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
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
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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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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022
An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.
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.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
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