Here are 100 books that Experiencing Architecture fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.
Architecture is always a collaboration between the architect who conceives the project, the builder who must realize it, and the client who starts it—and pays for it The protracted building process, which is often stressful, is always a complicated pas de trois. No one has written about this better than Tracy Kidder, who describes the complex choreography by following (in real-time and in detail) the construction of a family home in New England.
In the New York Times bestseller House, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges, and triumphs.
In Kidder's "remarkable piece of craftsmanship in itself" (Chicago Tribune), constructing a staircase or applying a coat of paint becomes a riveting tale of conflicting wills, the strength and strain of relationships, and pride in skills. With drama, sensitivity, and insight, he takes us from blueprints to moving day, shedding light on objects usually taken for granted and creating a vivid cast…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.
Buildings are a product of the artistic imagination and building technology, but they also depend on political will and cultural capital. Ross King, a skillful storyteller, describes how all these played a role in the construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in fifteenth-century Florence. Its maker, the great Filippo Brunelleschi, was the first architect in the modern sense, and in many ways the story of Western architecture begins here.
This work tells the story of the largest masonry dome ever built, describing the tremendous labour, technical ingenuity and bitter personal strife involved in its creation. Initially regarded as impossible to build, the construction of the dome, for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, became the greatest architectural puzzle of the age, and, when finally completed in 1436, was hailed as one of the great wonders of the world. Also told is the story of the dome's architect, the brilliant and volatile Fillippo Brunelleschi. His ambition and ingenuity, personal rivalries and intrigues are set in the context…
I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.
If you’ve ever wondered why modern buildings look the way they do—and look so different from say, the buildings of our grandparents’ generation—you cannot do better than read this collection of essays that examines the current state of modern architecture. Glazer, a sociologist who was a noted public intellectual, brings a down-to-earth intelligence and a sharp eye to his subject.
Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.
Kidder’s book is non-fiction, but Eric Hodgins’s 1946 architectural account, although influenced by his own experience of building a house, is fictional; the novel was later made into a hit movie starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. It’s a very funny story that exaggerates—but only slightly—the travails faced by anyone undertaking this challenging task. Weathering the challenge, as Mr. Blandings discovers, requires fortitude, patience, and yes, a sense of humor.
The classic tale of leaving the city and building a house in the country, only to find country life isn't so simple. But it is hilarious. Mr. Blandings, a successful New York advertising executive, and his wife want to escape the confines of their tiny midtown apartment. They design the perfect home in the idyllic country, but soon they are beset by construction troubles, temperamental workmen, skyrocketing bills, threatening lawyers, and difficult neighbors. Mr. Blandings' dream house soon threatens to be the nightmare that undoes him. This internationally bestselling book by Eric Hodgins is illustrated by William Steig and was…
I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.
If you’re in the middle of renovating and feel like you’ve lost your way, you might need a new perspective. This book will get you back on track.
Easy for laypeople to understand—the writing is simple and elegant—it’s philosophical and wise. It might even change how you look at the world, or at least the way you look at architecture. Hopefully, you’ll remember why you’re renovating in the first place.
What makes a house beautiful? Is it serious to spend your time thinking about home decoration? Why do people disagree about taste? Can buildings make us happy? In The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton tackles a relationship central to our lives. Our buildings - and the objects we fill them with - affect us more profoundly than we might think. To take architecture seriously is to accept that we are, for better and for worse, different people in different places. De Botton suggests that it is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be. Turning…
My passion as a teacher and writer is to help students and others interpret, understand and enjoy architecture and the built environment, and to help them respond in their own designs to the complexities of place, people, and construction. I have chosen five well-established books on analysing architecture that are highly illustrated, avoid jargon, can be explored rather than needing to be read sequentially cover-to-cover, and have lasting value. They offer guidance for beginning students and a checklist for the experienced. They are books to be kept handy and repeatedly consulted. Of course, analysing existing architecture is invaluable in designing new architecture. I hope you enjoy them.
If it’s good, this book should obviously be on my list - and it is good.
Simon Unwin explains how architectural themes (a mix including elements, geometries, types, and sensory experience) work together to create a particular place. It has thoughtful text illustrated with his own drawings.
Unwin’sTwenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand demonstrates his approach to analysis in more detailed examples.
Now in its fifth edition, Analysing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those studying architecture, it offers a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fascinating subject. With copious illustrations from his own notebooks, the author dissects examples from around the world and all periods of history to explain the underlying strategies in architectural design and show how drawing may be used as a medium for analysis.
In this new edition, Analysing Architecture has been revised and expanded. Notably, the chapter on 'How Analysis Can Help Design' has…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am a design-obsessed George Washington University (Washington, DC) professor, author, architect, interior designer, sketcher, modernist, city lover, traveler, and University of Michigan alumni who writes about topics on architecture and interior design for people of all ages and backgrounds. Everyone lives in the built environment, but not everyone understands it. For example, sketching is one of the best ways to understand a piece of furniture, interior, or building. You will never see the object the same way after you draw it! All of the books on this list are approachable, interesting, fun, and most importantly inspiring. Enjoy!
