Taschen launches digital version of BIG's Yes is More as its first iPad app, and CBR interviews Francoise Mouly, touching on her background in architecture.


Taschen launched its first iPad app today, and it happens to be a digital version of BIG's "archicomic" Yes is More (direct link to app in iTunes).

Originally a printed book, this digital version brings three extra chapters with projects recently developed. Moreover, it includes 25 videos, and images with 360°.

Check this video on BIG we featured yesterday and the recent live-blogging of Bjarke's appearance at Harvard recently.

In other comic news, I just stumbled upon this interview with Francoise Mouly, Art Editor of The New Yorker, on comicbookresources.com. In the article Francoise discusses her background studying architecture. Take the jump to read some clips about how architecture influenced her career in comic editorial...



To go back, I know that you studied architecture in school. Were you a comics fan as a child?

I'm not the only would-be architect that gravitated towards comics. There are a lot of architects in comics, especially in Europe. The two disciplines have a lot in common in terms of organizing information in a visual way and the back and forth between form and function. That mental gymnastics that you have to do between how it looks and how it works. As a kid, I was a comics fan, and so was everybody else I knew. I grew up in France. Everybody read comics.

So you grew up reading "Pilote" and "Spirou" and magazines like that.

More "Pilote" than "Spirou." "Pilote" was my magazine. It's one of my fond memories. When "Pilote" was coming out, my dad would take me to the newsstand on the corner to buy me a copy. For birthdays and Christmas, I got the bound volumes. "Pilote," at the time, was great. It had Gotlib and a lot of other terrific artists, quite influenced, I realized much later, by the early "Mad."

Why did I switch from architecture to comics? Specifically, because when I was studying architecture, one of the things that endlessly frustrated me was the disconnect between the architect's vision and what he or she can actually accomplish. Architectural school is an eight year course of training. You are told to envision a school, a museum and apartment complex, a city even. Nobody answered my query, which was, this has nothing to do with what we'll be doing as a functioning architect. We're not just going to sit there and make cities. It really bothered me that the practical aspect of being an architect, ninety-eight percent would have consisted of sitting in somebody else's office and drafting. And not necessarily drafting anything that exciting.

- via CBR