Most, if not every book that one reads, is encountered with our minds as much as our visceral senses, adding to our arsenal of lived and learned experiences, of observing and manoeuvring the world. No two readers visualise or register the same way, the same inked words that appear on myriad surfaces—the experience is largely incommensurable. In a world increasingly riddled with overt misconceptions and misinformation, the fertile, sustained, and transformative power of the written word remains unparalleled in its capacity to educate and mould our approaches to thinking. Profound reservoirs of knowledge, books shape the way we think, and in turn, the way we view and interact with the world, the way we create, and the way we grow, conduct, and express ourselves, steered from the nurtured, intersectant coordinates of erudition, discernment, and implementation.

We grow when we understand, and one of the finest avenues to gain that comprehension is through the written word. Experiencing the pleasure of the text—salient, recontouring, provoking, and nourishing—equips most to face the considerable challenge of dealing with biased, ill-informed, or downright, dangerously daft perceptions. The same cultivated acumen plays out within the creative circuits of design and architecture, where this knowledge-gathering furthers the necessary empowerment of rational, logical, and informed networks of thinking and creating. This proceeds, in equal amounts, to affirm, dilute, expand, constrain or augment our creative horizons of complexity and brevity, learning and beauty, enrichment and disillusionment, undoing and creating.

Below (and in no particular order), STIR presents a selection of stimulating book features and reviews centred on the realms of global architecture and design, including heartfelt memoirs, activist readings, compelling academic indulgences, and more, providing valuable insights stirring creative discourse and enabling knowledge building, towards effecting a more well-rounded creative industry.

1. How do you make it in the creative industry? Easy. Be privileged.

The creative industry is notorious for being exclusionary, for its lack of genuine access, and for its conspicuously marked in-roads of privilege. 

UK-based charity Creative Mentor Network is on an ambitious quest to recalibrate the creative industries towards becoming more socio-economically diverse, accessible, and inclusive. They partnered with global creative agency AnalogFolk, to launch their 60-page, tongue-in-cheek book succinctly named Making It In The Creative Industry: A Practical Guide, filled with sarcastic advice, such as suggesting time travel as a solution to garner experience for an entry-level position, or emitting 'boisterous arrogance outwardly' at work to impress and get ahead. Accompanied by illustrations by artist Tobatron, the book, through satire and statistics, pieces together the myriad invisible yet very real, very serious, and some impossible barriers that aspiring creatives from low socioeconomic backgrounds encounter while attempting to land a job and flourish in the competitive global creative gamut.

2. 'Making Space' for women's aspirations in Aotearoa New Zealand

Edited by historian Elizabeth Cox, this book, comprising 48 essays, delineates the stories of both colonial and indigenous women in New Zealand, concerning the architectural discipline and its associated industries from 1840 – 2020. It also ponders upon both the individual and collective struggles faced by women in architecture, and strategies employed to make the profession more inclusive.

The book not only chronicles the contributions of women who were formally registered for the role or ones who had the opportunity to hold positions in architectural firms or establish studios, but also about those with no relevant degrees or experience in the field but were responsible for designing structures off their own accord. This tome details creative women taking charge of making physical spaces, buildings, and landscapes while pushing through to make space for themselves in an industry notorious for not taking them seriously enough or overlooking their contributions entirely. 

3. 'Digital Design' traces the analogue histories of our relationship with computers

What do Apple, Deleuze, Johannes Gutenberg, Citroen DS, the Bauhaus, Joseph Priestly, and Zaha Hadid have in common? Seemingly unlikely, each has played a part in the proliferation of digital culture as we know it today. Weaving together anecdotes from history, art, architecture, and design, Stephen Eskilson’s Digital Design: A History explores how the term ‘digital design’ developed right from the onset of the electronic age in the 1950s.

The most tangible aspects of digital culture are those we can witness in front of us: the machines we use, the interface and its aesthetic, the parametric styles that advancement in digital technology has enabled, as well as the virtual realms we inhabit and the data they represent. The book, divided into these themes, starts with the development of the machine, what made the digital possible; moving on to the look, what made the digital personable; and to the data: what really is the digital.

