Welcome!

Here is a basic blog that we, the students of CED Thesis, 2008, can use to communicate and participate in each others' thinking. Please feel free to post any suggestions. To begin, it was suggested at our first thesis meeting that we use this blog to compile a communal reading list. Please suggest a handful of readings that have been seminal in your thinking about architecture and beyond.

My faves, by no means comprehensive:

Architecture:
Louis Kahn - 'On Monumentality' and 'Order Is'
Classic Modernist texts. Why post and beam doesn't cut it anymore, and why form, design, order, structure are important.

Peter Zumthor - 'Thinking Architecture'
Architecture of things in themselves. Memories and impressions of material and spatial qualities.

Hans Ibeling - 'Supermodernism'
Best description of contemporary practice set in timeline of history I've seen. Though it's now ten years old...

Bruce Mau - 'Incomplete Manifesto'
Survival guide to architectural life.

Grant Hildebrand - 'Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses'
Prospect and Refuge explained.

Greg Lynn - 'Animate Form'
The animate, emerging process of design in the 21st century.

Jane Jacobs - 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'
Why New York is awesome. The streets need eyes. Early writing on emergent systems thinking.

Beyond:
Italo Calvino - 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium'
Multiplicity, Lightness, Exactitude, Visibility, Quickness and ....

Milan Kundera - 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
The poetry of our own dialectic of existence. Are we grounded or light? Concrete or glass?...

Hegel - 'The Science of Logic'
The original dialectician. A thing and it's opposite together create the improved synthetic proposition.

Karl Marx - 'Alienated Labor'
Why do all architects houses look like hovels?