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Reading Material for beginners
Hi,
I am a certified B.Arch graduate and I teach first year in B.Arch. I wanted some suggestions for good books/ excerpts to read for my students. I wish to engage them in a regular short discussion after class to keep conversations on architecture or design running.
Little Red Riding Hood.
First year of what?
Elementary School
B. Arch - Bachelors of Architecture, I mentioned it.
Reading is not Alina's strongest asset.
sorry that I meant was: what are you teaching? First year of structures, first year design studio, professional practice, design theory? Just saying first year doesn't mean a whole lot. I assume that this is outside of the US?
@ Non Sequitur, still surpasses your skill of spending all day on the internet, reading every single of the comments and taking them seriously.
Alina, I’m rather exeptionlly busy doing architect stuff. I don’t think the 15mins total I’m here really is “all day”.
AlinaF: ?
Just to have a benchmark, what's the stuff you had to read yourself for your B.Arch?
Was meant for E2468.
The first thing I remember reading in school was Vitruvius.
Firmness, commodity, and delight.
from what I can remember, the major titles were:
Outside of that, Style and Epoch (Ginzburg), Team 10 Primer, and I'd add For Everyone a Garden (Safdie).
Some that I like:
Poetics of Space (Bachelard)
In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki)
The Eyes of the Skin (Pallasmaa)
The Architecture of the City (Rossi)
Complexity and Contradiction (Venturi)
A Pattern Language (Alexander)
ooh A Pattern Language!
rendevouz with rama, arthur c. clarke
'how to win friends and influence people' by dale carnegie.
the peter principle, by laurence peter.
thus spoke zarathustra, nietzsche
harry potter, JK Rowling
the prince, niccolo machiavelli
the wheel of time series, robert jordan (and brandon sanderson)
I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander. An interesting design perspective which takes you beyond your run-of-the-mill routine into things like networks, logic, mathematics, systems, probably mostly associated with urban studies.
Of all of Alexander's works, A Pattern Language gets all the attention in architecture, but I thought The Timeless Way of Building and Notes on the Synthesis of Form were better and encouraged more creative thought than A Pattern Language. Agree or disagree with Alexander's theory, it's a shame that more people haven't read some of his other works.
Christopher Alexander is one of those atypical architects possessing an actual structured thinking, but then again, he is also a mathematician. His brilliance shows in how he influenced major fields well outside of architecture, like computer science or philosophy. I admire him the most for how he kept reminding us about the beauty of "living structures" (and, by extension, architecture), he said "the objects that are most profound functionally are the ones which also promote the greatest feeling in us.", a pretty compelling argument for architecture as a "useless" thing, beyond pure "functionality" and profit.
Here is a list from ARCHDaily
https://www.archdaily.com/9015...
I know this is an old thread, but I'd like to add - Design of Cities by Edmund Bacon. This was required reading for an undergrad studio I had and I thought it was very straight-forwardly written and I liked the images.
"The Old Way of Seeing" by Johnathan Hale
https://www.amazon.com/Old-Way...
How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit by Witold Rybczynski
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