On the shelf: books on architecture and the rest of the work

(01) Architects we go back to

Tom Kundig: Works

Tom KundigPrinceton Architectural Press, 2015

Raw steel, timber and concrete, and the mechanisms Kundig calls gizmos: hand-cranked shutters and walls that pivot open to the landscape. The book that taught us a building can move, and close up when no one is there.
Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works

David RobsonThames & Hudson, 2002

Tropical modernism from Sri Lanka: deep verandas, courtyards open to the rain, buildings that step down a slope instead of flattening it. Of everyone on this shelf, his climate is the closest to ours.
Touch This Earth Lightly: Glenn Murcutt in His Own Words

Philip DrewDuffy & Snellgrove, 1999

Murcutt's houses follow the sun and the breeze with louvres, overhangs and long thin plans, and here he explains each move in plain words. The title is also a fair brief for building near a beach.
Lina Bo Bardi

Zeuler R. M. de A. LimaYale University Press, 2013

An Italian who became a Brazilian architect and built the Casa de Vidro and the SESC Pompéia in São Paulo. The biography follows how she worked with local craft and materials, which is what we try to do with Costa Rican ones.
Atmospheres

Peter ZumthorBirkhäuser, 2006

Short notes on why a room feels the way it does: the body of the building, the sound of a space, its temperature, the light on things. It reads in an hour, and we come back to it often.
RoTo Architecture

Michael Rotondi, Clark StevensRizzoli, 2006

Michael Rotondi was a partner at Morphosis and directed SCI-Arc before founding RoTo with Clark Stevens. Their buildings are worked out drawing after drawing until site, structure and use become one move, a good reminder when a plan settles too early.
Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization

Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, Bruno Stagno (eds.)Wiley-Academy, 2001

Co-edited by Bruno Stagno, who has built in Costa Rica for decades and founded the Instituto de Arquitectura Tropical, where RESET was written. Essays and buildings on designing for the tropics without imported formulas.

(02) Ideas

The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard1958; Penguin Classics, 2014

A philosopher reads the house from cellar to attic, through drawers, nests and corners, as the places where we daydream. There is not a single floor plan in it, and it still changes how you draw one.
In Praise of Shadows

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki1933; Leete's Island Books, 1977

An essay on dimness: lacquer in candlelight, paper screens, the dark under a deep roof. Written about Japanese houses, and true of any house in the tropics, where shade is the luxury.
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

Juhani PallasmaaWiley, 1996

Architecture is felt with the whole body, not only seen. A short book against designing for the photograph, which we try to keep in mind while making the images on this site.
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order

Rudolf ArnheimUniversity of California Press, 1971

A psychologist of art takes the second law of thermodynamics into the studio: is order something we impose, or something things settle into? Short, odd, and useful for thinking about why a plan feels resolved.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Donella H. MeadowsChelsea Green, 2008

Stocks, flows and feedback loops, explained with bathtubs. A water tank, the heat in a room and a construction schedule all behave this way, and seeing it saves a lot of guessing.

(03) School and reference

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Matthew FrederickMIT Press, 2007

One idea per spread, a sentence and a drawing: how to draw a line, what a parti is, why the corner matters. The book we would hand a client who wants to know how we think.
Architecture: Form, Space, and Order

Francis D. K. Ching1979; Wiley, fifth edition 2023

Ching's drawings sort two thousand years of buildings by geometry, axis, symmetry, rhythm and threshold. The compendium many architects learned to see with, us included.
A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander and othersOxford University Press, 1977

253 patterns, from regions down to window seats, each a problem and a way to solve it. Light on two sides of every room is one of them, and it is in most of our plans.
The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture

Phaidon editorsPhaidon, 2008; travel edition 2011

1,037 buildings in 89 countries, all finished this century, mapped region by region. We open it at Central America and the Caribbean to see what our neighbours are building.
1000 Chairs

Charlotte and Peter FiellTaschen, 1997; revised since

A thousand chairs in order, from Thonet to now. A chair is where ideas about structure and the body fit in one object, and many of the best were drawn by architects.

(04) Computation, type and image

AAD Algorithms-Aided Design: Parametric Strategies Using Grasshopper

Arturo TedeschiLe Penseur, 2014

A Grasshopper manual that teaches the thinking as well as the buttons: data structures, attractors, form-finding. We use parametric models for roofs, louvres and sun studies, and this one stays within reach.
Typography for Screen: Type in Motion

Wang Shaoqiang (ed.)Flamant, 2020

Type made to move: motion graphics, websites and experiments, with interviews with the studios behind them and QR codes to the work in motion. The titles on this site step and slide across the page for reasons that start here.
Julius Shulman: Architecture and Its Photography

Julius Shulman, Peter Gössel (ed.)Taschen, 1999

The photographs that made Californian modernism famous: the Kaufmann House pool at dusk, Case Study House 22 hanging over Los Angeles. Shulman set up every frame, the lights, the furniture, sometimes the people, and seeing how is the best lesson we know in photographing a house.

(05) How we work

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Rick RubinPenguin Press, 2023

A music producer on paying attention, starting before you feel ready and finishing what you start. None of it is about architecture, and all of it applies.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Cal NewportGrand Central, 2016

Design needs long stretches without messages. This is the case for protecting them, with a method for doing it.