Architecture theory books
This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design. Architecture is the parent discipline of a lot of interaction design thinking, and this list is the shelf I was reading on the theory side: space, the city, urbanism, and the politics of the built environment.
Calvino’s Invisible Cities is the book I keep giving to people. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is the phenomenological counterpart, both are worth reading slowly. Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction and Manhattan Transcripts are the most polemical of the theoretical books. William J. Mitchell’s City of Bits and E-topia are the early digital-urbanism texts that most directly speak to interaction designers working on networked spaces.
The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy.
City of Collective Memory
M. Christine Boyer.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Breathing Cities: Visualizing Urban Movement
Nick Barley.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture
Manuel Gausa.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Rebuilding the Reichstag
Norman Foster.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Towards a New Architecture
Le Corbusier.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Architecture and Disjunction
Bernard Tschumi.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Manhattan Transcripts
Bernard Tschumi.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
The Logic of Architecture
William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture
Jennifer Siegal ed.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
City of Bits
William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
E-topia
William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Strangely Familiar
Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, Jane Rendell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard, Etienne Gilson, John Stilgoe.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
De Stijl
Paul Overy.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Fragments of Utopia
David Wild.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Architects in Cyberspace
Neil Spiller, Martin Pearce.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com