Architecture

Scholarship and Imagination: Alan Balfour’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter February 12, 2013

Alan Balfour

Architecture school dean Alan Balfour: College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)

Dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture Alan Balfour divides his book list for Designers & Books in a way that reflects his distinguished career as a scholar, author, and educator. The book list contains, he states in his introduction, “first, books that have touched me in the last year or so, most related to supporting and stimulating my own writing; second, writers whose imaginations I can enter, whose books I can get lost within; and third, books that I often return to and continue to value.”

Balfour is the author of eight books on architectural subjects—and a contributor to many more. Though the city is the ostensible subject of his writing in recent years, which includes titles on Berlin, Shanghai, and New York, his underlying concern has been with exploring the cultural imagination.* His newest book, Solomon’s Temple: Myth, Conflict, and Faith (December 2012, Wiley-Blackwell), a highly praised architectural history of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, one of the world’s most hotly disputed sites, doubles as a social and cultural history of this region of the Middle East. Recently read books that Balfour says have connected to his own writing include W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (also on Maira Kalman’s book list). “Sebald writes about memory and the loss of memory (both personal and collective) and the decay of civilizations, traditions, or physical objects—buildings and beliefs,” Balfour observes.

Other titles that have resonated with his recent writing are Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road, Nick Papademitriou’s Scarp, and The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, an author Balfour values for her “highly readable, extraordinary scholarship on religion and culture in many books over 30 years.”

Alan Balfour, Solomon’s Temple: Myth Conflict, and Faith, 2012 (Wiley-Blackwell)

Books whose worlds Balfour “can get lost within” range from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Year of the Flood (“raw, bizarre, yet prophetic,” says Balfour) to William Vollman’s Imperial, a history of the land of California’s migrant workers. There is also Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, which Balfour describes as “a glorious interweaving of scholarship and imagination.”

In the last category of books—those Balfour returns to often—are three histories of cities. The American City from the Civil War to the New Deal offers the perspectives of the late-20th-century Italian architectural theorists and historians Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, and Manfredo Tafuri. Then, of Mayhew’s London, originally published in 1851, Balfour says, “Nothing in Dickens comes even close to describing the underbelly of 19th-century London.” And finally there is the frequently reprinted (originally published in 1966) study The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840 by Alexander John Brown Youngson. Balfour, who co-authored Creating a Scottish Parliament with David McCrone, comments on this title, “ A beautiful book whose design is matched by brilliant scholarship. Reading it makes one in awe of a society in which, for a short period, wealth was pooled to create a unified reality.”

* http://www.designersandbooks.com/commentator/bio/alan-balfour

View Alan Balfour’s Profile

View Alan Balfour’s Book List

See more architects’ book lists and blog posts

comments powered by Disqus

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.

Order the book.

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.”

Order the book.

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.

Order the book.