Architecture

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29 blog entries

Books on Designers

February 20, 2014

Fifteen books from our contributors on American architect Louis I. Kahn (February 20, 1901– March 17, 1974). Updated May 1, 2022.

Additional books can be found on The Louis I. Kahn Facsimile Project. More...

Architecture

A Most Exciting Vision: Cesar Pelli’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter February 7, 2012

Architect Cesar Pelli: Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (New Haven, Connecticut)
Profile Book List
Recognized for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in architecture—he is the recipient of more than 200 awards and prizes for his contributions to the field—Cesar Pelli has designed some of the contemporary world’s most famous buildings. More...

Architecture

A Tool for Understanding Our Relationship with the World Around Us: Books Every Product Designer Should Read—Zoë Ryan

By Steve Kroeter August 23, 2011

Architecture and design curator Zoë Ryan: Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago)
book list
When Zoë Ryan—as of this July, the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago—gave us her list of books for product designers, she emphasized that she found it hard to be limited by disciplines or categories and that her view of design was an expansive one. More...

Architecture

Agents of Change: Galia Solomonoff’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter February 14, 2012

Architect Galia Solomonoff: Solomonoff Architecture Studio (SAS) (New York)
Profile Book List
The architect Galia Solomonoff, a native of Argentina, traces her attachment to books to a memorable incident: “In 1975, my parents burned a significant and dear part of our library as Isabel Perón signed a number of decrees empowering the military to ‘annihilate’ the Argentine left. It was a Sunday morning in winter. We were at our suburban house on the Paraná River and I was seven. I passed books to my father in silence; we did a barbecue to cover up the burning of the books.” More...

Architecture

Almanacs and Encyclopedias, Conjectures and Theoretical Arguments: Neil Denari’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter June 19, 2012

Architect Neil Denari: Neil M. Denari Architects (Los Angeles)
Profile Book List
Architect Neil Denari is “primarily a reader of nonfiction.” He tells Designers & Books, “Reports, almanacs, and encyclopedias have always interested me as they dryly lay out apparently unbiased information. I am also interested in the opposite: spurious conjectures, crackpot theories, conspiracies, and theoretical arguments.” More...

Architecture

Amazing Ideas into the Future: Winka Dubbeldam’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter August 2, 2011

Architect Winka Dubbeldam: Archi-Tectonics (New York)
book list
In an interview earlier this year, Winka Dubbeldam recalled that her parents enjoyed buying and building new homes—an obsession that resulted in her moving 15 times in the 17 years she lived with them. It isn’t really a surprise, then, that she ended up as an architect with a particular interest in progressive residential work. Her worldwide reputation now also extends to office tower, commercial, hospitality, and interior design work. More...

Architecture

An Appetite for Nearly Everything I Encounter: Craig Hodgetts’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter February 28, 2012

Architect Craig Hodgetts: Hodgetts + Fung Design and Architecture (Los Angeles)
Profile Book List
Since the 1970s, when he collaborated with Robert Mangurian in the cutting-edge firm Studio Works, to his talked-about recent installation with partner Hsinming Fung for the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition California Design, 1930–1965 (on view through June 3, 2012, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Craig Hodgetts has pursued a remarkable range of interests. In his architecture, writing, and teaching, he has drawn on automotive and lighting design, information technology, and theater and film, among many other areas. He has, as he says in the introduction to the list he created for Designers & Books, “an appetite for nearly everything I encounter.” More...

Architecture

Anticipating the Future: Florian Idenburg’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter January 15, 2013

Architect Florian Idenburg: Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (Brooklyn, New York)
Profile Book List
In a comment he makes for Designers & Books about Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book he calls “pretty essential for anyone who ‘designs’ for the future,” architect Florian Idenburg notes that it “tells us we cannot predict, thus depict, what the future will be—all we can do is anticipate.” More...

Architecture

Author Q&A with Kenneth Frampton: Five North American Architects

By Steve Kroeter August 23, 2012

Architecture professor and architect Kenneth Frampton: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (New York)
Profile
In honor of his 80th birthday, Kenneth Frampton—Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where he has taught since 1972—was invited by the dean of the School, Mark Wigley, to “curate an event.” Frampton chose to structure the event, a symposium, as an “occasion to present something of the current state of architecture as a North American practice,” focusing on the U.S. and Canada. More...

Architecture

Author Q&A with Mark Foster Gage: Aesthetic Theory

By Steve Kroeter April 26, 2012

Architect and Architecture Professor Mark Foster Gage: Gage/Clemenceau Architects (New York) and Yale University School of Architecture (New Haven)
Profile
Architect and Yale University School of Architecture professor Mark Foster Gage discusses the recent collection of writings he edited that explore contemporary architecture and beauty, Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design (W. W. Norton, October 2011). More...

Announcements

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People

By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022

Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

Order the book.

Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

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Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

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