James Biber’s Book List
There are those books that, like record covers of old, one can spend a lot of time poring over. For me, these tend to be visual feasts, though some literary works are equally involving. The self-taught lessons learned in these compulsive bouts are not easily forgotten (and neither are those lyrics and liner notes), and drugs have nothing to do with it.
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A study of precision, clarity, and control. A house built by a philosopher acting as an architect (as opposed to the other way around) that competes with John Pawson for ascetic luxury. And it was for his sister!
I attended college intending to be a biologist. That turned out to be a bad idea, but it wasn’t until I borrowed this massive volume from my father that I had the courage to try architecture. Winters are bleak in Ithaca and so were freshman dorms. I spent an entire semester of short, dark days studying every single page of this book, the first of the now ubiquitous gargantuan design books. It was very convincing.
The conception, design, and construction of an enormous, completely demountable, glass, wood, and cast-iron building in nine months would be a miracle today; in 1851 it was a feat of divine intervention. This book, published in facsimile by the V&A from the original and bought during my first trip to Europe, contains the entire set of gorgeous hand-drawn, ink-on-vellum working drawings. From it I learned more about how buildings are put together (and in this case, taken apart and put back together again) than from any other single book. The Crystal Palace was 1,851 feet long (get it?), a trope Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower (1,776 feet high, get it?) seems to have kept alive. Maybe he has a copy of it too…
Just like the 24-hour movie collage, there are still images from movies featuring clocks counting nearly every minute of an entire day. Just as insane as the film and just as captivating. If you have seen the installation, you know that while it sounds like a neat idea taken to an extreme, it is actually a new form of narrative. People would stay for hours because it was so interesting, not because the doors were locked.
When I knew nothing about gardens and landscape I learned everything I needed to know from this book. I finally own a copy after using it decades ago.
You could pick practically any of the Bechers’ volumes, but this and Typologies (also on my Book List) cover the field for me. Photographed under the gray, soft light of clouded skies, these collected images of industrial artifacts approach the subject from the typological organization (essentially a genus and species of industry) and from the sweeping landscape of modern ruin. Their photographs are always beautiful, but the books allow a comparative study that most gallery shows can’t.
Hindsight has a way of creating an amnesia about what you once didn't know. The view of the worst genocidal maniac and his psychopathic Reich, all documented by verbatim dialogue (mostly from private contemporary written accounts), is an exercise in the famous “boiling frog” theorem. It was, at nearly every point, inconceivable that Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess (and dozens of other less well-known and more complex figures) along with the entire nation could be led to the end we now know. This account is a remarkable and excruciating—and instructive.
A beautiful tale of all cities and one city. I feel as though I live in one of them though (spoiler alert) Venice is a wonderful punch line.
MoMA has produced a huge number of significant books (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966, was not unique) but this one appeared at precisely the right time for me. The corresponding exhibition put Italy at the very forefront of design at a time of relative architectural poverty in the United States. The vellum cover, filled with colorful cutouts of iconic pieces, was designed by Ambasz and remains a brittle, yellowed jacket on my copy.
That it only takes eight volumes to contain the entire architectural oeuvre of this gargantuan figure is the real surprise. Owning the complete set seemed entirely out of reach when I first was introduced to the set in architecture school. I bought a single volume (52–57) for $17 in college, and eventually owned the entire set. It is so packed with intelligence (a friend called it “the idea book”) that I will never fully exhaust it as a reference.
I am new to this series, published in the 1960s and ‘70s, which, along with Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, includes Structure in Art and Science and Arts of the Environment. They are a serious and detailed collection of design thought from people like John Cage, Rudolf Arnheim, Max Bill, Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Nervi, Fumiko Maki, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Robert Smithson. I was attracted by the cover art and titles, and the books turn out to be equally rich in content.
Photographs and other “evidence” from Frances Glessner Lee’s forensic dollhouses, used to teach crime detection in the 1940s. Lee, who grew up in H.H. Richardson’s famed Glessner House in Chicago, built these highly accurate and evidence-laden crime scenes at 1” = 1’-0 and used each as a lesson. They are beautiful and strange, photographed exquisitely and copiously explained. They are also insane.
Another link between my biology studies and architecture is this mathematical study of form in nature. All the famous examples, plus many, many more and a deep mathematical analysis of every one of them.
The first complete study of the Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, written by Kenneth Frampton. Plus Alan Colquhoun on typology, Allan Greenberg on Lutyens, Walter Benjamin on Paris, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Emilio Ambasz, all wrapped in a black debossed Pirelli Tile pattern. Need I say more?
Based on a culture of using every part of a slaughtered animal, this book traces every part of Pig 05049 to hundreds of end products. Beautiful, weird, and fascinating.
Language as a key for unlocking design. Every essay is too much to absorb.
See my comments on Industrial Landscapes by Bernd and Hilla Becher.
A study, with beautiful hand-drawn plans, sections, and elevations, of Venice’s multiple housing. Timely postwar study of what is actually remarkably modern architecture in the less-touristed portions of Venice.
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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