Arts & Culture
Architecture & Built Environment
Buildings and cities — the art form everyone is forced to live inside.
7 fields · 66 topics · 7 curated works
Fields within Architecture & Built Environment
Architectural Design
10The discipline of making buildings.
Design Process · Space & Program · Form & Proportion · Light in Architecture · Materials & Tectonics
Architectural History
10How building traditions developed.
Ancient Architecture · Classical Orders · Gothic Architecture · Renaissance Architecture · Baroque Architecture
Modern & Contemporary Architecture
10The twentieth-century break and its aftermath.
Modernism in Architecture · The Bauhaus · Le Corbusier · Mies van der Rohe · Frank Lloyd Wright
Urban Design & Planning
11The scale above the building.
City Form & Morphology · Zoning · Street Design · Walkability · Public Space Design
Sustainable & Environmental Design
9Buildings judged over their whole life.
Passive Design · Energy Efficient Buildings · Embodied Carbon · Green Building Standards · Daylighting
Interior & Landscape Design
8The immediate environment.
Interior Space Planning · Furniture Design · Lighting Design · Acoustic Design · Landscape Architecture
Architectural Theory & Criticism
8The arguments about what architecture is for.
Form Follows Function · Pattern Language · Phenomenology of Place · Critical Regionalism · Architecture & Power
Reading in Architecture & Built Environment
7Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
- BookThe Death and Life of Great American CitiesJane Jacobs, 1961
Cities work through dense, mixed, fine-grained street life — the exact thing mid-century planning was designed to eliminate.
- BookA Pattern LanguageChristopher Alexander et al., 1977
253 nested patterns for building places people actually like, from regional planning down to the alcove by the window.
- BookThe Timeless Way of BuildingChristopher Alexander, 1979
The companion argument to the pattern catalogue: good buildings come from a shared living language, not from an architect's signature.
- BookCradle to CradleWilliam McDonough & Michael Braungart, 2002
Being less bad is not being good: design so that materials re-enter a cycle, rather than optimising the rate of loss.
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
- BookTowards a New ArchitectureLe Corbusier, 1923
The manifesto that made the house a machine for living in — enormously influential, and blamed for much of what followed.
- BookDesign with NatureIan L. McHarg, 1969
Overlay the hydrology, soil and habitat before siting anything — the method that became environmental planning and, eventually, GIS.
- BookA History of ArchitectureBanister Fletcher, 1896
The comparative reference, continuously revised for over a century — including revisions correcting its own Eurocentric original framing.