4. 'Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future' shines a light on the Pakistani architect

The book chronicles the remarkable and rousing journey of Pakistan's first woman architect Yasmeen Lari, founder of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, winner of the Jane Drew Prize (2020), and most recently, the recipient of the RIBA Gold Medal. The monograph is compiled and edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar, and Architekturzentrum Wien, and published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press in 2023, shedding light on Lari’s transformative trajectory from a trailblazing modernist architect to a pioneering force in the world of humanitarian, earthquake resistant, sustainable architecture.

The book also showcases the Pakistani architect’s impact on emerging as well as established architects, by championing climate activism through zero-carbon, self-build movements, empowering communities with traditional technologies and low-cost materials, while fostering dignity and self-reliance within built environments.

5. OMA partner Reinier de Graaf expounds on how an architect is a verb (or not?)

“World-class”, “award-winning”, “creative”, “innovative”, “sustainable”, “livable”, “beautiful” or fostering “a sense of place and well-being”. What is the significance of such terms? When does a building warrant the label “world-class”? Why is one city more “liveable” than the other? What is the meaning of “innovation” in architecture? And what building can credibly claim to improve anyone's “well-being”?

Who determined these terms, and why is contemporary architecture being increasingly defined by them? Architectural theorist, leading Dutch architect and writer, Reinier de Graaf, partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and author of architect, verb. The New Language of Building, is of the opinion that the lexicon describing the architectural profession has become increasingly superfluous, setting unreal standards and ethics that are impossible to follow or achieve.

Dipped in satirical observations, with intentionally sarcastic analysis conveyed through dry humour and crushing honesty, the book traces the history of the ‘buzzwords’ (that don’t really mean anything) dominating the global architectural discourse today.

6. The "essentialist perfection" of Miesian collective housing with Fernando Casqueiro

Despite polarising reactions to Mies van der Rohe's utilitarian and machined modernist architecture, that tend towards extremes—from reverence to disdain—his body of work places him among an extremely select number of the architectural elite. Many of his celebrated projects have become blueprints for their respective typologies. Yet, one aspect of his practice that has consistently fallen under the radar, is his contribution to collective housing. Several principles applied to his now-iconic contributions to office architecture, such as gridded façade designs, recessed ground floor colonnades, and entry plazas, were reconfigured for this typology, developing a style that is distinctly Miesian and readily fitted to new settings.

Investigating this aspect of the German-American architect’s oeuvre, Mies van der Rohe: The Collective Housing Collection is this book by Spanish architect and academic Fernando Casqueiro, exploring Rohe’s experiments in housing over a period spanning nearly 40 years. Having compiled and redrawn projects from both Europe and North America to present a definitive catalogue depicting the evolution of Miesian housing archetypes, Casqueiro’s work is one of the most comprehensive looks into the mind of a man whose efforts have shaped the way we all live in cities, exploring the morphing relationships between floor plan and façade in its most rudimentary form.

7. Christopher Herwig reveals anomalous bus stops in the former Soviet Union

Browsing through the two book volumes that condense Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig’s architectural photography project called Soviet Bus Stops, one comes across a litany of uniquely stylised bus stops, designed and built during the Soviet era. Herwig's photographs comprise the documentation of nearly 750 Soviet-era bus stops, covered in different phases, and hurtling through the parched terrains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the undulating cordilleras in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, the verdant steppes of Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia and Estonia, the marshy territories in Belarus and Lithuania, the partially recognised state of Abkhazia, and across the sizeable expanses of Russia.

This monumental project by the documentary photographer is compiled in two book volumes—Soviet Bus Stops Volume I and Soviet Bus Stops Volume II—as well as in a documentary film titled Soviet Bus Stops - The poetry of the road. Herwig later also published Soviet Metro Stations, which comprises a series of photographs of the stations of each metro network of the former USSR.

