100 Designers Choose 100 Books

To celebrate the publication of our 100th designer on Designers & Books on, April 3, 2012, we paired each of our 100 architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers, landscape architects, product designers, and urban designers together with one book each, chosen from the book lists they’ve submitted. Click on a book title or cover image and you’ll get detailed information on the book along with all its Designers & Books recommenders. Click on a designer’s photo or name and you’ll get the designer’s full book list and links to biographical and other information. (The number of designers and books keeps growing. Visit our designers page for the newest additions.)

View List of Lists

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Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
Bruno Latour

designerDavid Adjaye: A seminal account of how you imagine or create the idea of publicness in our cities.

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David Hicks: A Life of Design
Ashley Hicks

designerJonathan Adler: David Hicks was the chic-est decorator ever. But what I really love about his work is that it’s not just chic—it's fun and playful and joyful, all the things I believe good design should be.

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The Natural House
Frank Lloyd Wright

designerEmilio Ambasz: 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.

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Make It Bigger
Paula Scher

designerGail Anderson: Design doesn’t get any more smarty-pants.

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Paris Was Ours
Penelope Rowlands

designerPenny Drue Baird: Made me rethink more than one or two serious ideas about life.

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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
Robert Pogue Harrison

designerDiana Balmori: Giving order to our relation to nature, rather than bringing an order to nature is the idea that made this book a favorite of mine.

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Saka no ue no kumo (Clouds on the Slope)
Ryotaro Shiba

designerShigeru Ban recommends this book.

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The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
Kenneth Clark

designerChris Bangle: You will never find a better description of what car design is all about than in this book. Just take out the word “nude” and insert the word “car” and it all becomes crystal clear.

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A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham
Reyner Banham

designerDeborah Berke: As a way to connect with Banham’s broader architectural thinking and insights, this book of collected essays is the one to dip into.

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Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments)
Roland Barthes

designerPierre Bernard: Barthes celebrates the fact that the 26 letters of the alphabet are not images, and as such they can be reinvented to mean whatever needs to be said. Giving meaning to the written word—using an alphabet that's not loaded in advance with stereotypes—is indeed one of the greatest challenges for the graphic designer.

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The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design
Vilém Flusser

designerJames Biber: Language as a key for unlocking design.

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Learning from Las Vegas
Robert Venturi
Denise Scott Brown
David Izenour

designerMichael Bierut: The designer as anti-hero.

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Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920
Peter Thornton

designerJeffrey Bilhuber: A “must” for anyone inspired by historic interiors. The author conveys the personality and unique relationship between owner and interior while remaining informative and poignant.

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The Design of Everyday Things
Donald Norman

designerTim Brown: Originally called The Psychology of Everyday Things, still the best argument for why designers can’t be left to design things on their own.

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So Far So Goude
Jean-Paul Goude

designerStephen Burrows: Everything about this book is beautiful—the layout, the fonts, the colors, the photographs.

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Theory of Colours
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

designerShashi Caan: This accessible color theory book is both illuminating and surprising. Since the book is devoid of pictures, reconstructing the experiments by following the writing results in experiential learning. This is a “must read” for anyone interested in better understanding human response to our physical world.

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Thoughts on Design
Paul Rand

designerIvan Chermayeff: I have read Thoughts on Design many times and will again. Rand was not only the best graphic designer America ever produced, but one of the few who wrote really well about what he was doing. Any designer to be (or in practice) should read Rand’s articulate and provocative thoughts on one of the few trades where the learning curve is continuous, ever-changing, and tuition free.

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Printed Ephemera: The Changing Uses of Type and Letterforms in English and American Printing
John Lewis

designerSeymour Chwast: Aggressive and elegant typography.

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Bertram Goodhue: His Life and Residential Architecture
Romy Wyllie

designerAlexander Cooper recommends this book.

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The Production of Space
Henri Lefbvre

designerTom Coward recommends this book.

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Pioneers of Modern Typography
Herbert Spencer

designerWim Crouwel: Published in 1969, this is an important sourcebook on the development of modern typography. It is an introduction to what led up to the new concepts in graphic design, and makes clear that modern typography does not have its origins in the conventional printing industry but is entwined with 20th-century painting, poetry, and architecture. It is an inspiring book.

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The Emigrants
W. G. Sebald

designerSheila Levrant de Bretteville: A masterpiece of literature in which the narrative appears to describe the images, but the images are not what the narrative describes. This disconnection between image and text astonished me, and validated all the disconnections and gaps my work has used to create an invitation to others to participate in the signification of a work.

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Billy Baldwin Remembers
Billy Baldwin

designerErnest de la Torre: Baldwin was one of the great visionaries.

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Designing for People
Henry Dreyfuss

designerNiels Diffrient: This book, though over 50 years old, has examples and advice that all designers and manufacturers could use today. Its message is timeless and has not been supplanted by other more recent publications. In addition, it’s a pleasure to read.

