This handsome book explores the recent use of figurative characteristics in the design arts. Through digital literacy and enhanced fabrication techniques, this avant-garde movement has reintroduced hybrids of methods and ideologies that were once considered too ornamental in character or too handcrafted for the 20th-century minimalist design lexicon. Both large urban-scale architecture and the small domestic realm of design are employing this avant-garde vocabulary formally and figuratively in the terms of shapes and surfaces that evoke trees, tornadoes, parasols, photography, death, illness, food, music, and sensuality.   The volume includes recent work by a wide array of international architects, designers, and studios, including Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, J#65533;rgen Mayer H., UNStudio, and many others, and features full-page spreads devoted to illustrations of everything from tattooed and perforated surfaces to woven and sculptural forms--a rich aesthetic charting new territories in the realm of contemporary design.