Unleash Your Creativity: 12 Must-Read Books For Architecture Students
Architecture includes a deeply theoretical background, idea, and representation generation beyond the visible structures. In this process, heaps of books, films, and visualization will lead us to increase our accumulation and broaden our perspective. I have lost for a long time in the intensity of this accumulation during my student years. Where should I start? Which book should I read?... And still going on. Impossible to finish, so the important thing is to start. Later, you are drifting to this book from that book. Let’s get started!
The Architecture of the City – 1966
Aldo Rossi
Aldo Rossi was a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza and one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city’s construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.
Archigram – 1927
Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, David Greene, Ron Herron
“In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to combine to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in a London architectural office. It became obvious that some publications would help. The main British magazines did not at that time publish student work, so Archigram was reacting to this as well as the general sterility of the scene. The title came from a notion of a more urgent and simple item than a journal, like a ‘telegram’ or ‘aerogram,’ hence ‘archi(tecture)-gram.’…By this time Peter Cook, David Greene, and Mike Webb, in making a broadsheet, had started a new Group.”
Thus begins Archigram, a chronicle of the work of a group of young British architects that became the most influential architecture movement of the 1960s, as told by the members themselves. It includes material published in early issues of their journal, as well as numerous texts, poems, comics, photocollages, drawings, and fantastical architecture projects.
Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form – 1972
Robert Venturi
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common” people and less immodest in their erections of “heroic,” self-aggrandizing monuments.
Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past – 1976
Reyner Banham, Todd Gannon
It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. The Megastructure is what it sounds like a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham’s 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning.
Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains–decades after its codification–more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction – 1977
Christopher W. Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson
At the core of A Pattern Language is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain ‘languages,’ which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system that gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. ‘Patterns,’ the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?
Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan – 1978
Rem Koolhaas
Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas’s celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle — “the culture of congestion” — and its architecture.
Superstudio: Life without Objects – 2003
Peter Lang
“Superstudio: Life without Objects” collects nearly 200 of the group’s most important images, collages, storyboards, and critical writings. White monuments crossing over entire landscapes and cities, vast grid ground planes spreading over infinite beaches populated by wandering hippies: these are some of the more evocative images that consolidated their fame as vanguard architects. In 1972, MoMA invited them to participate in one of the largest exhibitions in its history, built around Italian design and architecture. With essays from Peter Lang and William Menking, the book is designed to provide the reader with the most detailed account of this avant-garde design group and their lively assault on modernism.
Yes is More, An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution – 2009
Bjarke Ingels Group
This thorough documentation of the work of trailblazing Danish firm BIG invites audiences into their processes, methods, and results via the most approachable and populist means of communication available – the cartoon.
Mobitecture: Architecture on the Move – 2017
Rebecca Roke
Celebrate mobile architecture in all its forms with this visual ode to life on the move. Ranging from quirky to sensible and from rustic to deluxe, featured projects include houseboats, huts, and tricked-out caravans, alongside disaster shelters, wearable structures, and futuristic prototypes. This compactly designed package features more than 250 color photographs and a smart, engaging layout that will appeal to anyone who appreciates the power of good design.
Renzo Piano: The Complete Logbook – 2017
Renzo Piano, Kenneth Frampton
Over one hundred works are featured, accompanied by over one thousand images of Piano’s work around the world including new photographs, drawings, and sketches, both intimate and authoritative, all with commentaries by the architect that combine personal anecdote and technical description with original insights.
Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow – 2019
Eszter Steierhoffer, Justin McGuirk, Florian Idenburg, Edwin Heathcote
The “home of the future” has long been a topic of fascination in popular culture and an intriguing prospect for designers, and the 20th century offered up countless visions of the future of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanized home or the notion that technology might free us from the home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation.
But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today and patterns of use in the sharing economy the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has the “home” proved resistant to radical change?
Anime Architecture: Imagined Worlds and Endless Megacities – 2020
Stefan Riekele
Unprecedented access to vast studio archives of original background paintings, storyboards, drafts, and LM excerpts offers readers a privileged view into the earliest stages of conception, development, and finished versions of iconic scenes from critically acclaimed movies such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, and more. Revealing the secret creative processes of these major anime studios, Anime Architecture is perfect for anyone touched by the beauty and imagination of classic anime, offering inspiration for artists, illustrators, architects, designers, video game makers, and dreamers.
#BONUS:Archibet: From Aalto to Zaha Hadid Hardcover – 2025
Federico Babina
This charming collection of 26 detachable postcards features a card for each letter of the alphabet. Illustrated by architect and illustrator Federico Babina, each letter playfully resembles a building in the style of a famous architect. Covering names from Alvar Aalto to Zaha Hadid, this postcard book is perfect for sharing with or sending to architecturally minded friends.
That’s it, but there’s more of course. It is your turn now!
Come on, leave your bonus books in the comments.