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Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

designerElizabeth Diller recommends this book.

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs

designerAndrés Duany: At intervals of a decade or so I reread what I consider to be the great books of architecture. The real standbys have been Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. Depending on my stage in life—and on ambient circumstance—they become different books. Death and Life is now ascendant in my estimation, while the others are sounding a bit foolish for the first time. The books haven’t changed of course, but I have, and so has the general prospect. I am now a 37-year veteran of practice; and the 21st century is rather up to its neck in environmental, economic, and social crises. The conceptual and the aesthetic now seem to matter much less; and what does is good, practical know-how about normal humans and the places that serve them well—particularly the modest ones. What is so compelling about Jacobs is that real people with all their foibles come first; and architects, when appearing at all, are dangerous fools. This coincides with my personal experience. I must emphasize that the modest pragmatism that I now value is not a surrender of ideals, but the result of mature consideration. To read Jacobs is to be in the presence of an adult. This time around the others read variously like the works of a charming scoundrel, a wild-eyed teenager, and a self-indulgent child. I leave it up to you to guess which is which.

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Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World
Kevin Kelly

designerWinka Dubbeldam: This book is a classic and everyone should read it.

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The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton
Ogden Codman Jr.

designerDavid Easton: One of the very first books about architecture and decoration, which helped define American style as we know it.

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Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust

designerPeter Eisenman recommends this book.

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In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting
Philip Conisbee

designerJules Fisher: How do you bottle light? Corot does not give an answer but captures atmosphere so effortlessly you will not give up the quest.

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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller

designerNorman Foster recommends this book

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Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud

designerMark Fox: Ostensibly a comic book about comics, in this work McCloud broadens our understanding of symbolism, the relationship between words and images, narrative, time as a function of narrative, and communication. I share his concept of “amplification through simplification” with my graphic design students every semester.

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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
William McDonough
Michael Braungart

designerPhilip Freelon: A call to arms for all, especially design professionals.

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How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand

designerDaisy Froud recommends this book.

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One Two Three . . . Infinity
George Gamow

designerSou Fujimoto: The joy of discovery is the origin of creativity.

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On Growth and Form
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

designerJeanne Gang: The power of keen observation of natural phenomena informs this influential book, which stresses the ways in which structure and mechanics play a role in how living things find their form. What structure junky could resist discussions of spherical tetrahedrons, soap bubbles, or the delicate skeletal patterns found in radiolaria? Even though the science behind it has since been updated, Thompson’s book remains full of wonders.

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Letter and Image
Robert Massin

designerTom Geismar: Type as image over the centuries.

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L’Architecture
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

designerWilliam Georgis: Ledoux’s work combines a reverence for the classical tradition with a yearning for the sublime. This marriage yields strange and evocative offspring.

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The Art of Looking Sideways
Alan Fletcher

designerBob Gill: An amazing collection of obscure thoughts and observations. Endlessly entertaining.

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Visual Thinking
Rudolf Arnheim

designerMilton Glaser: Designers need these introductions for their work.

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Lo Studio Boggeri 1933–1981
Bruno Monguzzi

designerCarin Goldberg recommends this book.

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The Four Books on Architecture
Andrea Palladio

designerMichael Graves: Palladio’s work as embodied in the “Four Books” is a reflection of his passion for humanism. He has the ability to imagine how we will inhabit his enclosures, his rooms. He is able to embrace us with the places he makes, both on the interior and also in the garden. The Four Books on Architecture shows us how he accomplishes the magnificence of his structures.

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By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
Ralph Caplan

designerNancye Green: No one talks about design and the designer’s mind more intelligently.

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Mark Hampton on Decorating
Mark Hampton

designerAlexa Hampton: Of course.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll

designerSagi Haviv: Coming across this book as a child introduced me to the concept of fantasy, which informs my art to this day.

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The Invention of Solitude
Paul Auster

designerMikko Heikkinen: Includes “Portrait of an Invisible Man” and “The Book of Memory.”

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Nox
Anne Carson

designerJessica Helfand: A perfect example of a book that’s at once emotionally riveting—and visually immersive—in every sense of the word.

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Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art
E. H. (Ernst) Gombrich

designerSteven Heller: I always hoped that Ernst H. Gombrich and I were somehow related. He married Ilse Heller, a Czech concert pianist, which meant there were some degrees of separation. Alas, no such luck. None of my family lived anywhere near Czechoslovakia. But there is a slight spiritual connection. I began my “career” writing about the history of caricature. Gombrich and psychoanalyst Erst Kris wrote a book together on the subject. Apparently, the only place it was ever published (in a sharply cut version) was in Meditations on a Hobby Horse. And that is why I treasure this book. There are many insightful essays therein, but “The Principles of Caricature” is essential reading for any practitioner, scholar, or fan of this transformative art form. It was my inspiration for many years.

