Architecture and design

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version: Before 21 January 1996, probably before March 1995

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Traditional Islamic. Beaux-arts. Modernist. Its principles and jargon. Issues of adaptation and functionalism. The idea of "design methods", and whether they make sense (as opposed to whether the specific design methods movement of the '60s and '70s made sense). Biological designs. Evolutionary design. Visual grammars.

Recommended:
• Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
• Peter Blake
  • Form Follows Fiasco
  • God's Own Junkyard
  • No Place Like Utopia
• Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
• Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
• Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down [Who could resist a book with chapters like "How to Design a Worm"? Also good on catapults, compound bows, bridges, cathedrals, airplanes, and insisting to engineers that it's important to make things people can bear looking at. He's almost certainly wrong that most everyday objects of the 18th century looked better than their modern equivalents, because the sample which has survived consists of sturdy things worth keeping.]
• Grant Hildebrand, Origins of Architectural Pleasure
• Spiro Kostof
  • A History of Architecture
  • America by Design
  • The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History
• Donald Norman, Design of Everyday Things [Review: Fools Can Be So Ingenious]
• David Pye, The Nature of Design
• Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
• Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
• D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form [This is not explicitly a design book, but that doesn't stop it from being terribly interesting to designers]

To read:
• Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books of Architecture
• Maria Blanca Alfieri, Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent
• Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience
• Paola Antonelli, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design ["Fabrics made from ceramics, windows that are alternately clear and translucent, rubber and silicon light fixtures..."]
• Molly Bang, Picture This: Perception and Communication
• M. Barrucand and A. Bednorz, Moorish Architecture in Andalusia
• Louis Bergeron and Maria Teresa Maiullari-Pontois, Industry, Architecture and Engineering: American Ingenuity, 1750--1950 ["comprehensive illustrated history of American industrial architecture & civil engineering from the 18th to 20th centuries"]
• John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation ["Tours and describes 25 visionary environments created by fiercely independent artists over the past century, from the soaring spires of the Watts Tower in L.A. to the junk-and-flower-filled labyrinths of Howard Finster's Paradise Garden in Georgia."]
• Samir B. Billatos and Nadia A. Basaly, Green Technology and Design for the Environment
• Shelia S. Blair, Islamic Inscriptions
• J. Bourgoin, Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design
• Eric Broug, Islamic Geometric Patterns
• Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World: An Inquiry into the Roots of Form and Order in the Built Environment
• Howard Davis, The Culture of Building
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects
• Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: A History of Commodity Design
• David Gissen, Big and Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century [Sustainable skyscrappers!?!]
• Gordon Glegg, The Design of Design
• Goombrich, Art and Illusion
• Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament
• Paul Jacques Grillo, Form, Function and Design [Is this the same as What Is Design?]
• Desmond Guinness and Julius T. Sadler, Jr., Mr. Jefferson, Architect
• Fil Hearn, Ideas That Shaped Buildings
• John Heskett, Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life
• R. A. Jairazbhoy, Outline of Islamic Architecture
• J. Christopher Jones, Design Methods
• Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor
• Emil Kaufmann, Architecture and the Age of Reason
• Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through history
• Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America
• Brenda Laurel (ed.), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
• Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art
• Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture
• Ian McHorg, Design with Nature
• Pierre-Michel Menger, "Artistic Labor Markets and Careers", Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 541--574
• Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place
• George Michell, The Royal Palaces of India
• William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation and Cognition
• Gülru Necipoglu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire
• Frei Otto
• Victor Papenek
  • Design for Human Scale
  • Design for the Real World
  • The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World
  • How Things Don't Work
• David Pearson, Earth to Spirit: In Search of Natural Architecture [Seems like such a contradiction in terms as to deserve reading]
• Ulrich Pfammatter, The Making of the Modern Architect and Engineer: The Origins and Development of a Scientific and Industrially Oriented Education
• Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking
• Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects
• Salvadori, Why Buildings Stand Up
• Henry Sarnoff
  • Design Games
  • Visual Research Methods in Design
• Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
• Mike Silver (ed.), Programming Cultures: Architecture, Art and Science in the Age of Software Development
• Sinan
• Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects
• Tiffany Sutton, The Classification of Visual Art: A Philosophical Myth and Its History
• John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
• Marí Teresa Uriarte (ed.), Pre-Columbian Architecture in Mesoamerica
• Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture
• Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist
• Willats, Art and Representation
• Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics