Marc Newson was already the most influential industrial designer of his generation when, in 2010, his Lockheed Lounge chair—conceived in 1985, when he was 22—was sold at auction for $2.1 million, a record for a contemporary-design piece. Vaguely peanut-shaped and decidedly un-cozy, the Lockheed is made of a hunk of fiberglass clad in panels of stainless steel, riveted into place, like the surface of a Lockheed Electra fuselage. It was one of the native Australian’s first projects out of the Sydney College of the Arts, where he studied jewelry and sculpture. Newson himself did the pneumatic riveting on the original run of these chairs, building them bespoke as the orders trickled in.

“All I ever seem to be doing—or wanting to do—is master a certain material and process of technology,” he says. “Every project is like a little university degree.”

A new book, titled Marc Newson: Works(Taschen, $1,000), is an encyclopedic catalogue of his creations so far, and could be consulted as a text for designers-in-training who wish to understand the minute steps of the Newsonian process. It covers everything he has ever created. You can track the evolution of his obsession with easy edges and compound curves—legacies of the trailblazers Raymond Loewy and Charles Eames, two giants of mid-20th-century American design, who defined the 1950s and 60s, the era Newson says he likes best. The book runs the gamut from gargantuan projects such as his top-to-bottom design for Qantas’s A380 jumbo jets to his Aquariva speedboat, to the intricately faced Ikepod watches.

“I included the good, the bad, the ugly—and a lot of stuff that never got done,” New­son says of the book. “It’s a bit like going to a shrink, be­cause you get to analyze every single thing. It was a very cathartic experience.”