AR Reading List 036: books

Reading is a solitary process. Books allow us to turn in on ourselves as the pages transport us to places when planes cannot. You, the reader, are taken on a journey through time and space – one that stretches beyond the bounds of borders and lockdowns. When the world is a challenging and scary place to be, books comfort us and show us that other worlds exist – when the world becomes too comfortable, they challenge us and show us the worlds we must create.

We write to remember how we lived, and we read as a reminder of what once was. Fiction or not, books tell a story of people and places and these are made up of the words we include and those we omit. In a time when our words become lost on endless timelines and feeds, the book is selective. The author shapes the book, and the book shapes the reader. In this week’s Reading List, we flip back through our pages to revisit the stories and narratives that continue to be a vital part of architectural discourse.

Enigmatic Mackintosh: Fact meets fiction in Esther Freud’s Mr Mac and Me, Rebecca Swirsky, AR September 2014
‘In Freud’s rhythmical sentences high artistry is clear, with “rabbits smoothing away like ripples”, light that is “lemony and sour” and paints “so dense and clean they seem to burst out of the box”’

A book on the changing landscape of Essex, Andrew Mead, AR February 2014
‘His Essex is a county of hybrid landscapes. The Lea Valley on the edge of London “combines industry, agriculture, leisure, ecology and a tumultuous social history”, while the Essex foreshore is “wholly a product of the modern world”’

A feeling for Nature: Patrick Keiller’s The View From The Train, Tom Wilkinson, AR May 2014
‘Schofield could make the telephone book sound pregnant with meaning, but Keiller’s prose stands up by itself − as is revealed by this collection of his essays from 1982 to the present’

A word without a world: between Earth and elsewhere, Honor Gavin, AR December 2018/January 2019
‘When you speak without saying anything, the Librarian said. When you say nothing, you mean, replied the friend. No, said the Librarian tersely, I mean just what I said’

Interview with Lars Müller, Manon Mollard, AR December 2018/January 2019
‘You must set limitations and parameters for yourself. This is what editing is. And it is never about yourself, but about pleasing your audience’

Travel agents: guidebooks and atlases become a means of escape, Tom Keeley, AR May 2020
‘What’s important is that you can pick a book up off your shelf and be taken in your imagination to somewhere, and sometime, else’

Paris is burning: fire and archive, Max L Zarzycki, AR December 2019/January 2020
‘The archive is not mute, nor indifferent. The archive decides what is worth remembering: more memory lost in its making than in all the fires in history’