A Sneak Peek At The Collector's Edition of Never Before Seen Star Wars Blueprints.

Die hard Star Wars fans will be thrilled to learn about this soon to be released limited collector's edition from Epic Ink. The oversized volume, Star Wars: The Blueprints, features tons of the never before seen meticulously designed blueprints, drawings and photographs from George Lucas' Star Wars series by J. W. Rinzler, executive editor at Lucasfilm Ltd.








Discover how an entire galaxy was designed in Star Wars: The Blueprints. Each of the 200 seminal images included in the book was selected by Rinzler in collaboration with an expert panel of Academy Award®-winning visual effects artists (each of whom is described at the end of the post).




the following text is taken directly from Epic Ink:
Star Wars: The Blueprints brings together, for the first time, the original blueprints created for the filming of the Star Wars Saga. Drawn from deep within the Lucasfilm Archives and combined with exhaustive and insightful commentary from best-selling author J. W. Rinzler, the collection maps in precise, vivid, and intricate detail the very genesis of the most enduring and beloved story ever to appear onscreen.




Star Wars: The Blueprints gives voice to the groundbreaking and brilliant engineers, designers, and artists that have, in film after film, created the most imaginative and iconic locales in the history of cinema. Melding science and art, these drawings giving birth to fantastic new worlds, ships, and creatures.




Most importantly, Blueprints shows how in bringing this extraordinary epic to life, the world of special effects as we know it was born. For the first time, here you will see the initial concepts behind such iconic Star Wars scenes as the Rebel blockade runner hallways, the bridge of General Grievous’s flagship, the interior of the fastest “hunk of junk” in the Galaxy, and Jabba the Hutt’s palace. Never before seen craftsmanship and artistry is evident whether floating on the Death Star, escaping on a speeder bike, or exploring the Tatooine Homestead.

Star Wars: The Blueprints is a limited edition. Only 5,000 hand-numbered English language copies will be available, 1000 of which will be signed.

Highlights from the collection include the following blueprints (which have been cropped here for better visibility) of:

R2D2 (Artoo)

Cantina

Power Trench
TIE Fighter

Battle of Hoth
Millennium Falcon

Yoda's House

Carbon Freezing Chamber
Jabba's Throne Room

Jabba's Barge
Speeder Bike

Ewok Village

Theed Plaza
Anakin's Podracer

Jedi Starfighter

Rehabilitation Chamber

When Lucasfilm author and executive editor Jonathan Rinzler explored the long-hidden cache of blueprints hidden in the dark archives it was like discovering a Jedi Holocron, an extraordinary key to cinematic history mislaid for decades. Unrolling each extraordinary document, one after another, it became clear that a central part of the very genesis of Star Wars lay in these technical drawings, 95 percent of which had never before been seen by the legions of devoted fans. The origins of the streets of Mos Eisley, the X-wing fighter, even the legendary Battle of Hoth, the cantina, the Carbon Freezing Chamber, and many other iconic sets were guided to the silver screen through these critical documents, and could have otherwise been lost to time.

The author:
J. W. Rinzler, executive editor at Lucasfilm Ltd., is the author of The New York Times best seller The Making of Star Wars, as well as the London Times best seller The Complete Making of Indiana Jones. His most recent book is The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Rinzler lives in Petaluma, California.

other contributors:
The weight of history was on author and Lucasfilm executive editor J.W. Rinzler’s shoulders throughout the making of Blueprints. As he culled from hundreds of blueprints those that would most accurately and thrillingly speak to fans and devotees worldwide, there were difficult decisions to make. To make the final cut for the publication of Star Wars: The Blueprints, each of the 200 seminal images included here was selected by Rinzler in collaboration with an expert panel of Academy Award®-winning visual effects artists.

The Panelists:

Dennis Muren
Industrial Light & Magic’s Dennis Muren is an eight-time Oscar-winning special effects artist who helped pioneer and propel visual effects technology through his work on the first five Star Wars films, in addition to other classic films with jaw-dropping special effects including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park and E.T. The visual effects supervisor for the original trilogy, Muren is a revolutionary, and the only special effects artist with his own Hollywood “star” on the Walk of Fame.

John Knoll
Award-winner John Knoll is a visual effects supervisor and author of Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days. Knoll served as Visual Effects Supervisor on the Star Wars prequels and on the 1997 special editions of the original trilogy.

Lorne Peterson
Model-maker Lorne Peterson is an Industrial Light & Magic visual effects artist who worked on all six Star Wars films. In addition, he is the author of the 2006 book, Sculpting a Galaxy: Inside the Star Wars Model Shop, in which he details his experience making classic ships and locations like the Star Destroyer, the T-65 X-wing starfighter, and the Jedi Temple come to life.

Star Wars: The Blueprints By J.W. Rinzler


samples of page layouts:

Includes Star Wars: The Blueprints book, custom-made cloth case, and certificate of authenticity.

Star Wars: The Blueprints
is limited to 5,000 hand-numbered English language copies, with the first 125 copies signed by the three surviving Academy-Award® winners for Best Art Direction (Star Wars, 1978): art director Norman Reynolds; art director Les Dilley; and set dresser Roger Christian. ISBN: 978-160380-1911

Pricing structure for each number range:
Level One: Signed and hand-numbered copies #1-125 @ $1,000
Level Two: Hand-numbered copies #126-5,000 @ $500



all images shown are courtesy of Epic Ink and may not appear exactly as they do in the book. Some have been cropped and/or enlarged in order to show detail.

