Daniel Libeskind

Architect / United States / Studio Daniel Libeskind, Architect LLC

Daniel Libeskind’s Book List

The Prey of Unknown Zones —

The Pillage of the Sea

The Tabernacles of the Minds

That told the Truth to me —

 — Emily Dickinson

30 books
Vitruvius Pollio
Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan

A must for all designers! When I first read it I thought it was boring. Now it is eternal again . . .

Joseph Rykwert

Written by my former teacher, this is one of my absolute favorite books on the city. No nonsense or pseudo-facts. A true classic.

William Blake

Poetry, wilderness, and madness become one’s own in a psychotropic trip of dancing letters and hallucinating colors.

Malcolm de Chazal

A book that can never be exhausted—showing that someone from Mauritius can be more cosmopolitan than someone from New York or Paris.

Jacques Derrida

Mystical, intellectual, and ecstatic—for anyone interested in truly understanding architecture and thought that is not “philosophical”!

Francesco Colonna

Dreams and beauty of mystery with Early Renaissance woodcut illustrations. Eroticism and Constructivism combine in an Early Renaissance myth.

Leonardo da Vinci

A must for anyone seeking a reflection on both the seen and unseen.

Heraclitus

The most obscure and the most lucid thoughts of all time.

John Hejduk

Written by my mentor, a deep investigation into what it means to build through drawings and texts. Amazing how a book of drawings and ideas is much more inspiring than a book of techniques and buildings!

James Joyce

You can’t do urban planning without this book because it is a labyrinth that you can never leave.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

This was my first, and still favorite, art book—I bought it with all my savings. My favorite Cubist by far.

Vincent van Gogh

To design is to struggle. This collection of van Gogh’s letters are a lesson in loneliness in art. Truly relevant in this economy-obsessed era!

El Lissitzky

The wonders of red-white-black and fantastic composition with two squares! And meaning! You can become as smart a designer as a child of the revolution.

Pierre Cabanne

The best portrayal of freedom.

Le Corbusier

A view into Corbusier’s mind and how utterly crazy modernism actually is! You will find out the danger of the right angle.

Claudio Buttafava
Edoardo Garbagnati

An amazing book of master drawings of architecture—truly an eternal inspiration!

Anonymous
Translated from Middle English by A.C. Spearing

The clearest and most rational of all philosophy books. Very useful in the era of fuzzy cloud logic.

Edwin A. Abbott

Einstein wrote the introduction to this mind-distorting fantasy on the fourth dimension. Should suffice as cosmology for mere mortals.

Aldo Rossi

My favorite book about the “inner” reality of places, by perhaps the best theoretician of the last century.

Leon Battista Alberti

The Renaissance comes to life even in the rhetorical tropes of the Leoni translation—with incredible art by a man who was also a family lawyer!

Francesco Borromini
Monika Küble Editor
Felix Thürlemann Editor

The sheer beauty of geometry brought to light. A treatise that shows more geometic wonders than any computer can.

Gustave Flaubert

Unsurpassed analysis of contemporary dilemmas. More relevant now than in the late 19th century when it was written. Flaubert knew who the idiots were. Really important for our new era.

Andrei Bely

A fantastic description of what a city means to a citizen, a revolutionary, and a terrorist. In my opinion, even better on the city than Joyce’s Ulysses.

Paul Fréart de Chantelou

My favorite book about time, clients, cash, persistence, and competition in architecture. A practical manual for work!

F. T. Marinetti
Edited and with an introduction by R.W. Flint

The only manifestos that are still relevant for design—because the future is always just ahead. The most forward-thinking and relevant design manifestos. Includes Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909).

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

This book opened my imagination and freed me from oppressive spaces.

Walt Whitman

A book that is so fantastic that it even inspired Borges to see that the world is only a myth.

Bruno Schulz

The best insight into the soul of an artist. My favorite book by a poet who writes prose. A book that is imaginatively, aesthetically, and fetishistically Number One.

Lewis Carroll

“The best books have pictures,” says Alice, and this is the best—and most scary!

Paul Celan

A new language developed as a consequence of the Holocaust. Intellectually penetrable because of its opacity.

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