Looking for a last minute gift for the print-obsessed design stans on your holiday gift list? From the glossy pages of monographs to spirited interiors designed to inspire to texts suitable for the young (and young at heart), here is a comprehensive assembly of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and playful architecture and design books published this year. Be sure to appropriately anchor your stocking to your mantle or purchase enough wrapping paper, as some of these are hefty tomes.
Also, in case you missed it: Check out AN’s holiday gift guide, a curated list for architects and architecture lovers.
Monograph Mayhem
The year brought another strong crop of publications which focus on a single project or office. Starting close to home, check out Brooklyn Bridge Park, which captures the 23 years spent transforming the Brooklyn waterfront, or venture further down Long Island to visit Blue Dream, an organic modern home designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and captured in a dedicated publication by Paul Goldberger. Also peruse Iwan Baan’s latest book, which aligns with his retrospective currently on view at the Vitra Design Museum.
Architecture of Place
Bates Masi + Architects
ORO Editions
An Atlas of Es Devlin
Es Devlin, Andrea Lipps
Thames & Hudson
Blue Dream
Paul Goldberger
Delmonico + DAP
Brooklyn Bridge Park
MVVA
Monacelli Press
Caruso St. John Collected Works Vol. 2
Caruso St. John
MACK Books
Design for Life in the Deep South
Holly & Smith Architects
ORO Editions
Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism
MODU
Hatje Cantz
Hermann Czech: An Architect in Vienna
Eva Kuß
Park Books
John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense
Paul Walker
Harvard GSD Press
Moments in Architecture
Iwan Baan
Vitra Design Museum
Yasmeen Lari
Edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar, Architekturzentrum Wien
The MIT Press
Practice-minded
The business of architecture is a perennial topic, and publications like Ashton Hamm’s Practice Practice stem from lived cooperative experience. Molly Hunker and Kyle Miller’s Building Practice engages questions of labor, power and exclusivity through a series of interviews with a younger generation of designers and educators.
Building Practice
Molly Hunker, Kyle Miller
Applied Research & Design
Feminist Designer
Edited by Alison Place
The MIT Press
One House Per Day
Andrew Bruno
ORO Editions
Practice Practice
Ashton Hamm
ORO Editions
What Design Can’t Do
Silvio Lorusso
Set Margins
Engaging Diversity
The field of architecture and design continues to slowly address its diversity problems. These texts from authors, including Dori Tunstall to David Gissen, are bringing much-needed attention to inclusive design and are written to spark an overdue call to action.
The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access
David Gissen
University of Minnesota Press
Architectures of Spatial Justice
Dana Cuff
The MIT Press
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
Dori Tunstall
The MIT Press
Helvécia: A Swiss Colonial History in Brazil
Edited by Dom Smaz, Milena Machado Neves
Lars Müller Publishers
Latinas in Architecture and Allies: Stories of Raising the 1% One Latina at a Time
Alicia Ponce
Arquitina
Out in Architecture
Edited by Beau Frail, A. L. Hu, Yiselle Santos Rivera, Amy Rosen, Sarah Nelson-Woynicz
Self-published
Architecture’s Publics
These titles remind us that design goes beyond clients and drawings. Invoking societal relations embedded in structures like mansion blocks in the U.K. to the weaponized potentials of design for war and conflict, these titles are required reading for any socially minded practitioner.
Architecture from Public to Commons
Marcelo López-Dinardi
Routledge
Architectures of Care
Edited by Brittany Utting
Routledge
At Home in London: The Mansion Block
Karin Templin
MACK Books
Being a Ukrainian Architect During Wartime
DOM Publishers
Ievgeniia Gubkina
Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Spatial Tactics 1830–2023
Edited by Oliver Elser, Anna-Maria Mayerhofer, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Peter Cachola Schmal, Jennifer Dyck, Lilli Hollein
Park Books
Renewing the Dream
Edited by James Sanders; Preface by Nik Karalis; Contributions by Frances Anderton, Donald Shoup, Mark Valliantos
Rizzoli
Theory Heads
These titles are for the cocktail-party conversationalist, the book-club host, and the one who wants to go to—or desperately misses—graduate school. Architecture theory is alive and well, and pushing its traditional bounds to be more incisive, inclusive, and innovative. This list includes both legendary names like Pier Vittorio Aureli and emergent ones, like WAI Architecture Think Tank.
Architecture and Abstraction
Pier Vittorio Aureli
The MIT Press
Architecture’s Theory
Catherine Ingraham
The MIT Press
The City as a Technical Being: On the mode of existence of architecture
Peter Trummer
ORO Editions
Universal Principles of Architecture: 100 Architectural Archetypes, Methods, Conditions, Relationships, and Imaginaries
WAI Architecture Think Tank
Rockport Publishers
History Pilled
We’d all be better off knowing more about where we’ve been before planning where we want to go next in 2024. Brush up on your favorite architects, past architectural styles, and regime changes by browsing the best from Jean-Louis Cohen, Anna Bokov, and Frida Grahn.
