This week I am launching my recommended list - a collection of the most impactful books I have found (or had recommended to me) throughout my research journey.
This list will live on Emergetic’s Substack dashboard and be continuously updated as I find more gems. I will also include the link at the bottom of every weekly post.
If any of these books speak to you, or you have recommendations of your own, please send them over!
Architecture
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton
Description: Food for the creative part of your brain - a powerful narrative of architecture’s power and promise.
Creativity
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Description: This book fundamentally changed my perception on creativity, and I find myself quoting it regularly. It is call to live a more creative life no matter your domain. Practice relentlessly, create fearlessly and remember that “done is better than good.”
Climate
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
Description: Easily one of the most important books I have ever read. An expansive narrative of the forces that shaped our current understanding of the environment, and what to do about it.
The Carbon Almanac by The Carbon Almanac Network and Seth Godin
Description: A go-to guide for climate data, facts, and digestible information. The almanac has fantastic diagrams and illustrations that make a wide array of carbon topics easily accessible.
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg
Description: No need to panic. Lomborg lays out the flaws with the popular responses to climate change and proposes more effective actions. False Alarm was an eye-opening counterbalance to the climate rhetoric I grew accustomed to.
Carbon: A Field Manual for Building Designers by Alan Organschi, Matti Kuittinen, and Andrew Ruff
Description: A guide to decarbonized design, written by designers, for designers. Through case studies, diagrams, and drawings, Carbon is an encompassing book for sustainable design and a guide for the future of building. Written in part by friend of Emergetic, Matti Kuittinen!
Ecology
Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology by Kiel Moe
Description: A dissection of the epitome of modern building - its materials, geographies, systems and stories. Unless is a case study for how architects continue to operate outside of the terrestrial events that shape their designs. Part of an ongoing series on the ecology of Manhattan’s most consequential buildings from Moe.
Energy
The Hierarchy of Energy in Architecture: Emergy Analysis by Ravi Srinivasan and Kiel Moe
Description: An essential introduction for understanding emergy. This book is a go-to for case studies and refreshers on the many sub-categories of the broad term “energy.”
Insulating Modernism by Kiel Moe
Description: This book reshaped my understanding of energy and architecture. It traces the history of isolation technologies and presents an alternative, non-isolated, thermodynamically accurate agenda for architecture.
Wood
Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial by Daniel Ibanez, Jane Hutton, and Kiel Moe
Description: I have previously referred to this book as my Bible. It is a seminal collection of works around wood building that had a huge impact on me. I find myself returning to it frequently for its research, diagrams, and trans-scalar dissection of wood.
Architecture in Wood: A History of Wood Building and Its Techniques in Europe and North America by Hans Jurgen Hansen
Description: I found this book during my post on wood craftsmanship. It is an in-depth dive into the traditions of wood building in Europe and NA, including the evolution of the role of craft. The is a lot we can learn about the future of building with wood from studying the masters of the past.
Forestry
Designing the Forest and other Mass Timber Futures by Lindsey Wikstrom
Description: An incredibly researched, beautifully illustrated, book on our forests and how to build with them. Written by friend of Emergetic, Lindsey Wikstrom!
The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan by Conrad Totman
Description: I found this book while researching the Daisugi technique and discovered an incredible history of forestry in Japan. The nation has a unique relationship with its trees stretching back hundreds of years — with many lesson for the future of forestry.
In the Queue
These are books that I am currently reading or have on my reading list. I am sure they will make their way into the collection above in the near future…but for now, they are works in progress. Check them out to see what I am reading now and what others want me to read next.
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing
The Moon in the Nautilus Shell by Daniel Botkin
They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis by James Gustave Speth
The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton
A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism by Patrick Allitt
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy by Edmund Husserl
Touch Wood: Material, Architecture, Future by Carla Ferrer, Celina Martinez-Canavate, and Thomas Hildebrand
The Limits to Growth by Donnella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III
De architectura by Vitruvius
Empire, State & Building by Kiel Moe
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System I by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System II by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System III by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System VI by Immanuel Wallerstein
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