
Barry Bergdoll
Books Every Architect Should Read
Long before I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study architectural history, I knew I wanted to collect books. Arranging my books in new classification systems in my room at home as a teenager on rainy days, I even imagined that being a librarian might be the best of all possible worlds. Ever since then I’ve had at least as many books I intend to read as books I have actually read. And ever since then I have been torn between the idea of a small collection of desert island books and a big house with every room lined in books—“dessert island” books, I suppose one could call those that would line the dining room—so that every after dinner conversation might be seasoned with reading and shared books. For a long time I thought my library should emulate those where I had the luck of spending many of my days.
Growing up I tried to replicate the methods of the beautiful library in my suburb, the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, built in honor of the Shakespeare scholar sister-in-law of Frank Furness—one of my earliest passions in architecture (my great-grandmother had studied at his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).
When I discovered the Avery Library as a freshman at Columbia University, I realized that as much for its buildings as for its books, New York City was the place where I wanted to stay as long as possible. Worried that might not happen, I didn’t learn the lesson that books might always be nearby in beautiful rooms designed by McKim, Mead & White or Carrère and Hastings and managed and organized by others. I still thought to replicate the great working architecture library alone, despite the strain on the floorboards. I would be ready to travel wherever professional life might take me, armed with a library! At Avery and then at Cambridge, where Robin Middleton was librarian when I was a student, I also gained the knowledge that came from books as objects and not simply as transmitters of information.
Lately, my library has burst again, and once again I am undertaking the futile task of organizing the books in a system that makes sense, even as the possession of beautiful new, and temporarily empty shelves seems like a wonderful new beginning with old friends and an invitation to invite more in. But now I realize that organizing my library as interests shift and new projects emerge is a part of intellectual life, the physical labor, perhaps, of reading and writing.
Each time I launch a new project—an exhibition or a book—I gather together the books across subjects that I will want to have at hand, creating a space for them nearest my keyboard and desk. Everything else has to part ways and give up prime space for a new mapping of the networks I want to surf in real pages, even while the Internet has found its way into my library. Fiction and non-fiction merge; architecture books to be sure, but also the other voices I will want to be in conversation with as I try to develop a new subject, acquire new neighbors. My greatest curiosity in this regard is someday to be able to confirm Jorge Luis Borges’s marvelous thought: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
Having taught for more than a quarter of a century at Columbia, I have drawn up countless book lists, syllabi, and recommendations for purchase by librarians. But when young art history and architecture students ask for advice I am eager to convey some of my own eclectic range of reading. Inspiration for designers can come not only from the illustrated books that have nourished the design professions since the Renaissance but also from books without illustrations whose ideas can provoke us to see architecture and cities in new ways. The best way to arrive on site before a masterful or provocative building is not simply seeking to confirm the information already recorded in photographs.
As a young student, I was as much moved by the illustrations in Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities, one of the books that expanded my love of the shape of Center City Philadelphia, as I was by the descriptions of the buildings of Venice as the residue of the complex cultural currents mingling and mixing in the lagoon in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, a book I read for the first time the summer before I left Philadelphia for college. So what I have assembled is as much a list of books that represent the values and insights that keep architecture alive for me, whether a trek in the Auvergne to find a Romanesque chapel I haven’t yet seen—usually with a volume from the Zodiac series on the Romanesque, a veritable fetish object in our household—or a guided visit to new work in my jaunts as curator at MoMA, most recently to the astounding work underway in Medellín, Colombia.
Here I offer books that always combine great writing with great insights, books that when I offer them to students are meant to captivate by their ability to translate architectural insight into great writing, and thus be books that one knows could continue to deliver even on that mythical desert island. Frankly, I only want to go if there is a delivery service from Amazon and AbeBooks.
all genres
- filter by:
- all genres (0)
Colquhoun is one of the most insightful historians on 20th-century architecture. His penetrating essays integrate an accessible philosophical understanding with close reading of buildings in ways that are always refreshing and exemplary. They can be read over and over again.
One of the great reads in recent history writing. It’s the sort of micro-history that I would love to see more of in architectural history.
A rare, completely fresh take on the history of modern architecture. The way Ford reads buildings and the complex issues of the representation of structural and material qualities in them by either direct or metaphoric ways is inspiring not only for studying the architecture of the late 19th and 20th centuries but also for developing an architectural expression today.
This is the essential book of all Frampton’s writings to read, in any order. Frampton develops both a trajectory for the development of modern architecture and an ethos of building that should inspire architects in looking at a wide range of exemplary works and in making decisions about practice and individual projects.
Still a brilliant book that frames architecture in a new way. Giedion’s use of illustrations makes his books extraordinary works of page layout: you can enter the argument anywhere. Unless you are working on the historiography of modern architecture, there is no need to read the book from cover to cover—Giedion understood the idea of hypertext long before the Internet “invented” it.
This book really changed the way I thought about myself as a historian and what I wanted to study. It is one of the great models for thinking about the ways in which buildings tell stories at certain times that because of their longevity become part of the stories that cities in turn tell.
Leatherbarrow is another writer whose value system I share, so I am always delighted to follow him to new territories, new examples, and new insights. It would be a great desert island vacation to match this book with Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.
A brilliant book—architectural history as cultural history at the highest level.
There is scarcely a book at once more stimulating and maddening on architecture. One can dip into it in places—the chapters on the Venice Lagoon, and of course the chapter “The Nature of Gothic,” which launched William Morris on his career, can be read as freestanding works.
Sebald’s poetic interchange of photography and texts in counterpoint rather than illustration is to me one of the most compelling projects in late 20th-century literature. The relationship to architecture is of course only tangential, but his are the only books that when I finish, my temptation is simply to start again. The opening lines about 19th-century architecture, beginning in Antwerp, reveal that often the greatest texture of architectural appreciation comes from the least expected places.
It has to be an edition with the added part by E. B. White on writing. It is one of the most useful, delightful, and wickedly funny books I have ever had the pleasure of reading, owning, assigning, and returning to. Even reading the part about the invitation to speak at the dedication of a cat hospital is something I am sometimes tempted to grab off the shelf during a dinner party to add to the hilarity. Architects and architecture students, too, might find it very helpful in preparing reports and presentations for clients to help wean them off the insider language of schools and the profession.
A fantastic, quick entry into the meaning of the classical syntax of architecture that provides a lively understanding with no dogmatic belief in its eternal validity. These were original radio talks and they evoke a culture that believed at one point that architectural appreciation was vital for any citizen. This is something today that exists in very few places: in Mexico City, in Paris, and until recently in Caracas, where the much-missed William Nino had a lively debate weekly about architecture. Would that we could revive this culture in our cities.
Announcements
Designers & Books Tours
Designers & Books Tours:
Customized tours providing the opportunity to explore the places, meet the people, and see the books of the design book world in New York City.
For information:
PH: 212-777-9080
or
info@designersandbooks.com
Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986 by Andrew Blauvelt
Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986
by Andrew Blauvelt
Publisher: Cranbrook Art Museum
Published: June 1, 2018
Explores the printed matter—posters, flyers, zines, and album covers—produced by and for the punk and post-punk music scenes in the United States and UK. Printed as a special, oversized, 52-page color newspaper, the catalogue has been published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name, curated by Andrew Blauvelt, on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum through October 7, 2018.
Recent Articles




