Abbott Miller’s Book List
For Designers & Books I decided to focus on books that were influential on me as a student: as I get older, I realize that they continue to influence the way I think about art, architecture, and design.
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Containing incredibly smart essays by a filmmaker whose work I came to know and love in school, this book was an important example of an artist who used his work and his writing to explore ideas in the history of film and photography. I mostly loved this book because of how comfortably Frampton sat on both the creative and analytical sides of the desk.
This is a sort of perverse “coffee-table” book in that it is a serious study of ways in which language and thought have been visualized. For me it functions to kickstart thinking about type, structure, and spatial aspects of layout. It has radical experiments, vanished languages, and truly strange “proposals” for how thought can be transmitted visually. Unusual and inspiring.
Brisk survey of the cultural setting in which Viennese modernism took hold: everything about this book comes to life: architecture, city planning, psychoanalysis, music, literature, painting. A brilliant model of cultural history.
The power of humor and the revelation of incidental details: an endlessly interesting book, even if almost every “joke” or example is terribly unfunny. You had to be there, I guess, and this book takes you there, at the birth of the insight.
A fantastic, concise cultural history that situates the emergence of German modernism. Good maps, timelines, and layout: doles out nice illustrations along the way.
Foucault's book offered a radically new way of thinking about modernity. I was obsessed with this book and it became the “gateway” book to the entire Foucault corpus: classifications, prison, death, sexuality, etc.
This book initiated my own research into the Bauhaus and set off a long engagement with modernist ideas and contradictions.
This book connected Derrida to art and design in an interesting way.
Essays on the history of modernism and photography that shaped much of my thinking about art, design, and theory. Krauss was an incredible teacher but an even better writer—incredibly sophisticated, cerebral, stylish, and original. This book was foundational for me.
The author ingeniously distills the history of art into 30 amazing color sets such as “Indian,” or “Italian Renaissance,” and provides a one-page narrative for each. The “system” is so disarmingly broad and intuitive, but the magic of the book is that the colors the author chooses are mind-blowingly good. Small silk-screen chips show the color in proportionate quantities. Amazing. If you see this book at any price, buy it. (She did another volume, c. 1948, called Modern Color Guide, which takes on specific and inventive schemes for contemporary interiors.)
Miller Lane provides a good look at the intersection of politics and architecture and how the Nazi Party responded to modernism.
A model of design and writing, and an exceptional case study of a partnership between a public intellectual and a great designer.
A book that opened hundreds of doors to reading design, art, music, and film with the eye of an anthropologist and an art critic. Barthes infused everything else I wrote and thought about afterward.
An author whose sense of ennui and melancholy connected my younger interest in surrealism with my burgeoning interest in architecture.
Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
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.
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Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman
Love Letter to a Garden
By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025
From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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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.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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