SOURCES FOR ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS
annotated bibliography
complied by
Jill Stoner
Associate Professor of Architecture
UC Berkeley
2007
Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1952.
A science fiction classic by a mathematician, describing life in a two-dimensional world.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed. This sets the premise for a speculation on the
nature of “bare life.”
AlSayyad, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London: Routledge Press, 2006.
AlSayyad examines, through 20th century films, a set of urban conditions that illustrate such diverse contemporary phenomena as
divergent experiences of race and class, the dominance of surveillance, and the hyperreal aesthetic of new urbanism.
Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams.
---. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Etienne GIlbert. New York: Beacon, 1961.
Bachelard’s exploration of the spatial dimensions of poetry, with attention to such archtypal spaces as cellar and attic, nest,
drawer and chest, and the phenomenology of roundness.
Ballard, J. G. Concrete Island. New York: Vintage, 1985.
A novel about an architect marooned and invisible in a gap among the freeways of the London metropolitan ring roads.
---. “Intensive Care Unit.” Myths of the Near Future. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Short story describes the violence that ensues when family members, each accustomed to his/her own individual space, decide to
meet in person.
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Banham identifies four ecologies in Los Angeles: freeway, plain, foothill and suburb. Important and seminal celebration of the
particular conditions of the American post-war landscape. Contemporary with Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
The objects of material and polular culture achieve significance in this collection of short essays. Such diverse subjects as
Einstein’s brain, toys, and the new Citroen.
Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Trans. Howard Eiland. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University,
2006.
Benjamin’s childhood reminiscences include such spatial experiences as the discover of a sock’s interior ambiguities.
---. “Naples.” Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Intro. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978. 163 - 73.
Benjamin wrote thi essay together with Asja Lacis. Images of Naples blur the distinction between the natural and the urban, and
also between the public and the private.
---. “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century.” Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Intro. Peter
Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, PL. New York: Schocken, 1978. 146 - 62.
Much of this material is represented in the form of extended notes in the larger work The Arcades Project. Numbered sections are
devoted to the arcades, panoramas, world expositions, and the interior.
---. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Schocken, 1969.
Benjamin reflects on the power of photography and other forms of reproduction to effect a change in the definition of an original
work of art.
Berger, John. “Field.” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Short essay effects a transition from observer to participant, with a grazing field as its subject.
---. “Manhattan.” A Sense of Sight. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Description of the space of Manhattan, including a drawing by Berger.
---. “Ralph Fasanella and the Experience of the City.” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Through the analysis of paintings by the folk artist Fasanella, Berger addresses conditions of privacy and publicity in the city.
Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
An interdisciplinary look at the experience of the twentieth century, including a reinterpretation of Marx, and a close look at the
urban modernity of St. Petersburg and New York. Includes an analysis of the development influences of Robert Moses.
Blanchot, Maurice. Aminadab. Trans. Jeff Fort. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002.
A fantastic experience in a shape-shifting apartment house, suggestive of Kafka’s “Castle.”
Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text The (S)Crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
A close reading of Finnegan’s Wake and Piranesi’s drawings, and the parallels of language between them.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
The definitive critical work in English on Genjamin’s Arcades Project.
Caldeira, Teresa P. R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.
Analysis of patterns of isolation and segragation in this mega-city, including the architecture of the “enclave.” Compares with
Mike Davis’s Los Angeles study “City of Quartz.”
Calvino, Italo. “The Form of Space.” Cosmicomics. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.,
1968. 115-23.
A love story taking place in a parallel free-fall through space. Speculations on the fractal geometries of pure space.
---. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1974.
Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo sit in a garden, as Polo describes the cities he has encountered on his travels-- thin cities, trading
cities, cities and signs. In reality, the cities are all metaphysical portraits of Venice. see also: William Gass, “Invisible
Cities”
---. Marcovaldo. Trans. Wiliam Weaver. London: Secker and Warburg, 1983.
An urban laborer reveals his sensitivity to the natural seasonal rythms of the countryside.
---. Mr. Palomar. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1983.
Calvino’s last novel, written in three contexts-- the beach vacation, the city and a metaphysical set of silences.
