Books Every Architect Should Read: Kent Kleinman’s Book List
By Steve Kroeter August 28, 2012
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| Kent Kleinman |
Dean and architect Kent Kleinman: Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (Ithaca, New York)
In time for a new academic year for design and architecture schools, our newest “dean’s list” of books comes from Kent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Although he enjoys “access to one of the finest collections of art and architecture books in the country at Cornell University. . . there are books with which one forges a special bond, books that are not necessarily greatest hits but ones that become intellectual companions,” Kleinman says in the introduction to his book list for Designers & Books. These are “books I admire greatly, durable accomplishments in and around the subject of architecture, books that have informed my thinking and to which I return often.” He considers each book “in its specificity—its binding, font, layout, and weight, the post-its and marginalia—as a gift of thought and a form of physical connection to the author.”
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| Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer, Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas, 2005 (Princeton Architectural Press) |
Among the titles that make the list are John Hejduk’s Education of an Architect: A Point of View, which Kleinman calls “an extraordinary publication . . a manifesto, a declaration of intent, a collective effort by faculty and students forged into a powerful vision of an architectural pedagogy, a landmark, and a beautifully crafted book.” He cites Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals for its “special qualities that at the time [1985] were groundbreaking,” including Kostof’s insistence on showing a building’s context. “Architecture, in the end,” Kostof writes in this book, “is nothing less than the gift of making places for some human purpose.”
Kleinman challenges would-be readers of Clifford Geerz’s witty study The Interpretation of Culture to “read the first chapter called ‘Thick Description,’ and see if you ever experience a wink as you once did….” He also advises members of the architectural profession to translate the entirety of Adolf Loos’s essays, collected in Trotzdem (“Nevertheless”), which is on Kleinman’s book list: “As a discipline, we should get organized and get the entire opus translated and published.”
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| Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal. eds., After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, 2011 (Princeton Architectural Press) |
And about Walter Pichler: Drawings, Sculpture, Buildings, which features the work of the visionary Austrian architect and artist who became known in the early 1960s and passed away this July. Kleinman states: “Anyone not familiar with his major projects should get this book. The inventiveness produced by self-imposed constraints of site, materials, and processes is astonishing. It is a great loss that Walter passed away recently.”
A scholar of 20th-century European modernism, Kleinman is the author or editor of five books, including analyses of the work of Mies van der Rohe and Adolf Loos, and most recently After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (2011, Princeton Architectural Press), which explores the role of taste in the evolution of interior design as a discipline from the 18th to the 20th century.
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Understanding Understanding: New from Richard Saul Wurman
Understanding Understanding
by Richard Saul Wurman
Publisher: Richard Saul Wurman and Jack Dangermond
Published July 30, 2017
From the author of Information Architecture, who says about his newest book: “This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. . . Before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand.”
The Hard Life by Jasper Morrison
The Hard Life
by Jasper Morrison
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published in US: May 22, 2017
Photographs taken by designer Jasper Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal. “The objects photographed and described may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest. The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy.”
Paula Scher: Works - Order from Unit Editions
Paula Scher: Works
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin
Publisher: Unit Editions
Published April 2017
New book covering the career of of master designer Paula Scher, called “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.” (Ellen Lupton), This definitive, chronological visual record spans Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.
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Type Tells Tales: New from Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Type Tells Tales
by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published May 30, 2017
Reveals how type can become both content and illustration, as letters take the form of people, animals, cars, or planes. With numerous illustrations by F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Munari, and Francis Picabia, among others, as well as by contemporary designers such as Richard Eckersley, John Hendrix, Maira Kalman, and Corita Kent.
The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design: New from Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
The Moderns
by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
Publisher: Abrams
Published September 19, 2017
Featuring more than 60 designers whose magazine, book, and record covers; advertisements and package designs; posters; and other projects created the visual aesthetics of postwar modernity in America. Some were émigrés from Europe; others were homegrown; all were intoxicated by elemental typography, primary colors, photography, and geometric or biomorphic forms. Some are well-known, others are honored in this volume for the first time, and together they comprised a movement that changed our design world.
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