15 architecture and design books to read this summer

Summer is back. And with it comes that luminous interlude when time seems to loosen its grip, becoming more porous and accessible: a pause in which the journey—whether real or mental—becomes almost inevitable. It is the season of departures and detours, but also of readings that do more than simply entertain: they open pathways, shift perspectives, and chart unexpected maps. Summer has returned. And with it comes that luminous interval when time seems to loosen its grip, becoming more porous and generous—a pause in which travel, whether physical or imagined, feels almost inevitable. It is the season of departures and detours, but also of books that do more than entertain: they open new paths, shift perspectives and sketch unexpected maps. Over the past few years, architecture and design publishing has expanded into a crowded archipelago of books, magazines, monographs and hybrid experiments. The sheer abundance of titles is no longer an exception but the norm. Which makes one question increasingly pressing: how should we look at this growing landscape? What framework can help us make sense of it?

For these fifteen summer recommendations—selected during what already promises to be another scorching season—we chose a precise trajectory. Rather than yet another overview, we assembled a constellation of books that each, in its own way, shifts the conversation. They invent new genres, stretch existing vocabularies and propose different ways of thinking about design. Some are bold experiments, others accomplished breakthroughs, but all attempt to open paths that have yet to be explored. Because, ultimately, that is what summer is for: allowing thought itself to become a form of exploration. In design. In architecture.

Can a chair become a manifesto? Marco Sammicheli’s monograph on Martino Gamper suggests that it can. The book launches a new publishing series destined to become a key reference for contemporary design culture. Tracing Gamper’s education across South Tyrol, Vienna, Milan and London, it follows the journey of a designer who turned craftsmanship, reuse and experimentation into a design methodology.
With the iconic 100 Chairs in 100 Days (2007)—recently acquired in its entirety by a major international museum—Gamper radically redefined design as improvisation: a form of inventive, irreverent bricolage in which making becomes an ongoing process of reinvention. Richly illustrated and featuring previously unpublished material alongside contributions from leading figures in art and design, the volume inaugurates a series conceived to offer new ways of reading contemporary design.

What does it mean for one of the most influential designers of the past few decades to argue for the “unimportance of form”? That paradox lies at the heart of The Unimportance of Form and Other Arguments, a volume that opens Jasper Morrison’s intellectual workshop to readers for the first time.
Bringing together texts written between 1984 and 2002, edited by Sina Sohrab and published in Apartamento’s elegant series devoted to designers’ writings, the book reconstructs the development of a body of thought that placed usefulness, simplicity and ordinariness at the centre of design, offering an entirely new perspective on Morrison’s work.

Written with the intellectual rigour of a design essay and the pace of a compelling narrative, this book has already become something of a manifesto only months after its publication. Design historian and curator Domitilla Dardi overturns the conventional perspective from which design history has long been told, placing practices, techniques and forms of knowledge—ranging from embroidery and cooking to knitting and origami—back at the centre of the conversation. Traditionally relegated to the margins of material culture and associated with women’s work, these practices emerge as fundamental drivers of modern ideas, tools and forms. Rather than simplifying complexity, the book makes it legible, challenging the distinction between so-called major and minor arts while redefining how design history can be written and understood. It feels less like another essay than the beginning of an entirely new genre.

For decades, design has addressed an implicit body: male, able-bodied and abstract. But what happens when the point of departure becomes women’s bodies instead? In La sedia del sadico, Chiara Alessi revisits a century of material culture to question the presumed neutrality of objects, revealing how design has absorbed standards, hierarchies and systems of control. From the gynaecological examination chair and the speculum to intrauterine devices, pregnancy tests, the GEC chair, the “androchair” and countless instruments designed to measure, regulate and discipline the body, the book reconstructs a genealogy in which women’s lived experience has repeatedly been translated, simplified or erased. The result is a powerful reframing of design—not as an inherently neutral discipline, but as a field where bodies, technologies and power are constantly negotiated. It is an essential and long-overdue shift in perspective.

A quiet revolution has transformed museums over the past decade. From the Victoria and Albert Museum to MVRDV’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, institutions have begun opening their storage facilities to the public, making visible what was once hidden behind the scenes by definition. Keeping Culture: The Architecture of Storage argues that this is far more than a gesture of transparency. It marks a structural shift in the contemporary museum itself.
Storage is no longer the institution’s technical backstage but its operational core—the place where decisions are made about what counts as culture and what remains out of sight. The book shows how the exponential growth of collections has pushed storage to the centre of architectural thinking. To look inside these repositories is therefore to witness the moment when museums stop merely displaying culture and begin actively producing it through their own systems of selection, preservation and exclusion.

Reinier de Graaf breathes new life into a literary form that had all but disappeared from architectural discourse: the pamphlet. Architecture Against Architecture revives the short-form manifesto not as a vehicle for synthesis, but as a tool of critical friction. Written with De Graaf’s trademark combination of analytical precision and biting wit, the book exposes the contradictions that define contemporary architectural practice, where building no longer automatically produces meaning. Instead, it proposes a radical shift in perspective: architecture should no longer be judged by its capacity for novelty, but by its ability to engage with the inertia of what has already been built—the only truly available field of action that remains.

