Alan Balfour

Academic; Writer / Architecture / United States / Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Architecture

Scholarship and Imagination: Alan Balfour’s Book List

This list is made up of three parts: first, books that have touched me in the last year or so, most related to supporting and stimulating my own writing; second, writers whose imaginations I can enter, whose books I can get lost within; and third, books that I often return to and continue to value.

4 books
Alexander John Brown Youngson

A beautiful book whose design is matched by brilliant scholarship. Reading it makes one in awe of a society in which, for a short period, wealth was pooled to create a unified reality.

Nick Papadimitriou

A highly subjective exploration of a lost world at the edge of London.

Henry Mayhew
Edited by Peter Quennell

Nothing in Dickens comes even close to describing the underbelly of 19th-century London.

Giorgio Ciucci
Francesco Dal Co
Manfredo Tafuri et al.

Essays on the ideologies driving the formation of the new American city. These European perspectives from the late 1970s and early ‘80s offer much that is new and surprising.

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