Witold Rybczynski

Critic; Academic; Writer / Architecture / United States / School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

www.witoldrybczynski.com / www.design.upenn.edu/people/rybczynski_witold / www.witoldrybczynski.com/blog / www.twitter.com/witoldr

Books Every Architect Should Read

The first architecture book I bought was Frank Lloyd Wright’s A Testament. That was in 1961, two years after the old man had died. I was 18 and in the second year of architecture school. I don’t know that I ever read the text straight through; it was Wright’s beautiful drawings that attracted me. That was the case with most of my architecture books, which were less for reading than for examining the plans and photographs. That was certainly true of the two George Braziller series, Masters of World Architecture and Makers of Contemporary Architecture. These inexpensive monographs introduced me to the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Pier Luigi Nervi, Louis Kahn, and Eero Saarinen.

One of the few books that I do remember reading—it had no illustrations—was Anonymous (20th Century), by the Italian architect Leonardo Ricci. Another was New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM ’59 in Otterlo, a chronicle of a Team Ten meeting that consisted largely of transcripts of conversations between Aldo van Eyck, Ralph Erskine, and Alison and Peter Smithson.

After I graduated, I bought the seventh volume of Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complète, and one volume of the Girsberger edition of Aalto’s work.

One of the books I pored over when I was a young architect designing houses was Vincent Scully’s slim volume The Shingle Style Today, which contained illustrations and drawings of houses by Charles Moore, whom I admired greatly, as well as Robert Venturi, and a very young Robert A. M. Stern. Stern’s 1988 Modern Classicism, which included the work of a variety of post-postmodern designers, ranging from canonic classicists such as John Blatteau to more pragmatic traditionalists such as Jaquelin Robertson, was another book whose contents influenced me.

Architects will always acquire books for visual inspiration, but what follows are ten books definitely to read. They are not necessarily the “best” or the most influential, but they will repay careful attention.

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Architecture: Choice or Fate

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Léon Krier

An anti-modern architectural rant. Krier’s language is inflammatory but his drawings are delightful, and the combination of the two produces the best kind of indignant propaganda. His ideas about urbanism, especially, are compelling.

The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste

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Geoffrey Scott

Scott (1884–1929) was a scholar and garden designer who worked on Bernard Berenson’s garden at I Tatti, and wrote this lovely evocation of the Baroque that contains important insights into the nature of architecture and how buildings touch us.

Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade

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Vincent Scully

If you never took Scully’s course at Yale, or had the privilege of hearing him lecture, this book is a good substitute. This is not a conventional history, rather a series of essays that examine the intersection of the built environment and the natural world: Greek temples, Italian urbanism, French classical gardens.

Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920

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Peter Thornton

Architects should know history, not only the history of buildings but also the history of interiors—not at all the same thing. Thornton, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, provides a magisterial survey, examining the architectural shell as well as the loose furnishings within, and illustrating each period with contemporaneous paintings, drawings and (for the latter part of the nineteenth century) photographs.

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture

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Peter Collins

Collins was my architecture professor at McGill, and this wide-ranging history of architectural ideologies examines the 200 years from 1750 to 1950. For three years I memorized buildings and architects, assisted by a well-thumbed copy of Bannister Fletcher. Collins’s quirky but razor-sharp intelligence is apparent throughout Changing Ideals, which punctures many modernist dogmas. The “gastronomic analogy” still fascinates.

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

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Robert Venturi

Venturi, who knows a lot of architectural history and has an extremely good eye, brings the past to life. His lucid book predates the descent into obfuscatory jargon that bedevils most theoretical texts. Still a stimulating read, even if the movement it helped to launch—postmodernism—fizzled out.

The Details of Modern Architecture

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Edward R. Ford

Art historians merely describe the appearance of buildings, whereas Ford shows how they were actually built. A combination of philosophy and technological history, this book discusses iconic buildings of early modern architecture, from H. H. Richardson to Frank Lloyd Wright. The comparison of the (sophisticated) building technology of Beaux-Arts architects with the (crude) details of the early modernists is particularly fascinating. A companion volume covers the period 1928–1980.

The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture

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Frank Lloyd Wright

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer Editor

I have to include something by the old wizard. Wright’s own books are flawed by his self-promotional histrionic style, but he produced many important essays and lectures, which are gathered here together in one volume. It spans from “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901) to “The Natural House” (1954), which remains a practical guide by one of the great house builders of all time.

A Pattern Language

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Christopher Alexander

Sara Ishikawa

Murray Silverstein

You don’t have to agree with the author’s philosophy—or share his taste in architecture—to appreciate this compact and sensible distillation of architectural wisdom. The roughly 250 patterns cover towns and neighborhoods as well as buildings. Something every young architect should own.

Town Planning in Practice

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Raymond Unwin

Unwin raised town planning to the level of an art. His wide-ranging urban manual is full of useful information and encapsulates a lifetime of practice. Should be read in conjunction with Camillo Sitte’s The Art of Building Cities. I wish more new urbanist planners would read these books and broaden the palette of what is sometimes a rather narrow range of solutions.

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