Author(s): Simon Sadler
In the 1960s, the architects of Britain's Archigram group and Archigram magazine turned away from conventional architecture to propose cities that move and houses worn like suits of clothes. In drawings inspired by pop art and psychedelia, architecture floated away, tethered by wires, gantries, tubes, and trucks. In Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Simon Sadler argues that Archigram's sense of fun takes its place beside the other cultural agitants of the 1960s, originating attitudes and techniques that became standard for architects rethinking social space and building technology. The Archigram style was assembled from the Apollo missions, constructivism, biology, manufacturing, electronics, and popular culture, inspiring an architectural movement―High Tech―and influencing the postmodern and deconstructivist trends of the late twentieth century.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Zaida Muxi, Josep Maria Montaner
Arquitectura y política afronta una cuestión clave de la arquitectura contemporánea: su responsabilidad respecto a la sociedad. Para ello realiza un recorrido histórico y temático sobre el papel social de los arquitectos y los urbanistas hasta la actual era de la globalización. A partir de cuestiones como la vida comunitaria, la participación, la igualdad de género o la sostenibilidad, el libro identifica y analiza tanto las vulnerabilidades contemporáneas de la arquitectura como aquellas alternativas que ya se han experimentado, de ahí su subtítulo Ensayos para mundos alternativos.
Suggested by: @i_amdaniela
Author(s): Steen Eiler Rasmussen
A classic examination of superb design through the centuries.
Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence―ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace―Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience.
Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered “what instrument the architect plays on.”
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel
"Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
Suggested by: @devlin.grey
Author(s): Bernhard Leitner
In 1926 philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed and built a house in Vienna for his sister. The only building designed by Wittgenstein, it crystallized his philosophy of architecture—notable for its clarity, precision, and austerity—and served as a foil for his written work.?
This detailed investigation of the house is based on 30 years of extensive research. It examines the formal properties of the structure, including Wittgenstein's attention to proportion, detail, and color. It is also the story of one man's relationship to this extraordinary building: in 1971, author Bernhard Leitner was instrumental in saving the Wittgenstein House from destruction and having it declared a national landmark. In the years since, he has continuously refined his ideas about the house and its architect. The beautifully printed photographs in this volume allow a true appreciation of this icon of modern design. Also included are archival images showing the house as it was originally built, before numerous alterations.
Suggested by: @pibbb25
Author(s): Manfredo Tafuri
Offers a survey of avant-garde architecture, looks at the work of Stirling, Rossi, Gregotti, Venturi, Eisenman, Graves, Hejuk, Argest, and Gandelsonas, and discusses futurism and expressionism.
Suggested by: @deserted_real_
Author(s): Robert Venturi, Vincent Scully (Introduction), Arthur Drexler (Foreword)
First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A "gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture," Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architectureexpresses in the most compelling and original terms the postmodern rebellion against the purism of modernism. Three hundred and fifty architectural photographs serve as historical comparisons and illuminate the author's ideas on creating and experiencing architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was the winner of the Classic Book Award at the AIA's Seventh Annual International Architecture Book Awards.
Suggested by:@caddotexas
Author(s): Juhani Pallasmaa
First published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin has become aclassic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching questionwhy, when there are five senses, has one single sense – sight– become so predominant in architectural culture and design?With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of theimage electronically, it is a subject that has become all the morepressing and topical since the first edition’s publication inthe mid-1990s. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the suppression of theother four sensory realms has led to the overall impoverishment ofour built environment, often diminishing the emphasis on thespatial experience of a building and architecture’s abilityto inspire, engage and be wholly life enhancing.
Author(s): Eric Owen Moss
A collection of SCI-Arc Director and architect Eric Owen Moss' introductions, essays and lectures. Moss draws from a wide range of literary, philosophical and historic sources to discuss the work of architects and theorists from all over the world who have lectured at SCI-Arc, as well as central themes such as 9/11 and the urban development of Los Angeles.
Moss interlaces philosophy and psychology, history and sociology to explore the inquiry posed by the title. He suggests that as a discipline becomes a subject that is taught and learned, rather than explored and questioned, 'it becomes: less impulsive, more method; less instinct, more system; less overrule the rule, more ruled; and in the end, a doctrine.' Perhaps it is the many questions raised that make this concertina-bound book an intriguing read, although the question posted in the title remains unanswered.
