Architecture plays a fundamental role in shaping our daily lives, influencing not only the spaces we inhabit but also our experiences and well-being. From the homes we live in to the public buildings we interact with, architecture has the power to enhance functionality, foster creativity, and create a sense of community.
New Jersey Architecture week was observed during the week of April 6-12. (The American Institute of Architects) AIA-NJ distributed recommended reading lists to New Jersey Libraries to encourage the public to read about Architecture and Architects.
The list can be accessed here.
National Architecture Week 2025, taking place from April 13-19, provides a platform to showcase the role of architecture in creating spaces that enhance quality of life and contribute to the development of our culture and society. It aims to raise public awareness and appreciation of architecture, showcase its value, and connect students with architects and design professionals.
Whether you’re an architecture enthusiast, a student, or simply someone curious about the artistry behind iconic structures, here are some books available with your Livingston Library card that explore architectural history, theory, and practice. These books celebrate architecture’s ability to shape our lives and the world around us.
As the nation recovered from a cataclysmic war, two titans of design profoundly influenced how Americans came to interact with the built and natural world around them through their pioneering work in architecture and landscape design. Frederick Law Olmsted is widely revered as America’s first and finest parkmaker and environmentalist, the force behind Manhattan’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Biltmore’s parkland in Asheville, dozens of parks across the country, and the preservation of Yosemite and Niagara Falls. Yet his close friend and sometime collaborator, Henry Hobson Richardson, has been almost entirely forgotten today, despite his outsized influence on American architecture–from Boston’s iconic Trinity Church to Chicago’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store to the Shingle Style and the wildly popular “open plan” he conceived for family homes. Individually they created much-beloved buildings and public spaces. Together they married natural landscapes with built structures in train stations and public libraries that helped drive the shift in American life from congested cities to developing suburbs across the country. In chronicling their intersecting lives and work in the context of the nation’s post-war renewal, Howard reveals how these two men created original all-American idioms in architecture and landscape that influence how we enjoy our public and private spaces to this day.
Architectural Theory : Pioneering Texts on Architecture from the Renaissance to Today
This book brings together all of the most important and influential essays about architecture written since the Renaissance, copiously illustrated and neatly organized chronologically by country. From Alberti and Palladio to Le Corbusier and Koolhaas, the best treatises by architecture’s greatest masters are gathered here, each accompanied by an essay discussing its historical context and significance.
Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages by Paul Binski
How did people living in the Middle Ages respond to spectacular buildings, such as the Gothic cathedrals? While contemporary scholarship places a large emphasis on the emotional content of Western medieval figurative art, the emotion of architecture has largely gone undiscussed. In a radical new approach, this book explores the relationship between medieval buildings and the complexity of experience they engendered. Binski examines long-standing misconceptions about the way viewers responded to medieval architecture across Western Europe and in Byzantine and Arabic culture between Late Antiquity and the end of the medieval period. He emphasizes the importance of the experience itself within these built environments, essentially places of action, space, and structure but also, crucially, of sound and emotion.
Architecture : The Definitive Visual History
From ancient dwellings to modern high-tech skyscrapers, discover everything there is to know about the history of architecture worldwide. Covering over 6,000 years of human history, this book charts the most important developments in building materials, technology, design, and the social changes that have shaped the architectural landscape. Explore every significant architectural period and style in depth through critical examples. Take a tour of some of the world’s most iconic buildings, beautifully illustrated with brilliant photography and specially commissioned CGI artworks…Find out why so many ancient Roman structures have withstood the test of time. Learn how the soaring ceilings of Gothic cathedrals are held up. And discover the architectural innovations that are helping to combat climate change.
Atlas of Never Built Architecture by Sam Lubell
A comprehensive global survey of more than 300 extraordinary unbuilt architecture projects from the 20th century to the present day. The Atlas features hundreds of the most spectacular unbuilt projects of the 20th and 21st centuries in a comprehensive, geographically arranged survey. At times impractical or fanciful but always imaginative and ambitious, the projects included in this ground-breaking book reveal the incredible diversity of ideas that have emerged from the world’s most influential architects. A vast array of imagery, from initial sketches and paintings to etchings and digital renderings, offers insight into how architectural projects are conceived and developed, and the book features a wide-ranging selection of projects, such as parliamentary buildings, museums, arts centers, skyscrapers, artificial islands, and city plans.
Bold Ventures : Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck
In thirteen fascinating chapters, Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal to their architects-architects who either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire in seventeenth-century France to a theater that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in the author’s hometown. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Darwin to art history, stories from her own life, and popular culture, Broeck brings patterns into focus as she asks, What is that strange, life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator?
Building the Metropolis : Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880-1935 by Alexander Wood
Wood asks a deceptively simple question about New York City in its most iconic period of growth from the 1880s to the 1930s: “Who did this?” In chronicling the labor of architects, builders, contractors, and construction workers, Wood compels our attention to the physical and social challenges embodied in buildings: where did the billions of bricks, millions of feet of lumber, millions of pounds of stone, and thousands of miles of wire, pipe, and steel come from, and who arranged to use them when, where, and how they were? His answers reveal much about the local specifics but also about national and international flows of ideas and goods.