---. Six Memos for Hte Next Millenium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Written for the 1985 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Calvino died with only five of the lectures completed. The themes
of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity, applied to literature in the lectures, work for architecture
as well.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996.
Castells develops the concept of the “space of flows” in Chapter 6- key to contemporary theories of global civilization in an
information society.
Chandler, Marilyn. Dwelling in the Text. Berkeley: Un iversity of California Press, 1991.
Chandler explores the image and meaning of the house in American fiction, from Thoreau and Hawthorn and Poe, to Fitzgerald,
Faulkner and Morrison.
Cheever, John. “The Swimmer.” Collected Stories of John Cheever.
On a warm summer day in Westchester county, Neddy Merrill decides to swim home through a chain of pools in his
neighborhood. The adventure turns to nightmare, as the suburban space is transformed into an elongation of time.
Colomina, Beatriz. .
Conrads, Ulrich, ed. Programs and Manifestos on 20th -Century Architecture. Trans. Michael Bullock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.
An anthology of short architectural manifestos of the 20th cenury, including those of Loos, Taut, Corbusier, Van der Rohe,
Gropius, Kahn and Fuller.
Corner, James. Taking Measure Across the American Landscape.
Crawford, Margaret. Everyday Urbanism.
Davenport, Guy. Every Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
Twenty essays, including “Making it Uglier to the Airport” and “Ariadne’s Dancing Floor.”
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York, 1992.
Davis’s first book, a ruthless analysis of L A, including the chapter on the architecture of security and surveillance, “Fortress L.
A.” See also: Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls, similar work on Sao Paolo Brazil.
---. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.
Davis argues that the production of slums around the world’s major cities is the result of deliberately corrupt leadership, and the
controlled transfer of assets from the poor to the rich.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
Part III: Spatial Practices. Three chapters, “Walking in the City”, “Railway Navigation and Incarceration” and “Spatial Stories”
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald NIcholson-Smith. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1994. 1967.
Debord’s theory of the spectacle as the defining social characteristic of the time (1960’s), that which served to separate us from
each other-- that is, as the primary instrument of alienation.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Delillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Humerous and ironic portrait of an American family in the context of everyday suburban culture, an extra-ordinary noxious
cloud, and the “cloud” of the fear of death.
Didion, Joan. “Many Mansions.” The White Album. White album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Comparison of two governors’ mansions in Sacramento, with particularly prescient descriptions of the kitchens.
---. “On the Mall.” The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
“They float on the landscape ike pyramids to the boom years . . .” Reflections on the phenomenon of the American mall.
Dillard, Annie. Living by Fiction. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1982.
Reflections on the particular value of “contemporary modernist fiction.”
Dimendberg, Edward. Excluded Middle: Toward a Reflective Architecture and Urbanism. Architecture at Rice. Houston and San
Francisco: Rice School of Archicture and William Stout Publishers, 2002.
A forward by Lars Lerup.
Dixon, Terrell. City Wilds. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.
A collection of fiction and non-fiction writings on the presence of nature in the urban landscape. Includes Lisa Couturier’s essay
“Reversing the Tides” and Richard Brautigan’s story “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”
Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1994
---. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
A collection of Eco’s essays on the contemporary landscape, including reflections on theme parks, the similarity of the current
time to the middle ages, and the archetype of Casablanca.
Evans, Robin. “Mies Van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries.” Mies Van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries. Translations from
Drawing to Building and Other Essays.
Analysis of the Barcelona Pavilion as an example of symmetry around a horizontal line rather than a vertical one.
---. “The Rights of Retreat and the Rites of Exclusion: Notes Toward a Definition of Wall.” Translations from Drawing to
Building and Other Essays.
A theory of walls as instruments of voluntary retreat and coercive exclusion, with examples from a wide range of literary and
built sources.
Frank, Ellen Eve. Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 1979.
Frank’s essays on Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, and Henry James, and the architectural images in their
novels.
Frascari, Marco. “The Tell-the-Tale Detail.” VIA VII.
An exploration of the meaning of the architectural detail through the drawing and architecture of Carlo Scarpa
Gass, William. On Being Blue. Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1976.
