10 ARCHITECTURAL BOOKS EVERY ARCHITECT SHOULD READ
1. S, M, L, XL by Rem Koolhaas
The book that written by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, tries to challenge conventional understand of architecture, scale, and the city by using the remarkable design works, drawings, collages, images and texts produced by in the first two decades of the Dutch architecture Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and its founder Rem Koolhaas.
The name of the book determines the fiction of the book. Projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While small and medium focus on issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls “the architecture of Bigness.” Extra-large focuses on urban scale projects with the important essay “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?” and other studies of the contemporary city.
2. Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor
Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s philosophy and his sensitive approach to building and form are presented in the book through the lens of his own work and experience.
According to Peter Zumthor, architecture must have a sensitive connection to life, this bond must have a thought that goes beyond form and construction. In this book, Peter Zumthor describes what motivates him to design his buildings which have a different approach to the heart and mind of the visitor in different ways.
3. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Easily readable book escapes from the familiar discussions about cities and refers to a different subject; why we are in love with cities at first. In this book, Marco Polo describes the cities he is visited to his host, emperor Kublai Khan with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo shows his tales, the emperor realizes these fantastic places are more than they appear.
4. The Eyes of The Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa
Although we have five sense organs, why only the sense of sight is more dominant in architecture, design and culture? The book examines this question. Pallasmaa argues that the suppression of the other four senses causes the general impoverishment of our environment. And he leads architects to understand the world around them not only by seeing, but by touch, by voice, even by smell. The book brings a new perspective to architectural culture.
5. The Second Digital Turn by Mario Carpo
Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today’s digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn, Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted?no longer tools for making but tools for thinking.
Today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind.
The Second Digital Turn is a technological developments in art and beautiful exposition of historical ideas.
6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Objectivism: an uncompromising defence of self-interest as the engine of progress, and a jubilant celebration of man’s creative potential. Objectivism: an uncompromising defence of self-interest as the engine of progress, and a jubilant celebration of man’s creative potential.
Architect Howard Roark is as unyielding as the granite he blasts to build with. Defying the conventions of the world around him, he embraces a battle over two decades against a double-dealing crew of rivals who will stop at nothing to bring him down. These include, perhaps most troublesome of all, the ambitious Dominique Francon, who may just prove to be Roarke’s equal. This epic story of money, power and a man’s struggle to succeed on his own terms is a paean to individualism and humanity’s creative potential.
7. Form, Space and Order by Francis Ching
The book examines the foundations of architectural form and space in a detailed and systematic way. In making this study, the author receives help from many fields, from all periods, cultures, geographies and historical examples.
For a long time, this book has been one of the basic books of the introduction to architectural design. The book has helped both students and architects understand how the form and space are arranged, helping them understand the vocabulary of architectural design. It also directs the reader to look critically at the built environment.
8. Toward A New Architecture by Le Corbusier
The book, which is among the classics of the architecture world, was written by le corbusier, one of the most important architects of the 20th century, and argues for the concept of modern architecture. Every article in the book rejects the contemporary tendencies in eclecticism and art. And he replaced them with architecture that should have been more than a stylist experiment; on the contrary, it is an architecture that will fundamentally change people’s interaction with buildings. This new lifestyle is a function-based architecture that defines the industrial age. It is derived from a new spirit that demands a new aesthetic based on rebirth and pure form.
9. The Dilution of Architecture by Yona Friedman
The Dilution of Architecture explores Friedman’s process, taking readers through the movements and projects with which he has been involved, from Archigram, an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s; to the construction of ephemeral, emergency architecture in disaster zones; architectural utopianism; and the rise and fall of the megastructure. The book also considers the pedagogical aspect of Friedman’s work, which extended his influence well beyond architecture to planning, information science, sociology, visual art, and filmmaking. Drawing on a recent exhibition at the Archizoom gallery at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the book supplements the essays with a vast collection of sketches, drawings, and documents related to Friedman’s work and concludes with a conversation between Friedman and the Swiss architect and writer Bernard Tschumi.
10. Learning from Las Vegas by Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour
11. BIG, HOT TO COLD: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation by Bjarke Ingels
12. The Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi
13. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi
14. Conversations with Students (Architecture at Rice) by Louis Kahn
15. The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
16. Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000 by Peter Eisenman
17. Archigram by Peter Cook
18. The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992 – 2012 by Mario Carpo
19. Yes is More by Bjarke Ingels
20. Algorithms Aided Design by Arturo Tedeschi
