Summer is the perfect time to dig into your huge pile of want-to-read books. Whether you’re sunbathing at the beach, killing time waiting for the subway, or flying abroad for summer vacation, AN editors have compiled new architecture and design titles for you.
What You Need to Know Now: Sociopolitics in Design
At times, architects are at the forefront of design activism and social matters, as they can use their spatial imagination to confront injustice and instability. These reads will open your mind—and practice—and maybe offer some much-needed optimism.
Architecture After War: A Reader
Edited by Bohdan Kryzhanovsky
MACK
$25.00
Architecture against Democracy
Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman
University of Minnesota Press
$35
Building Institution
Kim Förster
Transcript
$70
Prospering In The U.S.: A Handbook For Immigrant Architects
Graciela Carrillo, Yu-Ngok Lo, Saakshi Terway, Oyuki Sulu, and Gloria Kloter
IAC
$19
Engaging with Climate
The climate crisis is considered the defining challenge of our time. Centuries of industrial production have left designers in a precarious position: How to reckon with the constraints of our collective resources and work toward responsible practice? These titles ask the big questions and pose new solutions and pathways for designers everywhere.
Building Carbon Europe
Dennis Pohl
Sternberg Press
$22
Environmental Activism by Design
Coleman Coker and Sarah Gamble
Applied Research + Design
$35
Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
Adam Greenfield
Verso
$19.95
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
Kohei Saito
Astra Publishing Housing
$27
Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture
Albert Narath
University of Minnesota Press
$32.95
Design Near and Far
Even if your summer vacation is more of a staycation, you can travel around the world by adding these new titles to your bookshelf. Browse this list to dive deep into a place you’ve studied for years or learn about somewhere completely new.
Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
MIT Press
$34.95
The City in the City
Amy Thomas
MIT Press
$30
Mountain House
Nina Freudenberger
Clarkson Potter
$40
Something Completely Different: Architecture in Belgium
Christophe Van Gerrewey
MIT Press
$39.95
Where is Africa: Vol. 1
Emanuel Admassu and Anita N. Bateman
CARA
$35
The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris
Justinien Trabillion
Verso
$29.95
Making Better Urbanism
While not everyone can access the private homes and elite projects of the architectural avant-garde, the street belongs to all of us, which makes urbanism and city planning some of the defining topics of contemporary discourse. These volumes explore both specific geographic contexts—like Columbus, Indiana; Texas; or Calcutta—and wider historic narratives.
American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana
Matt Shaw, with photography by Iwan Baan
Monacelli Press
$75
Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture
Kathryn E. O’Rourke and Ben Koush
University of Texas Press
$45
Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing
Alexander Gorlin
Rizzoli
$35
A Paradise of Small Houses: the Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing
Max Podemski
Penguin Random House
$29.95
Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s Ecologies and Settled Ruralities
Victoria Jane Marshall
ORO Editions
$40
Protest Architecture Barricades, Camps, Spatial Tactics 1830–2023
Edited by Oliver Elser, Anna-Maria Mayerhofer, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Jennifer Dyck, Lilli Hollein, and Peter Cachola Schmal
Park Books
$25
Rat City
Jon Adams, Edmund Ramsden
Melville House
$32.50
Make Reading Fun Again
Some writing resists classification, just like some of your favorite music resists genre. Here are two recent releases that remind us that binaries and boxes are sometimes useful but never necessary.
The Architect & Designer Birthday Book
James Biber
Princeton Architectural Press
$45
What We Keep: Advice from Artists and Designers on Living with the Things You Love
Jean Lin
Abrams
$40
Famous Places and Spaces
Architects and designers operate using a shared language of projects and references. Our favorite places and spaces age and adapt to contemporary life—or don’t. Brush up on the history of a favorite or take notes on a building you’ve always felt you need to know more about, and soon you’ll be the queen of conversation at your next cocktail party.
Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Masterpieces
Dominic Bradbury
Phaidon
$150
Concrete Architecture
Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin
Phaidon
$79.95
The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture
Michelangelo Sabatino
Monacelli Press
$75
Eugene Richards: Remembrance Garden
Eugene Richards
D.A.P
$55
Machine à Amuser: The Life and Death of the Beistegui Penthouse
Wim van den Bergh
MIT Press
$65
Technology’s Intersections
What separates today’s design culture from that of yesterday’s? Technology is one answer. Stay up to date, learn new skills, or reexamine recent trends in the pages of these titles.
Artificial Intelligence in Architecture
Edited by Matias del Campo
Wiley
$37.50
Behavioural Production: Semi-Autonomous Approaches to Architectural Design, Robotic Fabrication and Collective Robotic Construction
Robert Stuart-Smith
Routledge
$44.99
Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex
Jeffery S. Nesbit
Routledge
$48.99
Homing the Machine in Architecture
Galo Canizares and Zach Cohen
Routledge
$35.99
The Nature of Our Cities
Nadina Galle
Harper Collins
$29.99
Theory Time
Everyone needs a big, beautiful theory book to peruse at the local cafe. Expand your mind and look good doing it with these new boundary-bending works of theoretical exploration by some of the field’s premier thinkers.
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling: Inhabiting Modern Physical Culture 1926–38
Nile Greenberg and Matthew Kennedy
Park Books
$40
Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation
Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus
Applied Research + Design Publishing (AR+D)
$49.95
The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education
Kirsten Day, Peggy Deamer, Andrea Dietz, Tessa Forde, Jessica Garcia Fritz, Palmyra Geraki, Valérie Lechêne
Routledge 2024
$38.99
Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin
Alfredo Thiermann Riesco
MIT Press
$45
Things That Move
Tim Anstey
The MIT Press
$40
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky As Architect
Richard Anderson
MIT Press
$65
People and Personalities
Sometimes buildings aren’t enough. Learning more about the people and personalities is always a surefire way to find renewed inspiration or change your perspective. This collection of beautiful new monographs, interviews, and personal histories might help.
Adèle Naudé: A Form of Practice
Adèle Naudé
ORO Editions
$60
Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class
Jacqueline Taylor
MIT Press
$39.95
Hélène Binet
Marco Iuliano and Martino Stierli
Lund Humphries
$63.77
Horace Jones: Architect of Tower Bridge
David Lascelles
Profile Editions
$24.35
Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook
Edited by Sue Ann Kahn
Lars Müller Publishers
$40
Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect
Contributions by Heather Isbell Schumacher, Molly Lester, Franca Trubiano and William Whitaker
Yale University Press
$60
Ride: Antoine Predock: 65 Years of Architecture
Rizzoli
Antoine Predock
$125
Source Books in Architecture No. 16: Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO
Tatiana Bilbao with contributions from Kay Bea Jones and Benjamin Wilke
Applied Research + Design Publishing (AR+D)
$30
