Dark Pools (Almost Everything) is a shadow of Mies van der Rohe Furniture and Drawings, the catalog for an exhibition at MoMA dedicated to the architect’s furniture. Massimo Vignelli designed the slender paperback with brutal simplicity. Yet the longer I lived with the original, reading and studying it, I could not shake a sense of dread. Something dreadful lurked between the pages. I think that is because the utopia imagined by Mies and Vignelli never arrived. Machine production rendered craftsman irrelevant. Minimal forms did not improve daily life. Beautiful, innovative designs became ordinary filling bank lobbies and corporate boardrooms. Dark Pools inverts the original. Text has been erased except for years and page numbers. Time remains while context is erased. Black is white. Shiny is matte. The cover is screen-printed by hand instead of machine-printed. The book is still elegant and stark, but the darkness is clear. Much is obscured and yet more, perhaps, is revealed. –Aaron Krach, 2016