Seeing Things as You Have Never Seen Them Before: Books Every Architect Should Read—Paul Goldberger
By Steve Kroeter May 3, 2011![]() |
Paul Goldberger |
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger (New York)
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.”
Included in the collection of books he enlighteningly and entertainingly describes are architectural guidebooks (“the best are clear about what they like and what they dislike”), novels (“Wharton makes you see architecture . . . as much more than a neutral setting”), biographies (“though one may wonder how much a chronicle of an architect’s bedmates will add to your understanding of his work”), autobiographies (“[Wright’s] Autobiography is one of the most exciting books about architecture that you can read”), books of essays (Summerson, Scully, and Mumford), a children’s book (Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish), and a long, compellingly annotated list of well-known and also not-so-well known titles on an array of specialized architectural topics. He saves a special place at the end for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The books he values most, Goldberger observes, are “the books that are personal, the books whose authors make you see things as you have never seen them before.”
If we could add one book to the list, it would be one Goldberger himself recently wrote, Why Architecture Matters (2009)—cited by architect Calvin Tsao on Designers & Books for emphasizing “the imperative of poetics in architecture.”
Our final assessment? Every architect should read Goldberger’s “Books Every Architect Should Read.”
Announcements
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
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.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
Popular NowWeekMonth
- One Book and Why: Architect Steven Holl Recommends . . .
- One Book and Why: Graphic Design Writer Steven Heller Recommends . . .
- A Year in Design Books: Holiday Gift List 2022
- Baseball, Architecture, Time, and Creativity
- Quote of the Day: Emanuela Frattini Magnusson and Towards a New Architecture
Recent Articles


