Architecture and design

Traditional Islamic. Beaux-arts. Modernist. Its principles and jargon. Issues of adaptation and functionalism. The idea of "design methods", and whether they make sense (as opposed to whether the specific design methods movement of the '60s and '70s made sense). Biological designs. Evolutionary design.

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Peter Blake
- Form Follows Fiasco
- God's Own Junkyard
- No Place Like Utopia
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down [Who could resist a book with chapters like "How to Design a Worm"? Also good on catapults, compound bows, bridges, cathedrals, airplanes, and insisting to engineers that it's important to make things people can bear looking at. He's almost certainly wrong that most everyday objects of the 18th century looked better than their modern equivalents, because the sample which has survived consists of sturdy things worth keeping.]
Grant Hildebrand, Origins of Architectural Pleasure
Spiro Kostof
- A History of Architecture
- America by Design
- The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History
Donald Norman, Design of Everyday Things [Review: Fools Can Be So Ingenious]
David Pye, The Nature of Design
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form [This is not explicitly a design book, but that doesn't stop it from being terribly interesting to designers]

Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books of Architecture
Maria Blanca Alfieri, Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent
Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience [blurb]
Paola Antonelli, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design ["Fabrics made from ceramics, windows that are alternately clear and translucent, rubber and silicon light fixtures..."]
Molly Bang, Picture This: Perception and Communication
M. Barrucand and A. Bednorz, Moorish Architecture in Andalusia
Louis Bergeron and Maria Teresa Maiullari-Pontois, Industry, Architecture and Engineering: American Ingenuity, 1750--1950 ["comprehensive illustrated history of American industrial architecture & civil engineering from the 18th to 20th centuries"]
Samir B. Billatos and Nadia A. Basaly, Green Technology and Design for the Environment
Shelia S. Blair, Islamic Inscriptions
J. Bourgoin, Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design
Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World: An Inquiry into the Roots of Form and Order in the Built Environment
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: A History of Commodity Design
Arthur Ganson [Neat objects, article is full of rubbish art-speak]
David Gissen, Big and Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century [Sustainable skyscrappers!?!]
Gordon Glegg, The Design of Design
Goombrich, Art and Illusion
Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament
Paul Jacques Grillo, Form, Function and Design [Is this the same as What Is Design?]
Desmond Guinness and Julius T. Sadler, Jr., Mr. Jefferson, Architect
James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, Nomadic Furniture: How to Build and Where to Buy Lightweight Furniture That Folds, Collapses, Stacks, Knocks-Down, Inflates or Can Be Thrown Away and Re-Cycled. Being Both a Book of Instruction and a Catalog of Access for Easy Moving
John Heskett, Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life
R. A. Jairazbhoy, Outline of Islamic Architecture
J. Christopher Jones, Design Methods
Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor
Emil Kaufmann, Architecture and the Age of Reason
Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through history
Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America [online]
Brenda Laurel (ed.), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives [Blurb]
Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry
Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture [blurb]
Ian McHorg, Design with Nature
Pierre-Michel Menger, "Artistic Labor Markets and Careers", Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 541--574
Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place
George Michell, The Royal Palaces of India
William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation and Cognition
Gülru Necipoglu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire [Blurb]
The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity
Oka, How to Wrap Five Eggs
Frei Otto
Victor Papenek
- Design for Human Scale
- Design for the Real World
- The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World
- How Things Don't Work
David Pearson, Earth to Spirit: In Search of Natural Architecture [Seems like such a contradiction in terms as to deserve reading]
Ulrich Pfammatter, The Making of the Modern Architect and Engineer: The Origins and Development of a Scientific and Industrially Oriented Education
Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking [Blurb]
Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects
Salvadori, Why Buildings Stand Up
Henry Sarnoff
- Design Games
- Visual Research Methods in Design
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
Mike Silver (ed.), Programming Cultures: Architecture, Art and Science in the Age of Software Development
Sinan
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things [Blurb]
Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects
Tiffany Sutton, The Classification of Visual Art: A Philosophical Myth and Its History [blurb]
John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World [Blurb]
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture
Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist [blurb]
Willats, Art and Representation
Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics

Notebooks

Architecture and design