Stanley Abercrombie

Critic; Curator; Writer; Editor; Lecturer / Architecture; Interior Design / United States / Books Editor, Interior Design magazine

Books Every Interior Designer Should Read

As for so many other things, I blame my parents: they planted the seed of my hunger for books—especially art and design books—with a Christmas present. When I was eight or nine, growing up in a small town in Georgia, a big box under the tree held nothing but a small card welcoming me as a member of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In those days MoMA assumed that members who lived more than a couple of hundred miles from Manhattan would seldom get to the museum, so in compensation those remote members were sent a clothbound catalogue of each exhibition. I read each one over and over, thinking all of them wonderful. . . . View the complete text
2 books
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Although it was first published almost a century ago and offers finer details than most of us need, this is a fundamental and poetically written book about the material world for which we must design—about how things grow and why they take the shapes they do, about weakness and strength, speed and size, symmetry and asymmetry, and the partitioning of space. I recommend the 1961 Cambridge University Press abridged edition.

Henry David Thoreau

E. B. White once wrote that Walden was “a good argument for traveling light.” Surely such an argument for communing with nature, economy, liberty, and—above all—simplicity is a text from which a great many interior designers could benefit.

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