Suggested by: @cole_kazuo
Author(s): Atelier Bow Wow
Atelier Bow-Wow has up until now designed about twenty detached houses and holiday villas. An important part of the design process includes the production of technical drawings, which astonish with their level of detail, diversity and spatial depth. This book catalogues 24 designs accompanied by details and elevations and technical specifications.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Atelier Bow Wow
Atelier Bow-Wow allows a crucial inside look at a range of more than 40 recent projects, including residential buildings, public facilities and installations created specifically for exhibitions, with page after page of detailed sectional perspective drawings. These elaborate diagrams are based on section details drafted in the final design phase of each project, whereby the studio seeks the best representation of design characteristics, investigating various parameters by shifting perspectives and drawing in different ways. Latent spatiality and geometric form become readily apparent to the observer, while the graphic anatomy of lines and data informatively depicts each architectural work.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Edward Allen (Author, Illustrator), David Swoboda (Illustrator)
Illustrated with hundreds of illuminating line drawings, this classic guide reveals virtually every secret of a building's function: how it stands up, keeps its occupants safe and comfortable, gets built, grows old, and dies--and why some buildings do this so much better than others.
Edward Allen makes it easy for everyone--from armchair architects and sidewalk superintendents to students of architecture and construction--to understand the mysteries and complexities of even the largest building, from how it recycles waste and controls the movement of air, to how it is kept alive and growing.
Suggested by: @amadi_arch
Author(s): Christiane Crasemann Collins, George R. Collins, Camillo Sitte
First published in 1889, this revolutionary text by a noted Austrian architect and urban planner ignited a new age of city planning. Inspired by medieval and baroque designs, Camillo Sitte emphasized the creation of spacious plazas, enhanced by monuments and other aesthetic elements.
Numerous illustrations highlight this classic, which features extensive commentary, notes, and a bibliography. The acclaimed translation and commentary by George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins includes Sitte's original drawings and plates in a format resembling the original publication. The authors place Sitte's work within the context of its historical and theoretical background, and they establish its relevance to such recent developments in urban theory as the townscape movement and contextualism.
Suggested by: @pibbb25
Author(s): Lebbeus Woods
This book presents the visionary architecture of Lebbus Woods and his concern with the cultural regeneration of society, urban landscapes and social and political conditions.
Suggested by: @deserted_real_
Author(s): Agustin Perez Rubio
SANAA's housing projects, both finished (House A, S House, House in a Plum Grove, Small House and Moriyama House), and unfinished projects (Flower House, Garden & House, Seijo Apartments, Ichikawa Apartments, House in China and Eda Apartments). SANAA's architecture embraces complexities within deceptively simple appearances. It has many elements that are impossible to understand unless actually experienced. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in representative media such as plans, models, and photographs. The representations of their architectural works incorporate ambiguity and chronological elements. This characteristic makes Sanaa one of the most innovative offices in the current architectural panorama.
Suggested by: @andreina.rv
Author(s): Louis I. Kahn, John Lobell
In the development of contemporary architecture, no one has had a greater influence than Louis I. Kahn, whose many buildings include the Salk Institute, the Yale Study Center, and the Exeter Library. He is remembered, however, not only as a master builder, but also as one of the most important and creative thinkers of the twentieth century.
For Kahn, the study of architecture was the study of human beings, their highest aspirations and most profound truths. He searched for forms and materials to express the subtlety and grandeur of life. In his buildings we see the realization of his vision: luminous surfaces that evoke a fundamental awe, silent courtyards that speak of the expansiveness and the sanctity of the spirit, monumental columns and graceful arches that embody dignity and strength.
Suggested by: @nickkousoulou
Author(s): Vitruvius
In De architectura (c.40 BC), Vitruvius discusses in ten encyclopedic chapters aspects of Roman architecture, engineering and city planning. Vitruvius also included a section on human proportions. Because it is the only antique treatise on architecture to have survived, De architectura has been an invaluable source of information for scholars. The rediscovery of Vitruvius during the Renaissance greatly fuelled the revival of classicism during that and subsequent periods. Numerous architectural treatises were based in part or inspired by Vitruvius, beginning with Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1485).
Suggested by: @deserted_real_
Author(s): Anthony Vidler
The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical―serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical―opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.
