Greg Lynn

Architect; Product/Industrial Designer / United States / Greg Lynn FORM; Greg Lynn YACHT & Co; University of Applied Arts, Vienna; UCLA; Yale University

Greg Lynn’s Book List

Reflecting on my book list, I realize that I have a penchant for books from the late 19th century and then again from the late 20th century. This includes everything from the natural sciences, to novels, to philosophy. I can only suppose that my interests in typology, geometry, order, and form tied together many of these topics from the 1870s and once again from the 1970s. It’s very curious how much one learns about oneself and the world by selecting a couple of dozen tomes from one’s library.

5 books
Jules Verne

I remember buying this as a teenager after having read all the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis stories. Many sketches and doodles came from that experience. These are great books to get you drawing gizmos and contraptions.

Kōbō Abe

Peter Eisenman recommended that I read Abe’s The Box Man and The Ruined Map while I was working in his office. I was in fact working on layering maps and shifting boxes so in title they were appropriate manuals in addition to their value as literature. Thanks to Peter, I discovered Inter Ice Age 4 and this, along with Ballard’s The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, was the inspiration for me to later write the text “A New Style of Life,” imagining a few minutes waking up in one of the Embryological Houses. Growing up watching Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, The War of the Gargantuas, and Godzilla, I suppose I still have an appetite for post-nuclear, ecological-disaster, natural-mutation, urban-destruction novels.

Paul West

After discovering Paul West’s Rat Man of Paris, I then read Lord Byron’s Doctor and continued to read serially through most if not all of West’s novels, stopping with The Place in Flowers, Where Pollen Rests and Terrestrials. It is very hard to select a single most important Paul West novel but Lord Byron's Doctor combines vivid descriptions of urban Paris with biology, literature, eroticism, and psychology. I enjoy reading West for the linguistic pleasure I take from his prose; he writes so well that it inspires me to write.

Herman Melville

I first read this book when I was 14 years old while a volunteer first mate on a concrete sailboat in Lake Erie taking at-risk teens offshore for three to five days at a time. Everything about that summer was a bad idea except reading Moby Dick. Later, it was required reading during my first year of college at Miami University of Ohio and I have read it over and over since. More than a decade ago I splurged and bought the Arion Press edition and read it to my children as babies to help them fall asleep.

J. G. Ballard

I bought this secondhand only because the title is the namesake of the town in Ohio where I was raised. It was my introduction to Ballard and the inspiration for my Embryological House. 

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