Book List of the Week

The Book List of the Week highlights the list of books provided by invited designers (including architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers, landscape architects, product designers, urban designers, and other design professionals) who have chosen books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
189 blog entries
Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter August 16, 2011

Graphic designer Wim Crouwel (Amsterdam)
book list
When Wim Crouwel was interviewed a few years ago by AIGA/NY using the Proust Questionnaire, his reply to the question “What is your most treasured possession?” was “My library.” That answer caught our attention. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter June 5, 2012

Architect Peter Bohlin: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco)
Profile   Book List
Architect Peter Bohlin has given us the elegant glass cubes and steel spirals that have defined Apple stores from New York City to Shanghai. At the same time, he and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, are known for public commissions such as the visitor center in Grand Teton, Wyoming; civic and academic projects including Seattle City Hall and buildings for Williams College and Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering Institute; and many private residences in wood and stone across the United States that are sensitively integrated into the landscape they occupy. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter September 24, 2013

Hong Kong-based architect Rocco Yim talks to Designers & Books about aesthetics, design books he recommends to students, and his fourth and newest book about his work, Reconnecting Cultures, published this spring by Artifice Books on Architecture. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter February 12, 2013

Architecture school dean Alan Balfour: College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)
Profile     Book List
Dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture Alan Balfour divides his book list for Designers & Books in a way that reflects his distinguished career as a scholar, author, and educator. The list contains, he states in his introduction, “first, books that have touched me in the last year or so, most related to supporting and stimulating my own writing; second, writers whose imaginations I can enter, whose books I can get lost within; and third, books that I often return to and continue to value.” 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...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 23, 2013

Architect Craig Dykers: Snøhetta (New York and Oslo)
Profile     Book List
“What gets me up in the morning,” says architect Craig Dykers in the introduction to the list of 21 books he sent us, is “knowing . . . that the places where we live are not bound by catalogues of definitions—they are so much more.” Dykers is the co-founder of the New York and Oslo-based firm Snøhetta, More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter December 23, 2013

On the walls in one of her rooms at home, Sheila Bridges has painted the words of the authors and books she loves, she tells Design Matters’s Debbie Millman in a recent interview. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 13, 2012

Architect Peter Pennoyer: Peter Pennoyer Architects (New York)
Profile    Book List
“My father, who was on the New York City Art Commission and the Building Committee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” architect and architectural historian Peter Pennoyer tells Designers & Books, “would bring home pamphlets, plans, and even books from hearings and meetings at which the few building projects proposed in the dim days of the late 1960s and early 1970s were under review. I remember in particular the 1971 master plan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter June 17, 2013

Product/industrial and lighting designer Inga Sempé: Inga Sempé (Paris)
Profile     Book List
French product designer Inga Sempé—known for her pleated paper and pendant lamps, ruched sofas, and other distinctive twists on everyday objects—credits her parents in ways both large and small when it comes to what she reads and how she looks at books. “Almost 95 percent of the books I have read were given to me by my mother,” she admits in the introduction to her list for Designers & Books. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 18, 2011

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi: Isaac Mizrahi New York (New York)
book list
Isaac Mizrahi sent us a list of books every bit as colorful, compelling, and eclectically inspired as the clothes he designs and the life he lives. While perhaps best known for the clothes and accessories in his many fashion collections, his activities and range of interests include acting in films and on television programs; designing costumes for Broadway shows, the Metropolitan Opera, and ballets; writing—from comic books to style guides; hosting “Watch Isaac,” his daily web series; and appearing regularly on “Isaac Mizrahi Live!” on the QVC Network.

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