She was recently in the news for raising the wages of women employed by her office in order to close the gender pay gap at Studio Gang. American architect Jeanne Gang shares with AA’s readers three of her favourite books.

 

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
Bruno Latour, La Découverte
Paris, 2015, 400 p.

If you like science, politics, and art, Latour’s lectures bring these disciplines into a conversation to address our time, as characterized by climate change and the Anthropocene. He ponders how we got here and who might respond most effectively and most radically to bring about action. Instead of chapters, you have different lectures that could be read in sequence or independently.

 

 

 

 

 

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino, