Mohsen Mostafavi

Designer; Educator / Architecture / United States / Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

An Intellectual Affiliation: Mohsen Mostafavi’s Book List

How does one compile a short list of personally meaningful books? One way is to surrender to an almost unconscious process of simply picking the first titles that come to mind, but that method tends to skew the collection toward volumes most recently read. Instead, I have attempted to filter the selection to highlight titles that have been both inspiring and in some way formative to me as a designer and a teacher. Many of the books so chosen reflect my sense of intellectual affiliation with admired authors as much as an appreciation of specific content.

2 books
Nicolai Gogol

Gogol's writing is a must for all architects. It tells us as much about alternative ways of seeing the world as it does of our relationship to others.

W. G. Sebald

Sebald had a major presence in the field of literature and died tragically early in a car crash. He lived in England as an academic but wrote in German. The book is a beautiful exposition of memory and the sense of feeling an outsider.

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