No architectural reference shelf is complete without Francis Ching's Architecture: Form, Space, Order (now in it's second and updated edition). Ching provides a fundamental introduction to the principles of form, space, and order -- the basic vocabulary for every architect! Ching interprets form, discussing point, line, plane, volume, proportion, scale, circulation, and the interdependence of form and space.

With such masterworks as the Schindler-Chace House and the Lovell Beach House in California, the Vienna-born modernist R. M. Schindler (1887-1953) is recognized as one of the most innovative architects of the 20th century. Nearly 50 years after his death, admiration for his breathtakingly original houses and apartment buildings is at an all-time peak. Containing many never-published drawings and photographs and spanning Schindler's early years in Vienna, his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, and his bold contributions to West Coast modernism, this book-which accompanies the first major Schindler retrospective-offers the most comprehensive view of his genius to date.

In the discussion of architecture, there is a prevailing sentiment that, since 1968, cultural production in its traditional sense can no longer be understood to rise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but must now be constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes--post-structuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric--has given scholars a range of tools for...