The Editors Pick the Top Monographs for Summer 2025

The Craft of Place: Mork-Ulnes Architects,

by Casper Mork-Ulnes. Park Books, 256 pages, $60.

Unlike so many hefty hardcovers, Mork-Ulnes Architects’ first monograph conveys a kind of cozy softness with a textured viscose jacket, moody photography, and pliant binding. Even the creamy paper stock, made from raw materials without brighteners, emits a faint, woody aroma. The Craft of Place highlights the same attention to detail present in the built work of the Oslo- and San Francisco–based firm and 2015 Design Vanguard, as well as its thoughtful approach to establishing a dialogue with the natural landscape. And, more practically, architects will revel in the book’s abundance of exquisite drawings. Leopoldo Villardi

Notes on Peter Eisenman: The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture,

edited by M. Surry Schlabs. Yale University Press, 176 pages, $50.

A layered tribute to architectural theorist Peter Eisenman, this collection of essays emerged from a November 2022 symposium celebrating his retirement from Yale. What began as a standard academic conference quickly evolved into a spirited flurry of debate that perfectly captured Eisenman’s provocative pedagogical approach, one that embraced contradiction and dialogue. The volume gathers voices of 18 colleagues, friends, and former students—including Robert A.M. Stern, Phyllis Lambert, and Joan Ockman—who engage with Eisenman’s methods of analysis and urban explorations and his profound influence over the last half-century, celebrating his vision of architecture as “a way of knowing the world.” Pansy Schulman

Frei Otto: Building with Nature, 1925–2015,

edited by Joaquín Medina Warmburg and Anna-Maria Meister, with Mechthild Ebert and Martin Kunz. Prestel, 256 pages, $65.

This monograph on Frei Otto, published on the centennial of his birth, sheds new light on the contributions of the German architect-engineer known for his innovations in lightweight construction, particularly tensile and membrane structures. Illustrated with studies, sketches, and archival photos of his buildings, the compendium of project profiles and essays makes the case that, for Otto, who started his career in the wake of World War II, a “lightweight” approach not only conserved resources and was in sync with nature—it was also a social imperative. JG

Event-Cities 5: Poetics,

by Bernard Tschumi. MIT Press, 640 pages, $40.

The fifth and final installment of Bernard Tschumi’s influential series, which began in 1994, marks a new evolution in the architect’s thinking. Moving beyond the predominantly conceptual focus of his previous books, Tschumi embraces what he calls a “poetics” of architecture, a delicate balance between rational methodology and intuitive creation. With 500 color illustrations showcasing nearly 30 projects from the past 15 years, the book interrogates the very foundations of architectural practice and is a fitting capstone to a series that has documented the rigors of a unique theoretical mind. PS

Buildings for Plants and People by WORKac,

by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, with Miles Hardingwood. Park Books, 260 pages, $45.

Abounding in swaths of greenery, bursts of bright color, brimming library stacks, and no less than two play-area slides, this survey of 10 recent projects by WORKac showcases the New York–based practice’s skill at balancing social and environmental concern with an all-embracing lightheartedness. From a hot-pink parking structure in Miami to a sleek, ultra-faceted oceanfront manse in cofounder Amale Andraos’s native Lebanon, the monograph also showcases the firm’s versatility—although it is public library projects, in locales ranging from Brooklyn to Boulder, that reign supreme. Matt Hickman

Tadao Ando: Light and Space,

by Tadao Ando and Richard Pare. Introduction by Dominique Perrault. Phaidon, 280 pages, $150.

This follow-up to The Colours of Light, published in 1996, features explorations of 28 projects Tadao Ando completed between 2000 and 2021, including the Langen Foundation (2004), in Hombroich, Germany; the Roberto Garza Sada Center (2012), in Monterrey, Mexico; and the Nakanoshima Children’s Book Forest (2019), in Osaka, Japan. The book opens with a series of four original Ando sketches, printed on tissue paper, and closes with a collection of detailed drawings and plans. It took nearly 30 years to get this beautiful volume. It was worth the wait. Dante A. Ciampaglia

Home on Earth: Recipes for Healthy Houses,

by Jack Becker and Andrew Linn. Principal photography by Ty Cole. Oro Editions, 338 pages, $50.

When was the last time you read an architectural cookbook? This “epicurean treatise,” the first monograph by 2023 Design Vanguard BLDUS, presents the firm’s projects, scattered among the hills, valleys, and back alleys of Washington, D.C., as a series of illustrated recipes. One chapter even explores ingredients—compositions of such materials as resawn white cedar, purple slate, hemp insulation, cork cladding, copper tacks, and tulip poplar bark, all tastefully arranged, depict the studio’s edgy yet raw palette. Home on Earth may not have the same countercultural underpinning as, say, Ant Farm’s famous Inflatocookbook (1971), but its aim is clear: healthy, “farm-to-shelter” houses are easily within reach. LV

Lacaton & Vassal: Free Space, Transformation, Habiter,

by Enrique Walker, Anne Lacaton, and Jean-Philppe Vassal. Edited by Moisés Puente. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 208 pages, $45.

Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize, pack a lot into a relatively slim book. The architects survey their four decades of social-justice- and sustainability-focused design by guiding readers through housing, cultural, and civic projects representing their three core concepts. Free Space (“achieving generosity of scale”) is heavy on plans and drawings. Transformation (“never demolish, always add, transform, extend”) features site photography and renderings. And Habiter (“making a space one’s own”) is a series of film frames that take us inside buildings from previous sections to experience what’s often missing in such monographs: the life and people that occupy the spaces. DAC

Alvisi Kirimoto. Selected Architecture 2012–2025,

edited by Maurizio Carones and Valerio Paolo Mosco. Forma Edizioni, 168 pages, $26.

Rome-based architecture and urban planning firm Alvisi Kirimoto is renowned for its refined symbiosis of Italian and Japanese minimalist design sensibilities. It should come as little surprise, then, that their new monograph, bound in a glossy coral-red cover, succinctly surveys more than a decade of the firm’s work in just 168 pages. Thirteen of its projects, across myriad scales, are included in the book’s compact 6-by-9-inch frame, and are highlighted through a blend of photography, floor plans and sections, and text. Matthew Marani