Designers Build Better Baubles

Jewelry by Architects, by Barbara Radice (Rizzoli: $35).

This book is filled with elegance and whimsy in its lush, color photographs of baubles by adventuresome architects/designers such as Arata Isozaki, Peter Eisenman, Robert Venturi and artists/designers such as Los Angeles’ Peter Shire.

Radice’s text is in question-and-answer format, and when she puts the same questions to her subjects (“What type of woman did you have in mind when you designed your jewelry?” “Could you explain the language of your jewelry?” “Do you like buying jewelry for a woman?”) the reader is rewarded with gloriously diverse answers.

Shire, for instance, confesses that he “never had enough money” to enjoy buying jewelry for a woman and would like the jewelry he’s designed (in gold and semi-precious stones) to be worn “by a young woman with no money for dressing up and who found the piece in her mother’s box.”