Subtitled “A Philosophical Inquiry”, Gass explores the emotional, sexual and literary associations of the color blue.
---. Tests of Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Essays, including “Invisible Cities” and “The Test of TIme”
Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996.
Critical study of Benjamin’s urban theory, analysed through his essays on specific cities, his readings of Baudelaire and other
writers, and his Arcades Project notes. Sections are devoted to images, memories and allegories.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.
Harbison, Robert. Eccentric Spaces. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher Inc., 1988.
Harbison takes on a journey through the spaces that we cannot actually inhabit with our bodies-- the spaces of literature, of maps
and catalogues, and also of some physical but “eccentric” spaces like gardens and grottos, the underground, and the
machine.
Hayes, K. Michael. Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
An extensive collection of essays by architects and critics, that effectively picks up where Ockman’s anthology leaves off.
Hodgins, Eric. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Kingsport: Kingsport Press Inc., 1946.
A funny story about an ordinary AMerican couple taking on the challenge of building a house.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Jameson’s book covers the wide scope of political theory, architecture, film, economics and other aspects of contemporary
culture. A definitive work in Marxist critical theory. Includes analysis of the ficiton of J. G. Ballard.
Kubler, George. The Shape of Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1962.
Kubler offers a structuralist view of the history of art, eliminating the division into distinct “periods” favor of linkages that
express the continuities of change, rather than the static discontinuities implied by the traditions of art historical styles.
Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.
Kwinter poses a set of complex relations between science and the arts, involving EInstein’s theory of relativity, the urban theory
of the Italian futurists, and the fiction of Kafka.
Larson, Erik. Devil in the White City. New York: Vintage, 2003.
The true stories of a World’s Fair architect and a serial killer in Chicago in the 1890’s.
le Corbusier. Toward a New Architecture.
le Ricolais, Robert. “Things Themselves Are Lying and So Are Their Images.” VIA II.
A structural engineer explores formal analogies in nature, and the nature of form.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.
Argues that space, far from being the empty geometry into which we insert ourselves and our lives, is itself a constructed field, a
product of social, political and aesthetic forces.
Lerup, Lars. After the City. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
In particular, the essay “Stim and Dross: Retthinking the metropolis”, previously published in Assemblage, Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994. Lerup posits a new kind of metropolitan space, not the density of European urbanism, but rather a c
onstellation of ‘stims’ that shine like starts in the black sky of Houston’s ‘dross’ landscape.
Lesser, Wendy. The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History. Boston: Faber and Faber,
1987.
Lesser examines the nature and resonance of underground images in children’s literature, history, psychoanalysis, transportation
and contemporary fiction.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
In particular, the essay “A Global Sense of Place”, which argues for a definition of place that transcends both regionalism and
boundaries.
Ockman, Joan, ed. Architecture Culture 1943 - 1968. New York: Columbia University and RIzzoli International Publications
Inc., 1993.
Extensive collection of essays by both critics and architects.
Olalquiaga, Celeste. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Five essays on contemporary urban culture, including subjects of kitsch, cyborgs, spatial boundaries, and the Latinization of
America.
Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.
Perec, Georges. Life: A User’s Manual. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1987.
Calvino called it “ . . the last real event in the history of the novel so far.” The sectional diagram of an apartment house forms the
scaffolding for a series of 99 short narratives, connected by their physical relationship within the building. DIscussed at
length in Calvino’s essay on “multiplicity” in Six Memos.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965.
Robbe-Grillet’s theory of the new novel, including reflections on his own work. The disappearance of the character, the emphasis
on surfaces.
Schneider, Peter. The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story. Trans. Leigh Hafrey. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Fiction with the force of journalism; the Berlin Wall as a social and aesthetic instrument.
Schumacher, Thomas. Terragni’s Danteum: Architecture, Poetics and Politics Under Italian Fascism. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1985.
Schumacher’s deep and original anaylsis of the Danteum project, including essays on politics (Mussolini) and literature (Dante),
and a translation of Terragni’s own text on the project. All the drawings for the project are contained in the book, and
well annotated.
Shepheard, Paul. What is Architecture? Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.