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ABZ
Julian Rothenstein
Mel Gooding

designerKit Hinrichs: A very entertaining and contemporary look at historic typography.

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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte

designerCraig Hodgetts: Despite its numbing title, this volume, and its several cousins, is a visual feast. Its brilliantly selected examples, supplemented by a wise and perceptive text, propel the reader along a hyperbolic learning curve. I find myself referring to it so often that Tufte has nearly attained the status of a verb.

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Space Calculated in Seconds
Marc Treib

designerSteven Holl recommends this book.

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The Dictionary of Visual Language
Philip Thompson
Peter Davenport

designerAngus Hyland: The ultimate sourcebook.

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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

designerMaira Kalman: Elegance and humor. These are critical elements in doing anything.

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Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White

designerChip Kidd: This was the first book I read that was really about the power of design and typography. I would say that Charlotte’s typographic web-o-grams represent the first depiction of a successful ad campaign in children’s literature.

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In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

designerTom Kundig: This has been an important book for my career. I’ve read it multiple times—it continues to be meaningful and I don't expect that will change. Shadows are more important than objects because they enter the realm of the mysterious. The white space is more important than the stroke of the pen. Shadows are the silent reason that objects are recognized; they give them shape. Shadows represent the soul of a place or object.

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Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille
Denis Hollier

designerVincent Lacovara recommends this book.

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Avedon: Photographs, 1947–1977
Richard Avedon

designerChristian Lacroix: Avedon is a master of fashion photography.

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The Prisons
Giovanni Battista Piranesi

designerDaniel Libeskind: An inspiration for meditating about the shape of the human mind.

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Experiencing Architecture
Steen Eiler Rasmussen

designerMaya Lin recommends this book.

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World Champion Openings
Eric Schiller

designerGeorge Lois: The opening moves of the great chess champions prove (to me) that without an idea in solving each graphic assignment, you’re unarmed.

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Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky

designerJohn Maeda recommends this book.

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Space, Time and Architecture
Sigfried Giedion

designerPaul Marantz: Vectored me toward the nexus of architecture and light.

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The Aleph
Jorge Luis Borges

designerJean-Marie Massaud recommends this book.

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Moby Dick
Herman Melville

designerMargaret McCurry: Architects are as interested in referentiality as are authors. Both build layers of meaning into their work, whether it be the deconstructionist theories of Derrida or the Postmodernist reincarnations of the classical language of architecture as codified by Vitruvius, and in our time, Robert Venturi. Melville was a master of the layering art in his thematic epic Moby Dick, intensely interweaving symbolism and allegory into his dramatic storytelling.

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Architecture Without Architects
Bernard Rudofsky

designerZack McKown: My favorite architecture book. Rudofsky presents exquisite built environments, mostly from ancient times, that were developed organically by communities (versus individual authors), usually over a period of centuries.

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As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays
Colin Rowe

designerRichard Meier recommends this book.

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(un)Fashion
Tibor Kalman
Maira Kalman

designerIsaac Mizrahi: The book is as great as the title.

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Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere
Michael Kimmelman

designerJennifer Morla recommends this book.

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The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods
Vincent Scully

designerEric Owen Moss: Freud as the quintessential landscape architect.

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Man and Camel: Poems
Mark Strand

designerCleto Munari: I have produced a table using his visionary poem dedicated to a man and his camel. His often surreal metaphors are a continuous inspiration for my work.

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The Labyrinth of Solitude
Octavio Paz

designerEnrique Norten recommends this book.

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Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

designerJuhani Pallasmaa: Opens up poetic views to an imaginary urbanity.

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The Unknown Craftsman
Soetsu Yanagi

designerHarry Pearce: A Japanese insight into the nature of beauty, full of wonderful observations on culture, design, and—ultimately—humanity.

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Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Robert Venturi

designerCesar Pelli: Lucid and vigorous critique of modern architecture at the right time.

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From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe

designerPeter Pennoyer: Just passing 30 years after its first publication, Tom Wolfe’s acerbic attack on modernism remains relevant.

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Silence: Lectures and Writings
John Cage

designerAntoine Predock recommends this book.

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The Order of Things
Michel Foucault

designerKarim Rashid: Foucault studies knowledge beautifully via language, art, politics, and everything you can imagine in this book. His ideas are ever so inspiring. This is a brilliant book that altered the way I saw life. I feel I owe my career to his writing.

