Jorge Silvetti
Jorge Silvetti’s Book List
These are the books that come to my mind when I think about the best books I’ve read. They cover most periods of my reading life since I was a teenager in Argentina. They have indelibly shaped my understanding of the world, of people and what they do and make and why, and as such they have also shaped the way I think and perceive. Equally important, these books have given me immense emotional and intellectual pleasure.
The order they came to mind was not chronological in the sequence they were read over decades—but was more a result of free associations between one book and the next, and I find that interesting and revealing. The 17 books came to mind in the following order. In addition, the Roman numerals that appear in parentheses after each title identify the order in which I read the books: (i) signifying the ones I read first; (iii) the ones I read last; and (ii) the ones in between.
1. The Savage Mind (ii)
2. Tristes Tropiques (ii)
3. Italian Journey (ii)
4. Ficciones (i)
5. My Last Sigh (Mi último suspiro) (iii)
6. Frankenstein (iii)
7. The Leopard (Il gattopardo) (i)
8. Facundo (i)
9. Mythologies (ii)
10. The Pleasure of the Text (ii)
11. The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Writings (i)
12. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (ii)
13. Theories and History of Architecture (Teoria e storia dell’archittetura) (ii) and 14) Interpreting the Renaissance (Ricera dell’Rinascimento) (iii)
15. The Architecture of the City (iii)
16. For Marx (ii)
17. The Order of Things (ii)
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The best critical reading of Marx that explains broadly how we construct ideologies.
The best, sharpest, and most profound articulation of how societies create myths and live with and by them, and how to dismantle them.
A profound analysis and reflection about how text and readers interact.
The book through which I discovered the crucial importance fiction has in the understanding of reality.
A remarkable autobiography and a lesson in self-reflection by a great artist. How an author makes fiction a normal part of his life.
The best historical novel (reality-based fiction) for understanding the evolution of a society.
This book elicited the startling realization that we are not innocent in our relationships with nature and humankind.
The first book to come to mind when making my list for Designers & Books. Perhaps because it made me understand for the first time what makes us human.
The second book that came to mind in making my list for Designers & Books. The best comprehensive, multi-genre book (literature-history-science-autobiography) I have ever read.
A brilliant reading of the city as a construction of culture and a form of collective memory that exposes the poverty of most current planning ideologies.
The two original early articles in this book are the texts from which I Iearned how to read buildings.
The founding book of Latin American literature and a compelling argument that helps one to understand the good and evil forces that shape societies.
A moving, enthralling testimony of an artist’s ability to interpret and convey through fiction some of the most profound issues of an era.
This was the best and most startling discovery of what a new practice of “theory” might offer architecture.
History of architecture at its best.
A book that confirmed and outlined brilliantly what I was beginning to suspect and intuit about architecture.
Like Tristes Tropiques, a travel diary and a masterful description of the experience of viewing and thinking.
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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