A Town and Country magazine design pick, a monograph of the work of a California lifestyle and interior design firm, from the company’s founders. Commune was established in Los Angeles in 2004 by four like-minded souls—Roman Alonso, Steven Johanknecht, Pamela Shamshiri, and Ramin Shamshiri—with a common mission: to enhance life through design and to blur the lines between disciplines, eras, and styles. California is for those who refuse to conform and who live for freedom of expression, indoor/outdoor living, and that golden sunshine glinting off the waves of the Pacific. Commune perfectly captures this spirit and embodies a new California style that freely mixes old and new in its layered, highly personal interiors that embrace color, pattern, and texture. This book is the first monograph of Commune’s work, featuring its designs for private residences, hotels, commercial spaces, and restaurants, as well as the works they specially commission from virtually everyone in the artisan craftsman movement in California today. “Heavyweight Champs—Our picks from this year’s tempting crop of design books. Commune highlights work by the Los Angeles design group, known for its bohemian-chic approach to houses, hotels (such as LA’s Ace), and home products.” ―Town & Country Magazine

A journey through the acclaimed design studio’s effortless California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle Design Commune reveals the evolution story of an acclaimed design studio rooted firmly in the California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle. Truly multidisciplinary in practice, Commune has, since its inception in 2004, tackled all areas of design. The work featured in this second book highlights all disciplines that Commune engages in, including interior design projects for private and commercial spaces, artist collaborations, product designs, packaging, and graphics. Its projects share many common threads, such as the influence of handcrafted materials, but each remains deeply personal and unique.

"For dinosaurs, it was a big rock. For humans: coronal mass ejection (CME). When Earth is hit by the greatest CME in recorded history, the combine societies of the planet's most developed nations struggle to adapt to a life thrust back to the dark ages. In the United States, the military scrambles to speed the nation's recovery on multiple fronts including putting down riots, establishing relief camps, delivering medical aid, and bringing communication and travel back on line. Just as a real foothold is established in retaking the skies, a mysterious virus takes hold of the population, spreading globally over the very flight routes that the survivors fought so hard to rebuild. The communicability and mortality rates are devastating, leaving only small pockets of survivors scattered throughout the countryside. Commune Book One is the story of one small group of survivors who must adapt to a primitive, hostile world or die. As they learn the rules of this new era, they must decide how far they're willing to go to continue living, continually asking themselves the same question daily: is survival worth the loss of humanity?"--Page 4 of cover.

For dinosaurs, it was a big rock. For humans: Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). When the Earth is hit by the greatest CME in recorded history (several times larger than the Carrington Event of 1859), the combined societies of the planet's most developed nations struggle to adapt to a life thrust back into the Dark Ages. In the United States, the military scrambles to speed the nation's recovery on multiple fronts including putting down riots, establishing relief camps, delivering medical aid, and bringing communication and travel back on line. Just as a real foothold is established in retaking the skies (utilizing existing commercial aircraft supplemented by military resources and ground control systems), a mysterious virus takes hold of the population, spreading globally over the very flight routes that the survivors fought so hard to rebuild. The communicability and mortality rates are devastating, leaving only small pockets of survivors scattered throughout the countryside. Commune: Book One is the story of one small group of survivors who must adapt to a primitive, hostile world or die. As they learn the rules of this new era, they must decide how far they're willing to go to continue living, continually asking themselves the same question daily: is survival worth the loss of humanity?

The greatest wave of communal living in American history crested in the tumultuous 1960s era including the early 1970s. To the fascination and amusement of more decorous citizens, hundreds of thousands of mostly young dreamers set out to build a new culture apart from the established society. Widely believed by the larger public to be sinks of drug-ridden sexual immorality, the communes both intrigued and repelled the American people. The intentional communities of the 1960s era were far more diverse than the stereotype of the hippie commune would suggest. A great many of them were religious in basis, stressing spiritual seeking and disciplined lifestyles. Others were founded on secular visions of a better society. Hundreds of them became so stable that they survive today. This book surveys the broad sweep of this great social yearning from the first portents of a new type of communitarianism in the early 1960s through the waning of the movement in the mid-1970s. Based on more than five hundred interviews conducted for the 60s Communes Project, among other sources, it preserves a colorful and vigorous episode in American history. The book includes an extensive directory of active and non-active communes, complete with dates of origin and dissolution.

Following the Civil War, large corporations emerged in the United States and became intent on maximizing their power and profits at all costs. Political corruption permeated American society as those corporate entities grew and spread across the country, leaving bribery and exploitation in their wake. This alliance between corporate America and the political class came to a screeching halt during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when the U.S. workers in the railroad, mining, canal, and manufacturing industries called a general strike against monopoly capitalism and brought the country to an economic standstill. In The St. Louis Commune of 1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines the roots of the St. Louis Commune--focusing on the 1848 German revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S. history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist party.