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Informal
Cecil Balmond

designerTerence Riley: A few years ago, I took a man that I would have to describe as a media titan to a lecture by Cecil Balmond. I picked seats near the door as I was certain that our attendance would be limited to the first 20 minutes or so (my guest was just that kind of person, sampling one thing of interest before moving on to the next). Not only did he stay for the entire lecture and the question-and-answer session, but I watched with some amazement as he pulled out pen and paper and took notes. Balmond’s ability to address topics of great complexity in a way that appeals to the intellectually curious, but not technically trained, is a rare commodity. Balmond’s Informal translates his compelling lecture style to text and images in a thoroughly engaging way. I am certain it is the only book by an engineer that I have read and then re-read but also pick up from time to time just for the fun of leafing through it.

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The Power Broker
Robert Caro

designerJaquelin Robertson recommends this book.

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Minimalism and Fashion: Reduction in the Postmodern Era
Elyssa Dimant

designerCynthia Rowley: I love this book.

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Allure
Diana Vreeland
Christopher Hemphill

designerRalph Rucci recommends this book.

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Edward de Bono’s Thinking Course
Edward de Bono

designerStefan Sagmeister: Many of our ideas were aided by the techniques discussed in this book.

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The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934
Margit Rowell

designerPaula Scher recommends this book.

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin

designerRicardo Scofidio recommends this book.

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Popular Culture and High Culture
Herbert J. Gans

designerDenise Scott Brown recommends this book.

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A Little History of the World
E. H. (Ernst) Gombrich

designerGeoff Shearcroft recommends this book.

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Delirious New York
Rem Koolhaas

designerGalia Solomonoff: This book offers an idiosyncratic account of disparate events that connect the city of New York. What amazes me is that it still feels fresh as I review it now so many years after my first time reading it.

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The City in History
Lewis Mumford

designerMichael Sorkin: Given to me by my mother when it was first published, this is the book that gave me my first real clues about urban history and the relationship of form and social life. It also made me a modernist.

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Shapes for Sounds
Timothy Donaldson

designerErik Spiekermann: Whenever students of visual communication ask for my recommendation, I mention Shapes for Sounds as the first thing they should read. It is as entertaining and well-designed as any coffee-table book and offers a wealth of information beyond the good looks.

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The Principles of Uncertainty
Maira Kalman

designerDeborah Sussman: Proves that hands are still viable tools for making art.

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The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand

designerStanley Tigerman: I read The Fountainhead when I was 13 years old in 1943, put it down and decided to become an architect. One may question Rand’s politics, even the ideology of the self, but her gripping tale of an architect unapologetically motivated my prepubescent psyche.

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The Language of Things
Deyan Sudjic

designerAdam Tihany: Our relationship with objects—an intelligent eye-opener.

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Why Architecture Matters
Paul Goldberger

designerCalvin Tsao: Emphasizes the imperative of poetics in architecture.

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The Decisive Moment
Henri-Cartier Bresson

designerGeorge Tscherny: Cartier-Bresson demonstrated the significance of the decisive moment—be it in photography, design, or communication. He taught us to walk softly and carry a little camera.

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The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections
George Nakashima

designerBillie Tsien: Thoughts about making things.

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The Beer Can by the Highway
John A. Kouwenhoven

designerRobert Venturi recommends this book.

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Shaping Things
Bruce Sterling

designerTucker Viemeister: Sci-fi author proposes a design manifesto where everything is a Splime (smart and connected—the developed environment works like the “natural” one in Avatar).

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The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems
Josef-Müller Brockman

designerMassimo Vignelli: Swiss typography at its best.

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The Notebooks of Paul Klee, vol. 1: The Thinking Eye
Jürg Spiller

designerRichard Saul Wurman: There have been five moments in my life that were akin to having the switch turned on in a dark room. I will list these five and then expand upon the first, which allowed for the rest to occur.

  1. Reading The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature (then published by George Wittenborn). Klee’s writings confirmed or awakened what I already knew: there exists a systemic reason or basis for visual language, color, line, area, intensity, and repetition; and the boundaries between painting, illustration, narrative, and language are blurred.
  2. Lou Kahn gave me permission to be more of myself and embrace a land called “Zero”—emptiness as a place of beginning.
  3. Schuyler van Rensselaer Cammann, Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, allowed me to discover, at age 19, that, “Yes, Virginia, there is another half of the world.”
  4. Charlie Eames allowed me to secretly dance and fall in love with curiosity.
  5. After meeting Dave Gallo and Billy Lange, I sensed the vastness, intrigue, mystery, and splendor of that 72 percent of the Earth’s surface that before I had only ridden on top of.

So, back to number 1, which was an epiphanic embrace and personal journey of understanding that came not from big words and handbooks, but awakened, codified, and induced a journey of explaining things to myself, within myself, and in a manner that was myself.

Perhaps my only strong suit is the unfiltered conversation between my eyes and the three pounds of jelly above them—my brain. It is my home for patterns, threads of connections, maps, memory, and wit.

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Line and Form
Walter Crane

designerEva Zeisel: This 1900 work was an important book for me. Crane talks about expressive and communicative line. I often referred to it in my lectures.

 

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