The visual world is filled with photographs of celebrities, but some of those images rise above others with a special, undeniable warmth. Such is the case with the portraits that legendary Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt made of the luminous Italian film star Sophia Loren from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. During that time. the pair achieved a remarkable rapport based on trust. "When I met Eisie," Loren once recalled, "it was really a love at first sight. He became my shadow." Of the thousands of pictures of Loren that Eisenstaedt shot, very few ever made it into print. Now Taschen has brought out "Sophia by Eisenstaedt," a collectors edition book featuring nearly 200 of his photographs, the majority unpublished.

  Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was a visionary French architect who, among other things, devised the structural system that made it possible for Gustav Eiffel’s Statue of Liberty to sport a skin of self-oxidizing copper. His approach to materials was: understand the properties and the form will ensue. Many years later, this idea was popularized by Louis Sullivan, who coined the phrase, “Form Follows Function”—a statement widely considered ...