This is a fun sketching book to let your imagination run wild. More than just a coloring book, there are visual prompts that allow the user to modify or redesign an iconic building, or create one from scratch. It provides the framework; you provide the artistry. For kids and adults of all ages, this book will provoke creativity and encourage the architect in everyone.
This innovative book is the first to provide a fun, interactive way to learn about architecture. Filled with an array of beautiful and elegant drawings, it poses all manner of architectural challenges for the user: from designing your own skyscraper, to drawing an island house or creating a Constructivist monument, plus many others more.
Aimed at anyone who loves drawing buildings, it encourages the user to imagine their own creative solutions by sketching, drawing and painting in the pages of the book. In so doing, they will learn about a whole range of significant architectural issues, such as the importance…
As a practicing architect, and an avid reader—in a variety of subjects and genres, not just architecture—I love finding patterns and connections between seemingly dissimilar phenomena. Patterns conform to principles, and principles are the fountainhead of wisdom that never runs dry. I will be the first to admit that, even after forty years of absorbing these and other kindred principles, I’m still far from consistent in applying them. And, like the others I cite, my own work suffers from that inconsistency. I commiserate with all architects who are similarly struggling to design buildings that exemplify even a few of the principles in these books. And that is why I chose them.
Over his lifetime, Alexander’s controversial approach to architecture incited widespread criticism, yet it is precisely these unique and thought-provoking ideas that make The Nature of Order an essential read. Beyond his sometimes obscure writing style and lackluster built examples, Alexander's deep commitment to architecture as a complex layered system of patterns—an idea he first popularized in his hippy-architects bible, A Pattern Language—is still palpable in this four-volume magnum opus.
I found the second volume, where he offers a guide for how to “create life” through patterns, most pertinent to this list. Here he distills his earlier work down to fifteen essential patterns that lead to architecture as a living structure. There is gold to be mined here, for those in search of some semblance of order in the chaotic current of modern architecture.
Christopher Alexander's masterwork, the result of 27 years of research, considers three vital perspectives: a scientific perspective; a perspective based on beauty and grace; a commonsense perspective based on our intuitions and everyday life.
I am both a musician and an author: a Juilliard-trained professional composer who fell into writing after a Ph.D. in electronic music at NYU. Both of my biographies—a favorite genre—chronicle the lives of inventors who married music to electronics and altered the trajectory of music. But their lives each took strange turns—sometimes in almost fictional dimensions—demonstrating that leaving a technological and artistic mark on posterity often has a black side that history overlooked. I’m fascinated by the psychic profiles of my subjects, and I love books that show how character is not black and white—that those who moved the needle of human progress also harbored dark realms in their personalities.
As a New Yorker, I’ve glanced fleetingly over the years at architect Philip Johnson’s monumental structures that dot the city, and as a Ph.D. student, I spent hours researching under the atrium of his Bobst Library at NYU, assuming incorrectly—as this book demonstrates—that Johnson was a traditionally-schooled, distinguished architect of sound personal character. Lamster’s revealing biography untangles a disturbingly complex man—an almost gentleman farmer among architects with limited technical background, lofty plans, and a lifelong engagement with fascism.
This book pulls back the curtain to unveil an unexpected trail of machinations between Johnson and his circle of the wealthy and powerful, showing how a doyen of modern culture hid his failings from the public behind the façade of his towering creations.
When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable--and influential--figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as one of America's leading architects with his famous Glass House in New Caanan, CT, and his controversial AT&T Building in NYC, among many others in nearly every city in the country--but his most natural role was as a consummate power broker and shaper of public opinion.
Johnson introduced European modernism--the sleek, glass-and-steel architecture that now dominates our cities--to…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
As a student fifty years ago I struggled with architecture. I have spent my whole career as an architect and teacher trying to understand how it works. All my books are intended to convey that understanding to others as clearly as I can. I believe that architecture is a universal language of place-making, simply and directly expressed in the traditional architectures of different cultures around the world, and lifted into the realms of poetry by some gifted individuals. For many years I taught at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, Wales. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Dundee in Scotland.
All of my recommendations are about the ways modern architects have learnt from traditional architecture. The first appeared when I began working on the first edition ofAnalysing Architecture back in the 1990s. It is Kevin Nute’s exploration of the ideas that Frank Lloyd Wright gleaned from encounters with traditional Japanese architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nute’s book influenced my perception of architectural creativity as not fitting neatly into separate historical/stylistic categories, but as a realm of possible cross-fertilisation across cultures.
This book is the first thorough account of Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship with Japan and its arts. It presents significant new information on the nature and extent of Wright's formal and philosophical debt to Japanese art and architecture.
Eight primary channels of influence are examined in detail, from Japanese prints to specific individuals and publications, and the evidence of their impact on Wright is illustrated through a mixture of textual and drawn analyses.