Modern Mementos Of Macabre Moments in History By Boym

Boym Partners has a different idea of a souvenir than you may be used to. No romantic recollections reproduced in miniature, no glorification of heroes on porcelain plates, no picturesque renditions captured in snow globes.

Instead they have created tabletop architectural miniatures of tragic sites, blueprints of buildings that were the subject of murders, bomb threats and other disasters, and miniature half-built skyscrapers in bright colors interrupted during their construction due to lack of funding. They even have a birdhouse fashioned after the Unabomber's cabin hideaway in Montana.

Since 1998, Boym has chosen to honor buildings as symbols of political or human catastrophe rather than for brilliant form or important client. Hence, their best-known work, Buildings Of Disaster. Made from a specially bonded metal, each architectural miniature cast monument is made in a limited edition of 500.

Initially, it was Boym Partners' innovative three year project, Souvenirs of the End of the Century, a mail-order catalog that went out in November 1988, that spawned their ' Buildings Of Disaster', which is the best selling independent design project of all time.

Described by Creative Director Constantin Boym:

"The end of a century has always been a special moment in human history. While we no longer expect the world to come to an end, we all still share a particular mood of introspection, a desire to look back and to draw comparisons, and a sense of closure and faint hope. Above all, the end of the century is about memory. We think that souvenirs are important cultural objects which can store and communicate memories, emotions and desires. Buildings of Disaster are miniature replicas of famous structures where some tragic or terrible events happened to take place. Some of these buildings may have been prized architectural landmarks, others, non-descript, anonymous structures. But disaster changes everything. The images of burning or exploded buildings make a different, populist history of architecture, one based on emotional involvement rather than on scholarly appreciation. In our media-saturated time, the world disasters stand as people's measure of history, and the sites of tragic events often become involuntary tourist destinations."

above: Once they've sold out, they're gone (as is the case with The Twin Towers Monument, The Texas School Book Depository, the site of President Kennedy's assassination, November 1963) and the Unabomber's cabin. But they continue to add to the collection.

Linda Hale writes:
The Buildings of Disaster project emerged as a response to the end of the tumultuous 20th century. Boym drew inspiration from media repetition, as did Andy Warhol in his own disaster series. Boym acknowledges “one common precedent” but says, “My buildings are commentary not so much on disaster, but on the reflection on the disaster. They have a different sensibility.” The list began with Chernobyl, the Texas School Book Depository, the Watergate complex, and the Unabomber Cabin. A miniature Oklahoma City federal building, its center cratered by a bomb blast, was the first to freeze-frame the impact of terrorism. After Sept. 11, Boym sculpted the Twin Towers scarred by attack, but standing, and a gouged Pentagon. Proceeds went to relief funds. (source)

At present, on their site, the series is consisting of these models:

















At Design Miami 2007, Constantin and Laurene Boym showed a limited edition 24k gold plated version of their Buildings of Disaster in honor of the 10th Anniversary of the infamous architectural model collection:




You can purchase some of these Buildings of Disaster (including other editions not shown here) online at Velocity Art and Design or at Unica home or at New York Gifts or Minima and finally, but most costly, at MOSS online.

But that's not the only way Boym is immortalizing disasters. It may not be as glamorous as Princess Diana's tragic accident or as perversely fascinating as Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch debacle, but today's economic situation is certainly a tragedy that affects all. Boym has created a new series of souvenirs, Recession Souvenirs to be exact, that capture the building of skyscrapers interrupted due to lack of funds, one of the first causualties of the worldwide recession.

Recession Souvenirs: Interrupted Skyscrapers

The collection includes Burj al Alam in Dubai, The Russia Tower in Moscow (planned to be the largest tower in Europe), the Busan Lotte Tower in Korea (designed as the world's tallest hotel), Herzog & de Meuron's Condo Tower in New York at 56 Leonard, and the controversial Cheesegrater Tower intended for the heart of London.



Price is $95.00 USD each, limited number. Available here until sold out.


Bitter Blueprints:

Yet another way Boym has chosen to capture historical calamaties is by printing up digitally offset blueprints of venues such as The Bundy Residence (the scene of the murder of OJ Simpson's ex-wife Nicole) and the Oklahoma City Building. These can be purchased framed in black metal or if you buy four, in a special collector's portfolio.

8.5" x 11" digitally offset blueprints signed and produced in a limited number of 500 each.










They've even recently introduced a limited edition birdhouse based on the Unabomber's Lincoln, Montana shack.

The Unabirdhouse:


Buy the Unabird House here.

The real thing is a macabre memento of its own:

Above: the actual unabomber's cabin after being removed from Montana (photo by Richard Barnes) Check out a video of the real cabin here.



above: Boym Partners; Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym

About Boym Partners, Inc:
Boym Partners Inc was founded in New York in 1986 by Russian born Constantin Boym. In 1989 he earned a Masters degree in Design from Domus University in Milan, and then became a registered U.S. architect in 1988. Laurene Leon Boym has been a part of Boym Partners since 1995. Prior to that she was a Designer in Residence at The Cooper Hewitt in 1993. In 1992 she founded AWID (Association of Women Industrial Designers) and she presently teaches in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

In 2008, the Boym Partners were Finalists in the Product Design Category, National Design Awards, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Their work is published, sold and exhibited worldwide and is in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.


See all their work and shop their online store here.