Interviews, Essays, Etc.

40 Titles for New Architecture Students

Juhani Pallasmaa

June 7, 2011

During the early 1990s, Juhani Pallasmaa was dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology. Because of his belief in the importance of reading, particularly the reading of classic literature, each year he sent out to the School’s newly accepted students a list of books they were expected to have read before arriving on campus.

Here is the list of 40 titles that was sent out to the class that entered in 1992.

(An asterisk* denotes a book recommended elsewhere on Designers & Books.)

1. Gaston Bachelard,The Poetics of Space*
2. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
3. Ingmar Bergman, Laterna Magica
4. Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-past Nine
5. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths*
6. Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One*
7. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark*
8. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel
9. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities*
10. Albert Camus,The Outsider
11. Albert Camus, The Fall*
12. Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
13. Bo Carpelan, Axel
14. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
15. Anton Chekhov, Short Stories
16. Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories
17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky,Crime and Punishment*
18. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination*
19. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
20. Günter Grass, The Flounder
21. Mark Helprin,Winter’s Tale*
22. Herman Hesse,The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)*
23. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
24. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
25. Franz Kafka, Short Stories
26. Franz Kafka, The Trial
27. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
28. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice*
29. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
30. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
31. Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
32. Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films
33. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet*
34. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
35. Pentti Saarikoski, Diaries of Youth (available only in Finnish)
36. Susan Sontag, On Photography*
37. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art
38. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
39. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
40. Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos, or the Architect,” in Dialogues*

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