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling: Inhabiting Modern Physical Culture 1926–38
Nile Greenberg, Matthew Kennedy
Park Books
The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe
Stephen Fox
Texas A&M Press
Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect
Edited by Frida Grahn
Birkhäuser
Detroit–Moscow–Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945
Edited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Christina E. Crawford, Claire Zimmerman
The MIT Press
Lessons from the Social Condensers 101 Soviet Workers’ Clubs and Spaces for Mass Assembly
Anna Bokov
gta Verlag
Ludwig Hilberseimer: Reanimating the City
Scott Colman
Bloomsbury
Nothing Permanent: Modern Architecture in California
Todd Cronan
University of Minnesota Press
Paris Moderne: 1914-1945
Jean-Louis Cohen, Guillemette Morel Journel
Rizzoli
The Shape of Utopia
Irene Cheng
University of Minnesota Press
US Embassies of the Cold War: The Architecture of Democracy, Diplomacy and Defense
David Petersen
Onera Publishing
Materially Minded
Sustainability goes beyond green roofs, and these publications are shining much-needed light on the building blocks of sustainable living and building. As excerpted in AN’s mass timber issue, Lindsey Wikstrom’s Designing the Forest and other Mass Timber Futures is a welcome primer on the ecosystems that connect us, and Transform joins the cacophony of voices revealing experimental preservation’s capabilities to go green.
American Framing: The Same Something for Everyone
Edited by Paul Andersen, Jayne Kelley, Paul Preissner
Park Books
Emerging Ecologies
Carson Chan, Matthew Wagstaffe
MoMA
Mass Timber Futures
Lindsey Wikstrom
Routledge
Touch Wood: Material, Architecture, Future
Edited by Carla Ferrer, Thomas Hildebrand, Celina Martinez-Cañavate
Lars Müller Publishers
Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change
Deborah Berke, Thomas de Moncheaux
Monacelli Press
Page Turners
Not all architecture books are by, or about, architects. The built environment, cities, and the objects that shape everyday lives often make perfect gifts for the architect who’s sick of thinking about capital-A Architecture. Lose yourself in one of these longform works that reshape how you think about space, from parking spaces to a NEOM-inspired development.
A Moment in the Sun
Robert McCarter
ORO Editions
Brother Alive
Zain Khalid
Grove Atlantic
California Against the Sea
Rosanna Xia
Heyday
Paved Paradise
Henry Grabar
Penguin Press
Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities
John King
W. Norton
Property: The myth that built the world
Rowan Moore
Faber
Arts Forward
Architecture lies at the intersection of art and technology, right? For every designer thirsty for a little inspiration or more images to add to their reference banks, the following titles showcase the art all around us. There is artfulness in the rituals of cleaning, as the Cleaning flipbook by Kenya Hara illustrates, and in continuous attention to the objects around us, as illustrated by Frida Escobedo’s meditative tome, The Book of Hours.
The Book of Hours
Frida Escobedo
Lars Müller Publishers
Cleaning
Kenya Hara
Lars Müller Publishers
Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne
Christopher Payne
Abrams Books
Now is Better
Stefan Sagmeister
Phaidon
Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approaches
Phyllis Lambert
Lars Müller Publishers
Richard Wright
Will Bradley, Martin Clark, Tim Ingold, Richard Wright
Rizzoli
Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials
Edited by Clive Scott, Nick Warr
The MIT Press
Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape
Stephen Shore
MACK Books
Architecture for Children
Whether you’re interested in learning more about how to design for children, or your child is already ready to start reading the architectural language, this collection reorients design thinking to prioritize the most imaginative among us.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander on Pedagogical Playgrounds
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
Concordia University Press/Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Playground Project
Gabriela Burkhalter
Park Books
Shapes, Lines, and Light: My Grandfather’s American Journey
Katie Yamasaki (granddaughter of Minoru Yamasaki)
Third Place Books
Skyscraper Babies
April Pulley Sayre, Jeff Sayre; illustrations by Juliet Menéndez
Godwin Books
For the Interiors Obsessed
Trade doom scrolling interiors inspo on social media for the medative pages of books, where the photography of classical and out-of-the-box interior designs breed new ideas. These publications provide design inspiration for a multitude of spaces and compile some of the best work from top designers.
Big Little Hotel
Donna Kacmar
Routledge
Koechlin House
Daisuke Hirabayashi
MACK Books
Mountain House: Studies in Elevated Design
Nina Freudenberger with
Penguin Random House
New Antiquarians
Michael Diaz-Griffith, with primary photography by Brian W. Ferry and additional photographs by Leon Foggitt
Monacelli
Shamshiri
Pamela Shamshiri, Ramin Shamshiri, Mayer Rus
Rizzoli
