Invited designers and commentators have chosen these as the books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
1650 books
Architecture: Choice or Fate
Léon Krier
Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity
Marvin Trachtenberg et al.
Architecture in Britain 1530–1830
John Summerson
The Architecture of Michelangelo
James S. Ackerman
The Architecture of Community
Léon Krier
The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times
Henry-Russell Hitchcock
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste
Geoffrey Scott
The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens
A.S.G. Butler
Architecture of Truth
François Cali
Architecture on the Edge of Postmodernism
Robert A. M. Stern et al.
Architecture and Utopia
Manfredo Tafuri
The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
Reyner Banham
Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
Francis D. K. Ching
The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Bernhard Leitner
Architettura addio
Alessandro Mendini
Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement
Leonard Koren et al.
Art & Fear
David Bayles et al.
Art and Politics in the Weimar Period
John Willett
Art and Visual Perception
Rudolf Arnheim
Art Deco Jewelry
Sylvie Raulet
Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding
Alastair Duncan et al.
The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communication
George Lois
The Art of Eating
M. F. K. Fisher
The Art of Fiction
David Lodge
The Art of Florence
Glenn M. Andres et al.
Art of the Natural World
Robert Rosenblum
The Art of Travel
Alain de Botton
Artists at Work: Inside the Studios of Today’s Most Celebrated Artists
David Seidner
The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art
Fritz Neumeyer
Arts & Architecture: The Entenza Years
Barbara Goldstein, ed.
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
As Long as It’s Pink
Penny Sparke