
Barry Bergdoll
Books Every Architect Should Read
Long before I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study architectural history, I knew I wanted to collect books. Arranging my books in new classification systems in my room at home as a teenager on rainy days, I even imagined that being a librarian might be the best of all possible worlds. Ever since then I’ve had at least as many books I intend to read as books I have actually read. And ever since then I have been torn between the idea of a small collection of desert island books and a big house with every room lined in books—“dessert island” books, I suppose one could call those that would line the dining room—so that every after dinner conversation might be seasoned with reading and shared books. For a long time I thought my library should emulate those where I had the luck of spending many of my days.
Growing up I tried to replicate the methods of the beautiful library in my suburb, the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, built in honor of the Shakespeare scholar sister-in-law of Frank Furness—one of my earliest passions in architecture (my great-grandmother had studied at his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).
When I discovered the Avery Library as a freshman at Columbia University, I realized that as much for its buildings as for its books, New York City was the place where I wanted to stay as long as possible. Worried that might not happen, I didn’t learn the lesson that books might always be nearby in beautiful rooms designed by McKim, Mead & White or Carrère and Hastings and managed and organized by others. I still thought to replicate the great working architecture library alone, despite the strain on the floorboards. I would be ready to travel wherever professional life might take me, armed with a library! At Avery and then at Cambridge, where Robin Middleton was librarian when I was a student, I also gained the knowledge that came from books as objects and not simply as transmitters of information.
Lately, my library has burst again, and once again I am undertaking the futile task of organizing the books in a system that makes sense, even as the possession of beautiful new, and temporarily empty shelves seems like a wonderful new beginning with old friends and an invitation to invite more in. But now I realize that organizing my library as interests shift and new projects emerge is a part of intellectual life, the physical labor, perhaps, of reading and writing.
Each time I launch a new project—an exhibition or a book—I gather together the books across subjects that I will want to have at hand, creating a space for them nearest my keyboard and desk. Everything else has to part ways and give up prime space for a new mapping of the networks I want to surf in real pages, even while the Internet has found its way into my library. Fiction and non-fiction merge; architecture books to be sure, but also the other voices I will want to be in conversation with as I try to develop a new subject, acquire new neighbors. My greatest curiosity in this regard is someday to be able to confirm Jorge Luis Borges’s marvelous thought: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
Having taught for more than a quarter of a century at Columbia, I have drawn up countless book lists, syllabi, and recommendations for purchase by librarians. But when young art history and architecture students ask for advice I am eager to convey some of my own eclectic range of reading. Inspiration for designers can come not only from the illustrated books that have nourished the design professions since the Renaissance but also from books without illustrations whose ideas can provoke us to see architecture and cities in new ways. The best way to arrive on site before a masterful or provocative building is not simply seeking to confirm the information already recorded in photographs.
As a young student, I was as much moved by the illustrations in Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities, one of the books that expanded my love of the shape of Center City Philadelphia, as I was by the descriptions of the buildings of Venice as the residue of the complex cultural currents mingling and mixing in the lagoon in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, a book I read for the first time the summer before I left Philadelphia for college. So what I have assembled is as much a list of books that represent the values and insights that keep architecture alive for me, whether a trek in the Auvergne to find a Romanesque chapel I haven’t yet seen—usually with a volume from the Zodiac series on the Romanesque, a veritable fetish object in our household—or a guided visit to new work in my jaunts as curator at MoMA, most recently to the astounding work underway in Medellín, Colombia.
Here I offer books that always combine great writing with great insights, books that when I offer them to students are meant to captivate by their ability to translate architectural insight into great writing, and thus be books that one knows could continue to deliver even on that mythical desert island. Frankly, I only want to go if there is a delivery service from Amazon and AbeBooks.
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Announcements
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Edited by Michael Merrill
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published: October 2021
The first in-depth study of drawings as primary sources of insight into architect Louis Kahn’s architecture and creative imagination. Based on unprecedented archival research, with over 900 illustrations and written contributions by Michael Benedikt, Michael Cadwell, David Leatherbarrow, Louis Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, Michael J. Lewis, Robert McCarter, Michael Merrill, Marshall Meyers, Jane Murphy, Gina Pollara, Harriet Pattison, Colin Rowe, David Van Zanten, Richard Wesley, and William Whitaker.
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
Forthcoming: 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.
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
Forthcoming May 25, 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.
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context by David Raizman
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context
By David Raizman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: December 2020
An innovative approach to graphic design that uses a series of key artifacts from the history of print culture in light of their specific historical contexts. It encourages the reader to look carefully and critically at print advertising, illustration, posters, magazine art direction, and typography, often addressing issues of class, race, and gender.
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian by Rick Poynor
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian
By Rick Poynor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: September 2020
A comprehensive overview of the work and legacy of David King (1943–2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism, blending political activism with his design work.
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