Architect, interior designer, and product designer Shashi Caan: Shashi Caan Collective (New York and Edinburgh)
Profile    Book List
Born in India, educated in Europe, and with wide experience as a design practitioner and teacher in the U.S., Shashi Caan is the consummate global citizen. “I am an embodiment of my interpretation of the confluence of sometimes conflicting cultural views and constructs,” is how she describes herself in the introduction to the book list that she sent along to Designers & Books.

Car designer Chris Bangle: Chris Bangle Associates (Turin)
book list
As one of the world’s most high-profile and influential car designers of the last two decades (BMW, Mini Cooper, Rolls Royce)—who now runs his own design and design management studio—Chris Bangle is a master of the bold statement. He sent us his book list in “top ten” greatest-hits format.

Architect Peter Pennoyer: Peter Pennoyer Architects (New York)
Profile    Book List
“My father, who was on the New York City Art Commission and the Building Committee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” architect and architectural historian Peter Pennoyer tells Designers & Books, “would bring home pamphlets, plans, and even books from hearings and meetings at which the few building projects proposed in the dim days of the late 1960s and early 1970s were under review. I remember in particular the 1971 master plan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger (New York)
book list
What is the first role of books about architecture? “To interpret and explain: to be, in effect, the label on the museum wall, or the note in the concert program.” So writes architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a new essay for Designers & Books. But that’s only the beginning. He goes on to say, “The greatest buildings, like art and music and literature, can be interpreted in multiple ways. As there is no end to what can be said about Beethoven and Mozart, there is no end to what can be said about the work of Michelangelo and Palladio and Borromini and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn.”