Suggested by: @ahdgins
Author(s): John Hejduk
For the first time, and in a beautifully designed volume, the collected work projects, drawings, essays, and poems of one of America's foremost architects, architectural thinkers, and educators is brought together. Hejduk, an intellectual descendant of the heroic period of modern architecture, has consistently used and maneuvered the modernist vocabulary, forcing it, in the design process, to reflect his personal poetic vision. Sections, plans, and axonometrics are complemented with rough or thumbnail sketches showing their germination. These beautiful drawings take on a narrative strength when grouped together and serve to illuminate Hejduk's architectonic thoughts. Also integrated within the book are his site-specific sculptures, like the Berlin Masque, and watercolors from the Italian Sketches.
Suggested by: @jayakar_priyadharshan
Author(s): Aldo Rossi
Aldo Rossi, a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza, is also one of the most influential theorists writing today. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.
Suggested by: @jonasalfonsog
Author(s): Will Jones
Drawing by hand is making a big comeback. Tired of ubiquitous slick computer renderings that look the same the world over, architects are rediscovering the importance of this very basic, immediate medium: seeing the world and recasting it through their imagination and visual and manual skill. The resurgence of drawing is not merely a retrograde trend, but an affirmation of the continued importance of sketching as part of the design process. Architects' Sketchbooks is the first survey to present pages from the private sketchbooks of a wide international spectrum of architects, who use drawing to express their spatial ideas while revealing their unique thought processes. Sketches from some 85 architects and studios are featured. Their works range from simple line drawings and clear perspectives to more abstract, artistic compositions, from quick freehand to measured mapping, from spontaneous squiggles on scrap paper to careful drawings on art paper. Accompanying texts by editor Will Jones include comments by the architects and profile how they use sketches to help evolve their initial inspirations and concepts into more developed ideas, revealing the artistry behind the built world.
Suggested by: @alvee.habib
Author(s): Italo Calvino
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers, @ozge.dwg
Author(s): Junya Ishigami
In 2009, Junya Ishigamis workshop design for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology won Japans top architecture award: the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize. This book offers more proof of Ishigamis precocious talent. Plans, designs, photographs, models and writings from various projects illustrate Ishigamis stated aim to embody in architecture that which has never been embodied before. An essay by historian Taro Igarashi assesses Ishigamis importance and success, including his Golden Lion award at the 12th International Architecture Biennale.
Suggested by: @china.l.carr
Author(s): Alain De Botton
The Achitecture of Happiness is a dazzling and generously illustrated journey through the philosophy and psychology of architecture and the indelible connection between our identities and our locations.One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Juhani Pallasmaa
In The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa reveals themiraculous potential of the human hand. He shows how the pencil inthe hand of the artist or architect becomes the bridge between theimagining mind and the emerging image. The book surveys themultiple essences of the hand, its biological evolution and itsrole in the shaping of culture, highlighting how thehand–tool union and eye–hand–mind fusion areessential for dexterity and how ultimately the body and the sensesplay a crucial role in memory and creative work. Pallasmaa herecontinues the exploration begun in his classic work The Eyes ofthe Skin by further investigating the interplay of emotion andimagination, intelligence and making, theory and life, once againredefining the task of art and architecture through well-groundedhuman truths.
Suggested by: @a_sainzs
Author(s): Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, Hans Werlemann
S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society.
The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a "dictionary" of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language -- definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.
Suggested by: @rebe_henki
Author(s): Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokoy, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.
Suggested by: @matt.j.weinberg
Author(s): Tadao Ando
Comprehensive survey of the works of Tadao Ando from his early projects in the 70s to his most recent work. Includes Fuku House, Wall House, Koshino House, Suntory Museum+Plaza, Chapel on Mt.Rokko, Umemiya House, Izu Project, Nariwa Museum, Langen Foundation/Hombroich Omotesando Hills, Chichu Art Museum, Punta della Dogana Contemporary Art Centre, Abu Dhabi Maritime Museum and many more.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Lawrence Weschler
When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist "who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it." Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects―in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus―enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.
Suggested by: @pibbb25
Author(s): K. Michael Hays
An anthology of the pivotal theoretical texts that have defined architecture culture in the late twentieth century.
In the discussion of architecture, there is a prevailing sentiment that, since 1968, cultural production in its traditional sense can no longer be understood to rise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but must now be constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes―post-structuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric―has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architectures general importance in intellectual discourse.
This anthology presents forty-seven of the primary texts of architecture theory, introducing each with an explication of the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear here in English for the first time.
Suggested by: @deserted_real_, @nataliebezarashvili
Author(s): K. Michael Hays
Oppositions, founded in September 1973 and discontinued in 1984, was a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture published by the now-defunct Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. Editors Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, and Mario Gandelsonas assembled essays by leading architecture practitioners and theorists. The earliest issues are now collectors' items, and the journal continues to influence each new generation of architects.The Oppositions Reader collects the most important essays from the 11 year history of Oppositions.
