Invited designers and commentators have chosen these as the books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
203 books
The World of M. C. Escher
M. C. Escher et al.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
Word and Image: Posters from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Alan M. Fern
Word and Image
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA)
Wiener Werkstätte: Kunst und Handwerk, 1903–1932
Werner Schweiger
What Are You Looking At?
Will Gompertz
Walter Pichler
Walter Pichler et al.
Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art
Griselda Pollock
The Unknown Craftsman
Soetsu Yanagi
The Unfashionable Human Body
Bernard Rudofsky
Théorie du nuage
Hubert Damisch
The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840
Alexander John Brown Youngson
Techniques of the Observer
Jonathan Crary
Système de la Mode (The Fashion System)
Roland Barthes
Suspensions of Perception
Jonathan Crary
Studio and Cube
Brian O’Doherty
Studies in Iconology
Erwin Panofsky
Storia dell’Arte Italiana (3 vols.)
Giulio Carlo Argan
The Stamp of Fantasy
Ute Eskildsen et al.
The Spirit of Folk Art
Henry Glassie
The Shock of the New
Robert Hughes
The Shape of a Pocket
John Berger
Shadow of the Silk Road
Colin Thubron
The Sense of Order
E. H. (Ernst) Gombrich
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
Lawrence Weschler
The Sculptures of Picasso
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Saul Steinberg
Harold Rosenberg
The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934
Margit Rowell et al.
Rodchenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia
David Elliott
Richard Serra, Sculpture
Kynaston McShine et al.