library
feed your potato head.
Our extensive in-house library lives inside the multi-functional Studio Eksotika space at Potato Head Studios. Featuring over 500 hand-picked titles covering a wide range of subject matter including music, art, fashion, architecture, surf, well-being, philosophy and local Balinese culture, curated to reflect the many elements that make up the Potato Head way of life.
Pull up a seat, order a drink and expand your mind.
Presented here is a selection of titles from the shelves offering a preview of what you can enjoy on your arrival at the Desa.
Library: Book No. 1
Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science R. Buckminster Fuller 2017
Bucky is one of our personal heroes here at Potato Head.
In light of the reawakening interest in R. Buckminster Fuller’s works and thoughts, and of their growing importance for our technological world, it is time for a reedition of this comprehensive and legendary publication from 1999. The visual reader Your Private Sky examines and documents Fuller’s theories, ideas and projects, and critically deals with his ideology of “rescue through technology.” This book provides a highly multifaceted insight into Fuller’s world, also showing many of its less known sides.
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of the 20th century. He established new standards that can be seen as decisive for future-capable design. “How to make the world work” – to this task he dedicated his unflagging attention. Convinced that specialists usually create more problems than they solve, he developed his concept for a vision of the whole.
As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur and poet, he was a quintessentially American self-made man. But he was also an outsider: a technologist with a poet’s imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties and who anticipated the globalization of our planet. Catchphrases of our time, like “Spaceship Earth”, “synergetic”, or “think global, act local” – can directly or indirectly be traced back to Bucky.
library: book no.2
70s surf photographs jeff divine 2006
Surf culture & living alongside the elements are part of daily life here in Bali and woven into the fabric of Potato Head’s own unique way of life.
Jeff Divine’s ‘70s Surf Photographs is a colorful, insider portrait of ’70s surf culture, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning author William Finnegan. If you were there, even just for some of it—Hawaii, California, surfing, the ’70s—the memories and stories will flow freely from these photographs.
Jeff Divine was there for all of it, and these images have been culled from an enormous personal archive. Divine was shooting for Surfer, the monthly magazine that was the bible of the scene. His photos from this archive show the pre-commercialized era in surfing when the hippie influence still held sway. Surfers had their own slang-infused language and were deep into a world of Mother Ocean, wilderness and a culture that mainstream society spurned. Surfboards were handmade in family garages, often made for a specific kind of wave or speed, for paddling, ease of turning, and featured all kinds of psychedelic designs.
The color and black-and-white photographs collected here, taken throughout California on the coastlines at Baja, Dana Point, Laguna Beach, La Jolla, Malibu, San Clemente and Oahu, give a vivid image of this close-knit culture and the incredible athletic feats of its heroes and heroines.
Library: Book No.3
Radical Matter Rethinking material for a sustainable future Caroline Till & Kate Franklin 2019
Potato Head’s commitment to a sustainable future is realised throughout the entire Desa in the form of zero waste restaurants, no single use plastic, re-cycled in-room furnishings and our own research & design workshop Sustainism Lab which combines both ancient craftmanship and modern design techniques to transform re-cycled waste into beautiful everyday objects.
Rejecting old assumptions and revitalizing the principles of sustainable production, Radical Matter reimagines material and process to provide the manifesto for a revolution in material innovation.
Guaranteed to inform and inspire in equal measure, this book celebrates the designer and maker as an agent for radical change, disrupting the way we design, make and consume through material innovation. Framed by eight ‘Big Ideas’, with over sixty fully illustrated case studies featuring testimonies from global industry experts, this is an essential introduction to the cutting edge of design for a sustainable future.
Fit for designers at any level, this is nose-to-tail eating for the design world – a vital resource for those looking to understand how to connect materials wih manufacturing and the means of distribution and consumption.
library: book no.4
hi-fi the history of high-end audio design gideon schwartz 2019
The high end audio equipment we install for your listening pleasure here at Potato Head is as important to us as the daily soundtrack our resident DJs select.
A beyond-cool look at the world of high-end audio design for passionate collectors, obsessive audiophiles, and design fans. At a time when sales of vinyl records have hit a 25-year high, and analog technologies are providing the kind of extraordinary audio experiences that our increasingly digital world has started to remove, Hi-Fi is essential reading.
This unique book explores just how, when, and why the world fell in love with the look, feel, and sound of top-of-the-line audio equipment. Hi-Fi traces this fascinating evolution from the 1950s to today (and tomorrow), taking readers right up to the current renaissance of all things analog and the emergence of cutting-edge designs for die-hard audiophiles.
Library: Book No.5
Hippie Modernism The Struggle for Utopia Greg Castillo 2015
Our world here at Potato Head is informed as much by our contemporary global family as the past pioneers who laid the foundation for us to build upon.
Hippie Modernism examines the art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The catalog surveys the radical experiments that challenged societal norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia. It includes the counter-design proposals of Victor Papanek and the anti-design polemics of Global Tools; the radical architectural visions of Archigram, Superstudio, Haus-Rucker-Co and ONYX; the installations of Ken Isaacs, Joan Hills, Mark Boyle, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida; the experimental films of Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner and John Whitney; posters and prints by Emory Douglas, Corita Kent and Victor Moscoso; documentation of performances by the Diggers and the Cockettes; publications such as Oz and The Whole Earth Catalog; books by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; and much more.
While the turbulent social history of the 1960s is well known, its cultural production remains comparatively under-examined. In this substantial volume, scholars explore a range of practices such as radical architectural and anti-design movements emerging in Europe and North America; the print revolution in the graphic design of books, posters and magazines; and new forms of cultural practice that merged street theater and radical politics.
library: book no.6
bauhaus magdalna droste 1990
Potato Head’s creative village looks to re-imagine the world of hospitality through the lens of music, art, design, food and wellness. A multi-disciplinary approach that is as much informed & inspired by our contemporary world as past modernist pioneers like the Bauhaus.
Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school set out a craft-based curriculum unifying the practices of architecture, art and design with the aim of reimagining the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. A radical approach to education that was taught by an incredible community of teachers including Joseph Albers, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Mies van der Rohe among others. This comprehensive volume draws together material from the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, displaying over 250 new photographs, writings, studies, sketches, plans and models offering an in-depth review of the school’s influential work.
Address
Level 1, Desa Potato Head
Jalan Petitenget No.51B, Seminyak
Kuta Utara – Kabupaten Badung
Bali – 80361
Opening Hours
Mon to Sun: 9am – 6pm
