Chosen Books

Invited designers and commentators have chosen these as the books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
75 books
The American City from the Civil War to the New Deal
Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon
Harvey Kubernik
Charter of the New Urbanism
Michael Leccese et al.
Cities of the World
Georg Braun et al.
The Concise Townscape
Gordon Cullen
Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America
Warren Lehrer et al.
The Culture of Cities
Lewis Mumford
Design Like You Give a Damn
Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity, eds.
Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
John Brinckerhoff Jackson
The Economy of Cities
Jane Jacobs
Energy and Form
Ralph L. Knowles
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Carl E. Schorske
Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping
Rem Koolhaas et al.
The Highway and the City
Lewis Mumford
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel
Robert Alter
The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes
John Brinckerhoff Jackson
The Invention of Tradition
Eric Hobsbawm et al.
Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange our Environment
Giovanna Borasi, ed.
Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City
Filip de Boeck et al.
Le Droit à la ville (Right to the City)
Henri Lefebvre