Buildings that Breathe : Greening the World’s Cities by Nancy F. Castaldo
Urban planners, architects, and scientists are developing high-rise forests that seek to balance human activity and natural regeneration. Discover how green infrastructure will transform the urban landscape and how we think about our future.
Don’t Build, Rebuild : The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture by Aaron Betsky
In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuse.
Frank Lloyd Wright by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
This meticulous compilation assembles the most important works from Wright’s extensive, paradigm-shifting oeuvre into one authoritative overview of America’s most famous architect. Based on unlimited access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s archives at Taliesin West in Arizona, the collection spans the length and breadth of Wright’s projects, both realized and unrealized, from his early prairie houses, the Usonian concept homes, and the extraordinary Fallingwater to the Tokyo years, his designs for administrative buildings and places of worship, and later high-profile projects like the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as his fantastic visions for a better tomorrow with “The Living City.”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin : How America’s Most famous Architect Found Inspiration in his Home State by Kristine Hansen
A comprehensive guide to Wright’s designs (and those of his protégés) that are open to the public-as well as insider historical information about sites now demolished, and those available for “drive-bys” only. For architecture or history fans looking for tours, overnight stays, or creative inspiration. Museum collections in Wisconsin that include Wright’s furnishings and drawings are also included.
The Sagrada Familia : Gaudi’s Heaven on Earth by Gijs Van Hensbergen
Its scaffolding-cloaked spires reach up to the heavens, dominating the Barcelona skyline and drawing in millions of visitors every year. What seduces our attention is perhaps a combination: not only its almost megalomaniac ambition and architectural extravagance but the sheer longevity of its construction. Its creator, Antoni Gaudi, ‘God’s Architect’, saw the first stone laid on 19 March 1882 and yet it is unlikely to be completed until 2026 at the very earliest. It has survived two World Wars, the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and the ‘Hunger Years’ of Franco’s rule. It has defied the critics, the penny-pinching accountants, the conservative town-planners and the slaves to sterile modernism to witness the most momentous changes in society and history. This book explores the evolution of this remarkable building, working through the decades right up to the present day before looking beyond to the final stretch of its construction.
Saving Michelangelo’s Dome : How Three Mathematicians and a Pope Sparked an Architectural Revolution by Wayne Kalayjian
In 1742, when the legendary dome atop St. Peter’s Basilica–designed by Michelangelo–cracks and threatens to collapse, Pope Benedict XIV summons three mathematicians whose groundbreaking ideas spark a revolution in the world of architecture.
The Secret Life of Hidden Places : Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds that Made Them by Stefan Bachmann
A spellbinding tour, filled with stories and photographs, of some of the world’s most fascinating architectural mysteries. This wondrous guide for the curious and the intrepid takes readers on a lushly photographed and lyrically written tour of eighteen of the world’s most captivating architectural mysteries. Delve into both the secretive places themselves and the eccentric and obsessive minds that created them. Visit a chamber of skulls high in the Swiss Alps, a Japanese temple full of traps, a Parisian apartment locked and untouched since World War II, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Washington, DC, and a spooky “initiation” well in Portugal built by a secret society. How far down can you climb before losing your nerve?
Sick Houses : Haunted Homes & the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor
Horror begins at home from family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber’s cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them. This book crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears.
The Story of Architecture by Witold Rybczynski
In this sweeping history, from the Stone Age to the present day, Rybczynski shows how architectural ideals have been affected by technological, economic, and social changes-and by changes in taste. The host of examples ranges from places of worship such as Hagia Sophia and Brunelleschi’s Duomo to living spaces such as the Katsura Imperial Villa and the Alhambra, national icons such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Sydney Opera House, and skyscrapers such as the Seagram Building and Beijing’s CCTV headquarters. Rybczynski’s narrative emphasizes the ways that buildings across time and space are united by the human desire for order, meaning, and beauty.
Supertall : How the World’s Tallest Buildings are Reshaping our Cities and our Lives by Stefan Al
TED Resident Stefan Al-himself an experienced architect who has worked on some of the largest buildings in the world-reveals the advancements in engineering, design, and data science that have led to this worldwide boom. Using examples from the past (the Empire State Building, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower) and present (Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, London’s Shard, Shanghai Tower), he describes how the most remarkable skyscrapers have been designed and built. He explores the ingenious technological innovations-in cement, wind resistance, elevator design, and air-conditioning-that make the latest megastructures a reality. And he examines the risks of wealth inequality, carbon emissions, and contagion they yield while arguing for a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable built environment for everyone.
Women Architects at Work : Making American Modernism by Mary Anne Hunting
The first comprehensive history of the role of women architects within the history of American modernism.
—Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian