overwhelming international success and cult-star status are proof that people everywhere are receptive to his kindhearted philosophy and distinctive aesthetic sensibility. The democratic design projects that he has undertaken with Target (USA) and j/ii (Japan), as well as the TASCHEN bookshops in Paris and Los Angeles and the Bon restaurant chain, are among the projects included in this volume that traces the entire career of today's foremost design superhero.

The designer:
Philippe Starck is an internationally acclaimed French creator, designer and architect. This untiring and rebellious citizen of the world, who considers it his duty to share his ethical and subversive vision of a fairer planet, creates unconventional objects whose purpose is to be “good” before being beautiful. Most of his designs have become cult objects, and his hotels are timeless icons that have added a new dimension to the global cityscape. An enthusiastic advocate of sustainability, this visionary recently developed the revolutionary concept of “democratic ecology” by creating affordable wind turbines for the home, soon to be followed by innovative wooden prefabricated ecological houses and solar boats. He himself lives, with his wife Jasmine, mostly on airplanes, and in Paris, Burano, and on his oyster farm in the southwest of France.