An extended speculation on the state of architecture, in whimsical and eclectic creative prose..
Siza, Alvaro. Writings on Architecture.
Smithson, alison. Team 10 Primer. Cambridge: MIT P, 1967.
An anthology of the ideas and drawings of the members of “Team10”: J. B. Bakema, Aldo Van Eyck, G. Candilis, A and P
Smithson, Shad Woods, Giancarlo de Carlo, J. Coderch, J. Soltan, S. Wewerka.
Soja, Edward A. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989.
Builds upon the work of Lefebvre, Jameson and Foucault in the exploration of space as a social product rather than a tabula rasa
for historical events.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” “Ag. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Strous & GIroux, 1966. 3 - 14.
Sontag’s seminal essay on the need for an “erotics” of art, of allowing works to speak for themselves. A call for criticism to focus
on the elucidation of the surfaces and form of the work, rather than on its meaning.
---. A Place for Fantasy. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 136-41.
Reflections on the cultural need for grottos, including such contemporary additions to the genre as backyard bomb shelters and
Portman hotel lobbies.
Stoner, Jill. Poems for Architects. San francisco: William Stout Publishers, 2001.
Collection of 48 poems, with five critical essays exploring themes of contemporary space.
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Barbara Luigia Le Penta. Cambridge: MIT P,
1976.
Written from a Neo-Marxist point of view, Tafuri traces the modern condition from its beginings in the Enlightenment and the
visions of Piranesi, through the twentieth-century avant guard movements before WOrld War II, to the post-war
engagement of architecture with semiology.
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
The first in Thornton’s trilogy about the “disappeareds” of the 1970’s. Carlos, a clairvoyant can see the fate of those that have
disappeared, except in the case of his own wife Cecelia.
Tschumi, Bernard and Irene Cheng, ed. The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. New York: Monticelli
Press, 2003.
Collection of short pieces by theorists and practitioners, responding to themes of Urbanism, Identity, Globalization, Materiality
and Electronics.
Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Cheshire: Graphics Press, 1990.
Graphic representation of quantitative and qualitative information, with examples gleaned from a wide range of disciplines.
Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004.
An extended analogy between the making of a map of the physical world, and the conceptual cartography of a work of fiction.
Updike, John. “Can Architecture be Criticized?” Odd Jobs. New York: Knopf, 1991. 50-53.
“I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is
good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.”
---. “Fictional Houses.” Odd Jobs. New York: Knopf, 1991. 46-50.
“Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect-- castles in the air!-- and a novel itself, of course, is a kind of dwelling, whose
spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.” Discusses fictional houses
of Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton and Nathanael West.
---. “A Sense of Transparency.” Odd Jobs. New York: Knopf, 1991. 57-59.
Personal reflection on the experience of living in a seventeenth-century New England house.
Valery, Paul. “‘Eupalinos, or the Architect’.” In Dialogues. Complete Works Volume IV. Princeton, 1927.
Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture,
1967.
Seminal challenge to the “simple” tenets of modernism.
Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott-Brown. Learning from Las Vegas. New York: Rizzoli, 1972.
Analysis of the space of Las Vegas, including diagrams.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.
Vidler’s essays tackle the contemporary terrains of houses, bodies and spaces in both abstract theory, and in recent “unhomely”
works of architecture.
Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Experience. Brooklyn: Semiotext (c)., 1991.
---. A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
In a series of essays, Virilio brings to light aspects of alienation, or global warfare, of mass communication, to demonstrate the
transition from a world of the spatial relationships to one of the temporal. “Delirous New York”, written in 1993,
reflects upon the first attack on the World Trade Center, an essay that reads differently in light of the events of
September 2001
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
An account of the nature of decay, with a focus on the products of our industrialized society. Journalism, not science fiction.
Wetherelll, W. D. “The Man Who Loved Levittown.” The Man Who Loved Levittown. New York: Avon, 1985. 1 - 17.
Fictional story about the real Levittown on Long Island, tracing the evolution of its demographics through the eyes of one
homeowner.
Weyl, Hermann. “Symmetry.” Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952.
Insight into the concepts of symmetry that bridge the worlds of mathematics, science and art.
Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres.