Emilio Ambasz

Architect; Product/Industrial Designer / United States / Emilio Ambasz & Associates, Inc.

Emilio Ambasz’s Book List

The books on my list have all influenced me profoundly. How can I extricate them from my memory? They are now substantially part of me. And I could go on and on. . . . View the complete text
5 books
Willy Boesiger Editor

Le Corbusier was an extraordinary artist with a great a talent for transforming his Ars Poetica into a doctrine and a movement. I never prayed in his church, but I greatly admired his genius.

Alfred H. Barr

I taught myself English trying to read this book. So many times did I check out this book that the Lincoln Library of the U. S. Embassy in Buenos Aires gave me that copy when they received its replacement. Barr’s was the unerring eye that formed the extraordinary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This book describes the holdings of the collection he formed and the spirit that animated it based on the concept that architecture and design were as valid and inspiring arts as painting and sculpture.

Frank Lloyd Wright

This book is one of several Wright wrote to proselytize for his notion of organic architecture. I read it when I was 14 years old. Stylistically abominable, it is nevertheless a very influential text. Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture that promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with the site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated composition.

Titus Lucretius
Translated by Frank Olin Copley

On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) is a first-century B.C. epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. It deals with the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The poem grandly proclaims the reality of our role in a universe that is ruled by chance, with no interference from gods. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand.

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