8. Nigel Coates unpacks his ‘Lives in Architecture’ in his candid memoir

Irreverent and iconoclastic, Nigel Coates has been agitating the architectural scene for over 40 years. In this warm and compelling autobiography, he explores the highs and lows of life at the cutting edge of architecture. Coates' work collides at the intersection between bodies, sexuality and design. As 'artist-architect' and polymath, he has designed buildings, exhibitions, interiors and products…

Thus mentions the back-cover blurb of British architect and designer Nigel Coates’ autobiography Lives in Architecture: Nigel Coates, published by RIBA. Traversing lost loves and a prolific, if not legendary, contemporary design career of over four decades, from Tokyo bars (Caffè Bongo) and London’s Liberty to the Body Zone at the Millennium Dome and Noah’s Ark in Japan, the British designer’s 200-paged memoir is as post-punk, queer, sincere and unapologetic as himself. One of UK’s most influential designers, his unvarnished personal and professional history is recounted in this book review with grace, gossip, learnings, and unlearning, both deeply nuanced and necessarily provocative.

9. 'Brutalist Paris': uncovering unknown facets from within the known city

Paris is known for many things, but perhaps not its brutalist architecture. However, many built examples in the city define and convey the best (and worst) of the architectural style. Published by Blue Crow Media and authored by Nigel Green and Robin Wilson as a follow-up to their Brutalist Paris Map (2017), Brutalist Paris is a unique photographic record of over 50 buildings across France’s capital, interpreting anew, brutalism in the context of French architecture.

Accompanying Green’s architectural photographs capturing the geometric conceptions of Parisian brutalist and concrete architecture in the light of social abstraction, are detailed essays by Wilson. The book begins with a discussion of 'The brutalist 'figure' of an alternative Paris' where the style is defined as the 'beast of late modernism.' While unravelling the lesser-known parts of brutalism in the French city, the duo presents another Paris to the one familiar to all, an unknown city within the known.

10. 'Women Light Artists': a collection of light art that includes manipulations of the medium

There is something powerful about the artistic aspirations of light that transcend conventional concepts and boundaries of art. Light, when employed as an artistic medium, not only represents the artist's intent but spills into deeper narratives of observation, and marvelous discovery.

Nonetheless, as witnessed across myriad disciplines, creative and otherwise, gender disparity is a common sight in the light art industry, with women being denied recognition, despite their artworks being known and loved my many. This reality, along with The Women in Lighting project, formed the inspiration for the curation of the book, Women Light Artists by UK-based Light Collective.

"After 25 plus years in the world of light, it became apparent, that there is an onus on and huge visibility of male artists who work with or have worked with light within their body of work. Many are well-known names and are often cited as inspiration in the work of lighting designers. While there are few names that come up when discussing female light artists—the financially successful artist—Yayoi Kusama; the political rebel, Jenny Holzer; and lover of daylight, Nancy Holt, like the rest of the art world, the exposure of their work is less and our knowledge of light artists remains unbalanced in terms of gender. If you want to prove this further, just type the words ‘Light Artist’ into Google—(and) out of the first 15 artists shown by the world’s leading search engine only two are female,” mentions Light Collective. 

What’s NEXT?

How can one thematise thinking creatively? Can we go beyond what we know, perceive, or sense? The challenge of comprehensively viewing, attesting for, or even resisting and opposing the evolving landscape of design and architecture, as acutely and broadly as possible, against overweening narratives, can best be contended by written sites of human prowess and curiosity. These profound assertions of knowledge, of words committed to paper and screens, divulge insight, foresight, far sight, of the ways our world reacts and functions, vis a vis, these creative disciplines.

With this recollection of popular and outstanding books published on design and architecture in 2023, we ventured into and disseminated more examples of knowledge-building, more avenues of discourse and learning, and even more provocation in thought. As a creative publication ourselves, we enjoy writing and reading about these previously discussed or undisclosed topics, the innovations and talents present, growing, or waiting to be discovered from the past, present, and future. We hope the upcoming new year continues to provide us with discerning and detailed books on the ever-expanding culture of design and architecture, as it did this year. Happy reading!

STIRred 2023 wraps up the year with compilations of the best in architecture, art, and design from STIR. Did your favourites make the list? Tell us in the comments!