The Scientific, the Metaphysical, and the Spiritual: Lisa Jenks’s Book List
By Steve Kroeter May 1, 2012![]() |
Lisa Jenks |
Jewelry designer Lisa Jenks: Lisa Jenks (New York)
The work of jewelry designer Lisa Jenks is prized for its originality, drama, and tactility. She is known especially for being finely attuned to the materials she works with, particularly sterling silver, in a way that allows physical characteristics to communicate cultural allusions. Her aesthetic influences range from angular forms in urban architecture to glyphs on the Mayan pyramids in Uxmal.
“I love designing jewelry,” she says in her statement for the Council of Fashion Designers of America, of which she is a member. “It can be a timeless component of our culture. Visually the world for me breaks down into patterns, from the towering angular forms of Deco skyscrapers to the local train tracks and telephone lines near my home in New York. I see patterns everywhere I look. Surface decoration and shapes all evolve from my fascination with pattern.”
![]() |
Riptide bracelet, sterling silver, by Lisa Jenks |
While her bookcases are “a bit crowded,” Jenks admits to a not easily restrained interest in collecting art and design books, many of which provide inspiration that feeds into her work. On her book list for Designers & Books is Rediscovered Masterpieces of Mesoamerica—“the first art book I bought when I was in the midst of designing my initial collection. I’ve been hooked ever since.” She also includes volumes on Josef Hoffmann, Cartier, Art Nouveau and Art Deco bookbinding, Russian decorative arts in the teens, twenties, and thirties, and Françoise de Bonneville’s book on Jean Puiforcat (“one of my favorite designers”).
![]() |
Ribbon Memento necklace, sterling silver on vintage ribbon, by Lisa Jenks |
Among other books on Jenks’s list are Muriel Barbery’s gentle and philosophical The Elegance of the Hedgehog, from which Jenks quotes that “art is emotion without desire”; Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself (because in it “nothing seems impossible!”), and The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (“I adore her artwork, but even more, her perspective on the world”).
![]() |
Zigurrat earrings, sterling silver, peacock and gray freshwater pearls, by Lisa Jenks |
On her current reading list are Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (also on Gail Anderson’s book list), David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries, and Joan Didion’s now classic collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “Scientific, metaphysical, or spiritual” is how she describes the books that she is drawn to.
Announcements
Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture by Robert A.M. Stern
Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture
By Robert A.M. Stern
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2022
Architect, historian, and educator Robert A. M. Stern presents a personal and candid assessment of contemporary architecture and his fifty years of practice.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022
An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books by John Hill
Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books
By John Hill
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Published: June 2021
This unique volume by the founder of the hugely influential architecture blog A Daily Dose of Architecture showcases the best illustrated architecture books ever published with an informed, personal, and engaging take on what makes the title unique and indispensable.
Popular NowWeekMonth
- The Creative Interviewer: Debbie Millman on Why Design Matters
- Le Corbusier: A Legacy in Books
- Eugene Feldman, Co-Editor, and Co-Designer of The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn
- The Illustrated Book in Italy, 1918–1945
- Louis Kahn: A Memoir
Recent Articles