Rediscovering a work decades after its creation is never simply an act of return—it is the beginning of a new conversation. Bunker Archeology originated in philosopher and urban theorist Paul Virilio’s photographic survey of abandoned bunkers along France’s Atlantic coast, transforming military ruins into an unsettling form of architectural thought in which decay precedes design itself.
First presented at the Centre Pompidou in 1975, while the museum was still under construction, the project quickly established itself as a theoretical proposition as much as a historical document. This magnificent new edition from Spector Books confirms its remarkable relevance today. Rather than reading as an archive of the past, it feels almost radioactive—a lens through which to understand a world increasingly shaped by ruins, conflict and obsolescence, where architecture emerges from conditions of crisis rather than stability.

If you have not yet read this book, now is the time. The revised edition of Roberto Burle Marx’s lectures reintroduces a way of thinking about landscape that extends far beyond its visual appearance, opening a radically different understanding of what landscape architecture can be. Across these texts, the celebrated Brazilian landscape architect presents the garden not as ornament, but as an active urban form capable of reshaping ecology, public space and everyday life. Nature is not represented—it is reorganised into a network of relationships. More than a portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest landscape designers, the book revives a question that feels increasingly urgent today: what does it mean to design with living systems rather than simply designing for them?

This book places at its centre something that now feels increasingly rare: public debate as a living dimension of design practice. Concise, agile and intellectually vibrant, it stems from a panel discussion held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, rekindling the dialogue between architecture, urbanism and democracy through contributions by Richard Sennett, Diane Davis, Markus Miessen and others. The discussion ranges across the transformations shaping contemporary cities and the political tensions that define them, from inclusion and public space to the crisis of democratic representation. Rather than offering definitive answers—which is all to the good—the book reaffirms the urgency of collective thinking as a critical tool for understanding and designing the present.

For the first time, Hella Jongerius' work can be appreciated in all its depth and complexity through unprecedented access to her studio archive. Richly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive, this publication accompanies the major retrospective at the Vitra Design Museum, bringing together processes, experiments and finished works as parts of a single, evolving body of thought. Whispering Things presents design as a living, imperfect practice, where every project is shaped as much by doubt and intuition as by careful observation of materials. More than a retrospective, it is an intimate portrait of one of the most influential designers of our time.

Together with the companion volume dedicated to Giulio Einaudi, this book inaugurates a remarkable new publishing series conceived by literary critic Andrea Cortellessa and Premio Strega-winning author Emanuele Trevi. The series is built around a simple yet brilliant idea: to consider houses not as biographical backdrops but as the original nucleus of creative thought, where lives, personalities and works take material form. Quietly captivating, the volume reconstructs Giorgio Morandi's home and studio on Via Fondazza in Bologna, where the artist lived and worked for most of his life, transforming everyday domestic space into a meditation on light, silence and painting. In doing so, it reminds us that design is everywhere—not only in objects, but in the profound relationship between life, space and things.

Gardens have always embodied the possibility of renewal, and this book demonstrates how landscapes can regenerate over time through transformation and memory. Drawing on Cura's Garden, the immersive installation presented by American artist Ben Thorp Brown at Kunsthal Gent in 2023, the volume follows the transformation of a former monastic garden into an environment composed of plants, mist, sound and sculpture. Beautifully produced and equally compelling in its content, the book revisits the Roman myth of Cura, translating it into a richly sensory experience that evolves with the changing seasons. It is a meditation on care, ecology and time that feels especially resonant today.

Just when we thought there was little left to discover about radical architecture and design, Pino Brugellis' edited volume opens an unexpected new perspective. Focusing on the work of Alessandro Poli—a key figure in Florence's Radical Architecture movement whose practice unfolded between Superstudio, artistic research and an interest in vernacular and rural culture—the book brings together drawings, photomontages and previously unpublished documents. It traces an extraordinary dialogue between planetary visions and agrarian imagination, between Earth and the Moon. More than a portrait of Poli himself, the volume offers a broader reappraisal of Radical Architecture as a fertile field of exchange between disciplines, knowledge systems and imaginaries. It reminds us that the visions of that period continue to provide powerful tools for interpreting the present.

This book advances a crucial argument: social media no longer merely represent architecture—they actively produce it. Drawing on a vast collection of images and screenshots, from influencers' bedrooms and gaming setups to more extreme spatial environments, the essays gathered here reveal how digital platforms generate new kinds of interiors and, with them, entirely new ways of inhabiting space. In the algorithmic age, the domestic interior becomes a device of visibility, while public and private, physical and virtual increasingly merge into one another. There is little point in denying it: this is the world we inhabit today.

As with every edition of this summer reading list, we close with a novel. This time, however, we begin with an anecdote that opens an unexpected line of thought. Following the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde responded to accusations of immorality with characteristic wit, remarking that his book was neither moral nor immoral. Indeed, he suggested, it was not even a novel, but rather "a treatise on decorative arts." Let us take Wilde's provocation seriously and turn our perspective upside down. Whether reading literary classics or contemporary fiction, we might begin searching for design where we least expect to find it. Not as a discipline reserved for specialists, but as a way of living that permeates everyday existence. An art in which all of us are, in one way or another, already experts: a shared form of knowledge expressed through gestures, spaces, objects and the countless forms of daily life.