Architects have often looked to thinkers in philosophy and theory to find design ideas or in search of a critical framework for practice. Yet architects, and students of architecture, can struggle to navigate thinkers’ writings. It can be daunting to approach original texts with little appreciation of their contexts. And existing introductions seldom explore architectural material in any detail.
This original series offers clear, quick and accurate introductions to key thinkers who have written about architecture. Each book summarises what a thinker has to offer for architects. It locates their architectural thinking in the body of their work, introduces significant books and essays, helps decode terms and provides quick reference for further reading. If you find philosophical and theoretical writing about architecture difficult, or just don’t know where to begin, this series will be indispensable.
Books in the Thinkers for Architects series come out of architecture. They pursue architectural modes of understanding, aiming to introduce a thinker to an architectural audience. Each author in the series – an architect or an architectural critic – has focussed on a selection of a thinker’s writings which they judge most relevant to designers and interpreters of architecture. Thinkers for Architects has proved highly successful, now with over ten volumes dealing with familiar cultural figures whose writings have influenced architectural designers, critics and commentators in distinctive and important ways. The series continues to expand, addressing an increasingly rich diversity of contemporary thinkers who have something to say to architects.
By Albena Yaneva
March 31, 2022
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories ‘flourished’ in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In ...
By John Abell
November 23, 2020
Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present. Freud’s observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behavior have generated ...
By Francesco Proto
December 20, 2019
Marginalized due to the deployment of both a highly specialized jargon and a novel stylistic approach meant to upset established norms and conventions, Baudrillard's thought has suffered from the lack of an accessible, consistent and comprehensive exposition able to make it relevant to diverse ...
By Richard Coyne
March 05, 2019
Ideas gain legitimacy as they are put to some practical use. A study of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) supports this pragmatism as a way of thinking about truth and meaning. Architecture has a strong pragmatic strand, not least as we think of building users, architecture as a practice, the ...
By Diane Morgan
September 25, 2017
This book introduces architects to a philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose work was constantly informed by a concern for the world as an evolving whole. According to Kant, in this interconnected and dynamic world, humans should act as mutually dependent and responsible subjects. Given his ...
By Jonathan Hale
July 07, 2016
The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and ...
By John Armitage
June 29, 2015
Paul Virilio is an innovative figure in the study of architecture, space, and the city. Virilio for Architects primes readers for their first encounter with his crucial texts on some of the vital theoretical debates of the twenty-first century, including: Oblique Architecture and Bunker ...
By Nathaniel Coleman
December 18, 2014
While the work of Henri Lefebvre has become better known in the English-speaking world since the 1991 translation of his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space, his influence on the actual production of architecture and the city has been less pronounced. Although now widely read in schools of ...
By Remei Capdevila-Werning
November 18, 2013
American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was one of the foremost analytical thinkers of the twentieth century, with groundbreaking contributions in the fields of logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics. This book is an introduction to the aspects of Goodman’s philosophy ...
By Gordana Fontana-Giusti
July 10, 2013
From the mid-1960s onwards Michel Foucault has had a significant impact on diverse aspects of culture, knowledge and arts including architecture and its critical discourse. The implications for architecture have been wide-ranging. His archaeological and genealogical approaches to knowledge have ...
By Paul Kidder
December 14, 2012
Providing a concise and accessible introduction to the work of the celebrated twentieth century German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, this book focuses on the aspects of Gadamer’s philosophy that have been the most influential among architects, educators in architecture, and architectural ...
By Richard Coyne
April 28, 2011
Looking afresh at the implications of Jacques Derrida’s thinking for architecture, this book simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. Derrida‘s treatment of key philosophical texts has been labelled as "deconstruction," a term that resonates with architecture. Although his main focus is ...