Reading List
Reading
List
This reading list is not intended as a canon, nor as a list of recommendations arranged by importance.
It is an evolving map of the ideas, images, systems and narratives that have shaped the way we think about architecture.
The Architectural Mythologems emerged at the intersection of several fields: philosophy, depth psychology, mythology, semiotics, aesthetics, architecture and literature. Their boundaries are necessarily porous.
The categories below should therefore be understood as points of entry rather than fixed classifications.
Foundations
Before architecture can ask what form something should take, there are more fundamental questions: what is real, what can be known, what constitutes value, and how human beings situate themselves within history and existence.
The Republic
Nicomachean Ethics
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The World as Will and Representation
Tao Te Ching
Critique of Pure Reason
The Enneads
Essays
Beyond Good and Evil
Ethics
The Perennial Philosophy
Dialogues
All That We Know Knows Us
Sex and Character
Meditations
On the Genealogy of Morality
Heaven and Hell
The Essays
Timaeus
Bhagavad Gita
The Prince
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
What Is Buddhism?
Index Rerum
Bushido: The Soul of Japan
Ecce Homo
The Philosophy of Parochialism
A History of Western Philosophy
The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan
The Will to Power
Psyche
Architecture is encountered through consciousness before it is understood as an object. Dreams, projections, archetypes, complexes, memory and unconscious structures participate in the way environments acquire meaning.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Psychological Types
Understanding Human Nature
The Feminine in Fairy Tales
Escape from Freedom
The Red Book
Woman’s Mysteries
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Art and Literature
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Myth
A symbol is not merely an image attached to an idea. Myths, rituals and archetypal images provide some of humanity’s oldest structures for relating what can be articulated to what remains beyond direct articulation.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Man and His Symbols
The Sacred and the Profane
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Totem and Taboo
The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History
Images and Symbols
Language
Meaning rarely resides in an isolated element. It emerges through difference, relation, sequence, convention and structure. The same principle can be applied to architecture.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Savage Mind
A Theory of Semiotics
Syntactic Structures
Simulacra and Simulation
Mythologiques
The Truth in Painting
Aesthetics
Aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to preference. Questions of beauty, ugliness, representation, emptiness, composition and artistic form reveal different ways in which perception becomes structured and meaning becomes sensible.
Critique of Judgment
On Beauty
Kallias, or Concerning Beauty
A Treatise on Painting
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
The Aesthetics of Emptiness
Essays on Literature and Art
On Ugliness
Aesthetic
Modern Art: 1770–1970–2000
Architecture
Here the preceding fields become spatial. Architecture is approached not simply as the production of objects, but as a system of relations between form, experience, cultural memory, symbolic structure and the city.
The Ten Books on Architecture
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Krug na četiri ćoška
Towards a New Architecture
Architecture and Disjunction
The Four Books of Architecture
Urbs i Logos
The Architecture of Happiness
Anthology of Houses
Zaludna Mistrija
Red Is Not a Color
Gradoslovar
EEJI
Ukleti Neimar
Platonov Tajni Roman
Zelena Kutija
Literature
Literature constructs worlds without building them. Through narrative, character, atmosphere, metaphor and temporal sequence, it demonstrates how an imagined world can acquire internal coherence and become psychologically real.
Faust
The Aleph
Confessions of a Mask
The Lord of the Rings
Nausea
Dictionary of the Khazars
In Search of Lost Time
Dreamtigers
The Neverending Story
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Siddhartha
Landscape Painted with Tea
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Good Omens
Immortality
The Hobbit
Theatre
The Elementary Particles
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Plays
Norwegian Wood
The Colour of Magic
Don Quixote
Lives
Ideas are never completely separable from the lives through which they emerge. Diaries, memoirs and reflections on practice reveal habit, discipline, circumstance, obsession and the gradual construction of a personal worldview.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
From Immigrant to Inventor
Dnevnici
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Sun and Steel
Leonardo da Vinci
Down and Out in Paris and London
An Open Archive
This list is intentionally unfinished.
The intellectual framework of The Architectural Mythologems is not built around a closed doctrine, but around a continuing process of reading, comparison, reinterpretation and translation between disciplines.
New works will enter it. Others may change their significance over time.
The purpose of the list is therefore not to define what one must read, but to make visible some of the intellectual terrain from which the studio thinks and works.