Summer, time off, the urge to slow down. Long days under a beach umbrella or somewhere cooler than home leave room for the things you actually care about. For anyone drawn to architecture, design, and the discipline of making, vacation is the moment to page through an illustrated volume, get through an essay, or finally start that biography. There is no shortage of options: brand-new releases and established classics, coffee-table books that double as collectibles, and slim, affordable editions that fit in a bag or a backpack.
Reading recommendations for people who love creativity should be creative in their own right. Which is why we’ve picked five titles out of the ordinary, to give or to keep, this summer.
Åvontuura’s Architect Maps
Founded in Toronto in 2017 by architect Karl van Es, Åvontuura is an independent publisher of thematic maps that work as full travel guides in fold-out format. The full catalog is worth a look; we fell hard for the Architect Pilgrimages series, built for trips that trace the key works of Alvar Aalto in Helsinki and across Finland, Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona and Spain, Carlo Scarpa in the Veneto and beyond, Le Corbusier in Paris and France, and Peter Zumthor in Graubünden and Switzerland.
The maps flag the buildings not to miss—and hunting for tiny icons on paper rather than on a phone screen is a pleasure in itself—while short texts on the reverse describe what makes each one matter.
Zupagrafika’s DIY Kits
A game, but a grown-up one. That’s the premise behind the Brutal Kits from Zupagrafika, an independent publisher devoted to postwar modernist and brutalist architecture.
Each set is a collection of paper models of raw concrete buildings, from the landmarks of Eastern Europe to the ones scattered across London, by way of the GDR’s greatest hits. Cut them out, assemble them with glue and considerable patience, and the results are strikingly faithful to the originals.
Marinonibooks’ Illustrated Monographs
Marinonibooks publishes “picture books” of an almost moving beauty.
The illustrated biographies of Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray, in particular, will land squarely with anyone who loves architecture.
Phaidon’s Atlas of Buildings That Were Never Built
Some grand designs never leave the page. Phaidon has gathered dozens of buildings that never saw daylight in Atlas of Never Built Architecture—“an extremely enjoyable journey through what the world might have been, had fate taken a different turn,” as The Guardian shrewdly put it.
The large-format volume spans projects of every kind: skyscrapers, museums, churches, and bridges, along with theme parks, casinos, opera houses, and even a floating theater ship that looks like a UFO. Among the unrealized visions are those of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn, alongside contemporary names of the caliber of Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Steven Holl, Norman Foster, and Daniel Libeskind.
J.G. Ballard’s Novel High-Rise
Written by J.G. Ballard in 1975 and published in Italy by Feltrinelli as Il Condominio, High-Rise is a chronicle of life inside a very particular London apartment building: a futuristic 40-story tower, entirely self-sufficient, stacking residences above a full complement of services.
As breakdowns and failures accumulate, the tenants abandon every convention of civil coexistence, splitting into gangs largely along class lines—the less affluent on the lower floors, the wealthy toward the top—and waging outright urban guerrilla warfare across apartments and corridors. A raw, dystopian meditation on domestic life, it grips and unsettles in equal measure.