Suggested by: @deserted_real_
Author(s): Edward T. Hall
People like to keep certain distances between themselves and other people or thigns. And this invisible bubble of space that constitutes each person's "territory" is one of the key dimensions of modern society. Edward T. Hall, author of The Silent Language, introduced the science of proxemics to demonstrate how man's use of space can affect personal and business reltions, cross-cultural interactions, architecture, city planning, and urban renewal.
Suggested by: @rebardesign
Author(s): Jane Jacobs
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Citieshas, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.
Suggested by: @fectbro
Authors(s): Ernst Neufert, Peter Neufert
Neufert's Architects' Data is an essential reference for the initial design and planning of a building project. It provides, in one concise volume, the core information needed to form the framework for the more detailed design and planning of any building project. Organised largely by building type, it covers the full range of preliminary considerations, and with over 6200 diagrams it provides a mass of data on spatial requirements.
Most illustrations are dimensioned and each building type includes plans, sections, site layouts and design details. An extensive bibliography and a detailed set of metric/ imperial conversion tables are included. Since it was first published in Germany in 1936.
Suggested by: @ukharchitect
Author(s): Jimenez Lai
Citizens of No Place is a collection of short stories on architecture and urbanism, graphically represented using manga-style storyboards. Fiction is used as a strategy to unpack thoughts about architecture. Modeled as a proto-manifesto, it is a candid chronicle of a highly critical thought process in the tradition of paper architecture (especially that of architect John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi's Manhattan Transcript). The short stories explore many architectural problems through the unique language of the graphic novel, helping usher the next generation of architectural theory and criticism.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers, @vkevlr
Author(s): Peter Zumthor
Thinking Architecture is a highly materialist/phenomenological piece, this book could be read as a way of opposing the loud and modern world. Its author is a fierce as a critic of contemporary content and formal exercises (one can well imagine that mindless Hadids, Gehrys and Libeskinds populating urban centers worldwide) he is nevertheless aiming somewhere between tradition and modernity.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers, @ruddychadrac, @rizqiempe, @benyaminkevin
Author(s): Francis D. K. Ching
Architecture: Form, Space, and Order, Fourth Edition is the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design, updated with new information on emerging trends and recent developments. This bestselling visual reference helps both students and professionals understand the vocabulary of architectural design by examining how space and form are ordered in the environment.
Essential and timeless, the fundamental elements of space and form still present a challenge to those who crave a deeper understanding. Taking a critical look at the evolution of spaces,Architecture distills complex concepts of design into a clear focus that inspires, bringing difficult abstractions to life.The book is illustrated throughout to demonstrate the concepts presented, and show the relationships between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultures.
Suggested by @architectzee, @venkat_viswanathan_
Author(s): Peter Zumthor
In nine short, illustrated chapters framed as a process of self-observation, Peter Zumthor describes what he has on his mind as he sets about creating the atmosphere of his houses. Images of spaces and buildings that affect him are every bit as important as particular pieces of music or books that inspire him.
Author(s): Edward De Bono
The first practical explanation of how creativity works, this results-oriented bestseller trains listeners to move beyond a "vertical" mode of thought to tap the potential of lateral thinking.
This book is intended for use both at home and at school. At school the emphasis has traditionally always been on vertical thinking which is effective but incomplete. This book is about lateral thinking which is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practiced and used. It is impossible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.
Suggested by:@jonathancharlys
Author(s): Rem Koolhaas
Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture.
