The MIT Press
Independent press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, publishing in the areas of architecture and design, technology, and aesthetic theory, among other subjects.
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February 22, 2013
From the Publisher. Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of a classical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The house is not merely a home but a position for... More
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February 15, 2013
From the Publisher. Mid-20th-century California offered fertile ground for design innovations. The state’s reputation as a land of unlimited opportunity, its many institutions of higher learning, and its perpetually booming population... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book of 2013
February 8, 2013
Cover of Various Small Books Referencing Various Small Books of Ed Ruscha (2013), The MIT Press
From the Publisher. In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-... More
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Selected Backlist
A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2012
From the Publisher. In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the ways that technology design can provoke and engage the political. He describes a practice, which he terms “adversarial design,” that uses the means... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Digital technologies have already changed architecture—architectural form as well as the way architecture is designed and built. But if the digital is a revolution, which tradition is being revolutionized? If it is... More
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2012
From the Publisher. American urban form—the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life—has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes... More
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2010
From the Publisher. Combining formal argument with informal conversations and design proposals, Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else offers creative ideas for "thinking and acting architecture differently." What... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Rooted in the British apprenticeship system, the French Beaux-Arts, and the German polytechnical schools, architecture education in North America has had a unique history spanning almost three hundred years. Although... More
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2009
From the Publisher. While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture’s history, there has been no general theory... More
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2009
From the Publisher. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built... More
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2012
From the Publisher. The mobile device is changing the ways we interact with each other and with the world. The mobile experience is distinct from the desktop or laptop experience; mobile apps require a significantly different design... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2011
From the Publisher. In 1951, designer Greta Magnusson Grossman observed that California design was “not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions. . . . It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2012
From the Publisher. China is on the verge of a design revolution. A “third generation” of the People’s Republic of China that came of age during China’s “opening up” period of the 1980s now strives for... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2012
From the Publisher. When the fashion industry declares that lime green is the new black, or instructs us to “think pink!,” it is not the result of a backroom deal forged by a secretive cabal of fashion journalists, designers,... More
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2006
From the Publisher. Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to... More
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2009
From the Publisher. Eyeglasses have been transformed from medical necessity to fashion accessory. This revolution has come about through embracing the design culture of the fashion industry. Why shouldn’t design sensibilities also be... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Design Things offers an innovative view of design thinking and design practice, envisioning ways to combine creative design with a participatory approach encompassing aesthetic and democratic practices and... More
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2006
From the Publisher. Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object... More
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2010
Mainstream media, often known simply as MSM, have not yet disappeared in a digital takeover of the media landscape. But the long-dominant MSM—television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and books—have had to respond to emergent digital... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Dirt presents a selection of works that share dirty attitudes: essays, interviews, excavations, and projects that view dirt not as filth but as a medium, a metaphor, a material, a process, a design tool, a... More
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2010
From the Publisher. As the world redesigns and rebuilds in the face of economic and ecological crises, unprecedented numbers of architects are out of work. What does this say about the value of architecture? That is the question that... More
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2010
From the Publisher. The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship... More
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2011
From the Publisher. In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways. Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Computer graphics technology is an amazing success story. Today, all of our PCs are capable of producing high-quality computer-generated images, mostly in the form of video games and virtual-life environments; every... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2011
From the Publisher. For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying... More
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2012
From the Publisher. The word "architect" is a noun, but Doug Patt uses it as a verb—coining a term and making a point about using parts of speech and parts of buildings in new ways. Changing the function of a word, or a room... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Learning from Las Vegas, originally published by The MIT Press in 1972, was one of the most influential and controversial architectural books of its era. Forty years later, it remains a perennial bestseller and... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Interactive visualization is emerging as a vibrant new form of communication, providing compelling presentations that allow viewers to interact directly with information in order to construct their own... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that... More
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2006
From the Publisher. Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The... More
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1972
From the Publisher (revised edition, 1977): The book created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common” people and less immodest in... More
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2010
From the Publisher. If only today’s technology were simpler! It’s the universal lament, but it’s wrong. We don't want simplicity. Simple tools are not up to the task. The world is complex; our tools need to match that... More
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2010
From the Publisher. The “objective” world is one of facts, data, and actuality. The world of the “nonobject” is about perception, experience, and possibility. In this highly original and visually extravant book,... More
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2012
From the Publisher. For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally... More
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2011
From the Publisher. By the end of the twentieth century, America’s suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad... More
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2011
From the Publisher. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city... More
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2010
From the Publisher. This book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2012
From the Publisher. There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Our cities are "smart" and getting smarter as information processing capability is embedded throughout more and more of our urban infrastructure. Few of us object to traffic light control systems that respond... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Urban sidewalks, critical but undervalued public spaces, have been sites for political demonstrations and urban greening, promenades for the wealthy and the well-dressed, and shelterless shelters for the homeless. On... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2011
From the Publisher. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as “spatial urbanists” envisioned a series of urban utopias... More
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2012
From the Publisher. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner’s premise for a minor architecture. Her architect’s eye... More
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2011
From the Publisher. Cities speak, and this little book helps us understand their language. Considering the urban landscape not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner but from the viewpoint of an attentive observer, Urban Code... More
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A Designers & Books Notable Design Book
2011
From the Publisher. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house "a machine for living," was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: "If... More
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