It’s Sunday, December 27, 2020, and I am thinking about my favorite architecture books. Is that weird? Of course it isn’t because I like architecture books and now that I am flush with gift cards from this holiday season, it is time to go book shopping!
Since this pandemic started, some of you might know that I have been slowly renovating my house since July … well, my contractor has been slowly renovating my house. Just before Christmas we finally got our front room back and it’s time to start putting everything back on the shelves.
I have a very sad confession to make before I go much further … years ago I moved from a large house into a very small house and it basically didn’t have any storage or bookshelves. I had to go through all my stuff and make the decision of what I really wanted to keep and what needed to get gone. It was an unpleasant process but among the casualties were about 60% of my architecture books.
Can you just imagine?!?
Well anyway, here we are and now that I’ve just added some more bookshelves to my house, I don’t have to do quite as stingy with the number of books that I add to my collection.
About 6 months ago I started a kit.co account as a way to share with others the books I am buying, or the ones I own and enjoy since I so rarely write any blog posts about my books. If you can believe it, I just looked it up and this is the 1,001 post I’ve written on this site (Ikind of wish I had done something more special for number 1,000) and this is only the 4th blog post I have written on the books in my collection. The first one was titled “My Library Books” and I wrote it on May 10th, 2010, and this was after I had to trim down my collection so it’s a little pathetic as architectural book collections go.
So let’s take a look at a small selection of my current list of books…
So far I have 48 books on my list, but these are just a small sample of them. I specifically chose these 30 because I actually own all of them and can vouch that they are all worth having and adding to your own collection. There are a bunch of technical manuals on my list as well as pretty much all of the Frank Ching books that I own but I figured I could leave them off this graphic but if you click here or on the image above, you can see for yourself which ones I have one there.
I am going to keep modifying that list of books in order to keep the lists manageable. It isn’t of much use if I simply add every architecture book that comes out so once I get to around 50 books, the plan is that I will remove a book every time I add one. I would also add that if you have any books that you think are worth checking out, go ahead and let me know and I will do just that. There are a couple of books on my list that I’m pretty confident that you haven’t ever seen or heard of before (like this one and this one) and so it’s always fun to find that amazing book – which sadly is getting harder and harder to do.
Hopefully, you are enjoying your holiday break, taking a breather from the hustle and bustle (did I just date myself by saying “hustle and bustle”?) of your day-to-day life.
Cheers,
if you want to see the pens and pencils I like, or what’s on my desk, even if you are curious about the equipment I use to record the Life of an Architect podcast, you can see them all here.