Suggested by: @desertedreal, @camilo.dwg, @lana__star_
Author(s): Andrea Palladio, Adolf K. Placzek (Introduction)
The Four Books of Architecture offers a compendium of Palladio's art and of the ancient Roman structures that inspired him. The First Book is devoted to building materials and techniques and the five orders of architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. Palladio indicates the characteristic features of each order and supplies illustrations of various architectural details. The Second Book deals with private houses and mansions, almost all of Palladio's own design. Shown and described are many of his villas in and near Venice and Vicenza (including the famous Villa Capra, or "The Rotunda," the Thiene Palace, and the Valmarana Palace). Each plate gives a front view drawing of the building and the general floor plan. The Third Book is concerned with streets, bridges, piazzas, and basilicas, most of which are of ancient Roman origin. In the Fourth Book, Palladio reproduces the designs of a number of ancient Roman temples. Plates 51 to 60 are plans and architectural sketches of the Pantheon.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers
Author(s): Bernard Tschumi
An autobiographical look at the work of a seminal modernist architect. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the architecture of Bernard Tschumi. Part monograph, part architectural theory, and part story, the book narrates a three-decade journey through a personal history of architecture and architectural ideas, intertwining theory, practice, and hypothetical projects with forty built works. From Tschumi’s many written works, such as Architecture and Disjunction and The Manhattan Transcripts to such renowned projects as the Parc de la Villette in Paris, major concert halls in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Rouen and Limoges, France, a high-rise in Manhattan, the Vacheron Constantin Headquarters in Geneva, the Paris Zoo, and the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the book presents a profusely illustrated tour through the work of the architect, set in the context of a rich history of architectural ideas. Written for the layperson as well as the specialist, the book is an entertaining narrative about the condition of architecture today.
Suggested by: @enmanueldeoleo
Author(s): Le Corbusier
For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials."
Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians―but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions, and innovative theories of one of this century's master builders.
Suggested by: @mariaflowers, @mh__forouzanfar
Author(s): Kengo Kuma
Kengo Kuma is one of Japan’s most prominent architects, with a growing international practice. His projects have been widely praised for their beauty, clarity and attention to detail. One of the key issues in the architecture of Kengo Kuma is the way it responds to its setting. Unlike many important figures of Western modernism, who have promoted the idea of the isolated architectural object, his work attempts to have a tight fight with its immediate context. In Anti-Object Kuma traces in philosophical terms his approach to architecture, revealing influences from Kant and Bruno Taut to the Japanese tradition of ‘weaker’ buildings characterised by their use of natural light and natural materials.
Architecture Words is a series of texts and important essays on architecture written by architects, critics and scholars. Like many aspects of everyday life, contemporary architectural culture is dominated by an endless production and consumption of images, graphics and information. Rather than mirror this larger force, this series of small books seeks to deflect it by means of direct language, concise editing and beautiful, legible graphic design. Each volume in the series offers the reader texts that distil important larger issues and problems, and communicate architectural ideas; not only the ideas contained within each volume, but also the enduring power of written ideas more generally to challenge and change the way all architects think.
Suggested by: @pedrotpo
Author(s): Kevin Lynch
The classic work on the evaluation of city form.
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion―imageability―and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Suggested by: @clarizemakesmooi
Author(s): Louis H. Sullivan
In this creative, seminal work, his theories about architecture, art, education, and life in general are presented in the form of dialogues, or "chats," between an architect and a novice. Sullivan's contempt for 19th-century eclectic architecture ("That the bulk of our architecture is rotten to the core, is a statement which does not admit of one solitary doubt"), his striving for a more functional approach, and his theory of the skyscraper are just a few of the principles and insights that emerge in these pages. As the architect and writer Claude Bragdon has remarked: "Kindergarten Chats remains in my memory as one of the most provocative, amusing, astounding, inspiring things that I have ever read."
This edition is the first low-priced reprint of the 1918 definitive edition of Kindergarten Chats, which was personally revised by Sullivan himself, who rewrote those chapters and generally streamlined the argument of the original version. Eight additional papers, covering the years 1885–1906, supplement the basic text: they include "Ornament in Architecture," "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," "The Young Man in Architecture," and "What is Architecture?" Architecture students, architects, artists, educators, and readers who enjoy the stimulus of a lively and iconoclastic mind will all be attracted by the magnetic power of this bold, thought-provoking book.
Suggested by: @jonny.rohrbaugh
Author(s): William J. Carpenter
Learning by Building challenges today's architects and students to experience the energy and creativity of construction. Based on the example of famous architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, who considered construction an integral part of the design process, "design-build" is standard practice in growing numbers of today's architecture firms. Architect and professor William J. Carpenter explores ways to integrate construction into architectural education, bridging the gap between theory and practice--between designing and building. Mr. Carpenter traces the history of construction in architectural education, from medieval times, to Jefferson's Monticello, to the German Bauhaus. He cites twentieth-century artists such as Richard Serra and Donald Judd, whose work is generated by the process of making; like the artist, "the architect should be immersed in the potential of construction." Ten in-depth case studies of schools that have incorporated design-build into their curriculum illustrate how construction studios help future architects learn real-life pragmatics and collaboration.
Suggested by: @modartdriver
