Top Architecture books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Architecture books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Architecture

Understanding the concepts of Architecture starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment

Engineering in Plain Sight extends the field guide genre from natural phenomena to human-made structures, making them approachable and understandable to non-engineers. It transforms readers' perspectives of the built environment, converting the act of looking at infrastructure from a mundane inevitability into an everyday diversion and joy.
Each section of this accessible, informative book …

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The Art of Home: A Designer Guide to Creating an Elevated Yet Approachable Home

Whether it's through her thriving design business, Studio McGee, her popular Netflix series, Dream Home Makeover, or her online community of over five million followers, Shea McGee has shown the world how the principles of high-end design can be applied to any home. As the title of her new book suggests, designing rooms for maximum impact while also remaining approachable to any who enter is a…

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The Architecture of the City

The Architecture of the City (Italian: L'architettura della città) is a seminal book of urban design theory by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi published in Padova in 1966. The book marks the shift from the urban doctrines of modernism to a rediscovery of the traditional European city.

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Delirious New York

Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise. Though this book argues that it often appears that the architecture generated the culture.

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101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Encompassing both theory and practice, and illustrated with often witty drawings, 101 Things is an eclectic itemization of architectural philosophies, compositional strategies and tactics, design conventions, drawing and presentation techniques, and even tips about how to behave as an architect.

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Arquitectura - Forma, Espacio y Orden

Esta introducción clásica a los principios de la arquitectura analiza de manera sistemática y exhaustiva los fundamentos de la forma, el espacio y la ordenación arquitectónicos a partir de prototipos y de ejemplos históricos de todas las épocas, culturas y ámbitos geográficos. Partiendo de los elementos primarios hasta llegar a las composiciones arquitectónicas más complejas, el libro examina …

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Additional Architecture Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Architecture, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

The poetics of space

The Poetics of Space (1958) explores how imagination fills a space with spirit and meaning, and reciprocally, how the space evokes feeling, memory, and fantasy in its occupant's imagination.

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A Pattern Language

A pattern language is an organized and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language.

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Architects' Data

Architects' Data (German: Bauentwurfslehre), also simply known as the Neufert, is a reference book for spatial requirements in building design and site planning.

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How Buildings Learn

When a building is finished being built, that isn’t the end of its story. More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they’re allowed to. Buildings adapt by being constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and in that way, architects can become artists of time rather than simply artists of space. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei’s Media …

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S,M,L,XL

S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings.

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In Praise of Shadows

“In Praise of Shadows” (In-ei Raison) is a long essay published in 1934, in which Tanizaki sums up what he feels Japan has lost in becoming modern. In brief, it is his view that the traditional Japanese arts thrived in the shade, and that the glaring light of the Twentieth Century is destroying them.

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Specializations and Deeper Architecture Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. Architecture is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

World Architecture: The Masterworks

More than 350 color photographs celebrate the finest buildings from over two thousand years of civilization: Hagia Sophia, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Islamic masterworks at Isfahan, the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Westminster, Gehry's iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and much more.

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This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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