Architecture

 

29 blog entries
Architecture
By Steve Kroeter November 29, 2011

Architect James Biber: Biber Architects (New York)
Book List     Video

Graphic designer Michael Bierut: Pentagram (New York)
Profile

videoGraphic designer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and one-time aspiring biologist turned architect James Biber have been friends, business associates, or both for over 20 years. They also share a major interest in books. Between the two of them they cover just about all the important ways that books can intersect your life: reading them, writing them, designing them, collecting them, being inspired by them—and in one case, fighting over them with a parent. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter September 13, 2011

Architect Deborah Berke: Deborah Berke & Partners Architects (New York)
book list
In an essay called “Here and Now,” written for a monograph on her work published by Yale University Press, Deborah Berke discusses the evolution in her thinking about architects and architecture over the course of her more than 25-year career. Focused in the late 1990s on what she at the time called “the everyday in architecture”—for which she earned renown—her approach to building was about “embracing and learning from that which is not expressly constructed through high culture or self-conscious design.” Looking back on that time, she feels that “what I was trying to do through my buildings was see if it were possible to make an architecture of exceptional everydayness.” More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter August 23, 2011

Architecture and design curator Zoë Ryan: Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago)
book list
When Zoë Ryan—as of this July, the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago—gave us her list of books for product designers, she emphasized that she found it hard to be limited by disciplines or categories and that her view of design was an expansive one. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter August 2, 2011

Architect Winka Dubbeldam: Archi-Tectonics (New York)
book list
In an interview earlier this year, Winka Dubbeldam recalled that her parents enjoyed buying and building new homes—an obsession that resulted in her moving 15 times in the 17 years she lived with them. It isn’t really a surprise, then, that she ended up as an architect with a particular interest in progressive residential work. Her worldwide reputation now also extends to office tower, commercial, hospitality, and interior design work. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter June 21, 2011

Architect Mikko Heikkinen: Heikkinen + Komonen (Helsinki) book list

Architect Maya Lin: May Lin Studio (New York) book list

Architect Enrique Norten: TEN Arquitectos (Mexico City and New York) book list

The work of architects Mikko Heikkinen, Maya Lin, and Enrique Norten is acclaimed not only in their home countries—Finland for Heikkinen, the U.S. for Lin, Mexico for Norten—but also far beyond the cities and nations where their practices originated. And it is in this wider arena that, despite their different cultural backgrounds, some connections among the three emerge. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter June 7, 2011

Architecture curator and architectural historian Barry Bergdoll: The Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University (New York)
book list
A lover of books and architecture would be hard-pressed to find three finer libraries than the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania; the Avery Library at Columbia University in New York; and the Cambridge University Library in England.

These, as it turns out, are the libraries that have been in Barry Bergdoll’s life—while growing up, while in college and graduate school, and while a Kellett Fellow abroad. In these libraries he says, “I had the luck of spending many of my days.” In fact, Bergdoll at one point imagined that “being a librarian might be the best of all possible worlds.” More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter May 3, 2011

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger (New York)
book list
What is the first role of books about architecture? “To interpret and explain: to be, in effect, the label on the museum wall, or the note in the concert program.” So writes architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a new essay for Designers & Books. But that’s only the beginning. He goes on to say, “The greatest buildings, like art and music and literature, can be interpreted in multiple ways. As there is no end to what can be said about Beethoven and Mozart, there is no end to what can be said about the work of Michelangelo and Palladio and Borromini and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn.” More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter February 22, 2011

The architects Steven Holl and Juhani Pallasmaa have a history of connections. Holl (an American) and Pallasmaa (a Finn) have important ties to each other’s home country. One of Holl’s best-known buildings is in Helsinki (the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, for which Pallasmaa was the local architect). Pallasmaa, who has held visiting professorships at four American universities, is an honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. More...

Books on Designers
February 20, 2014

Fifteen books from our contributors on American architect Louis I. Kahn (February 20, 1901– March 17, 1974). Updated May 1, 2022.

Additional books can be found on The Louis I. Kahn Facsimile Project. More...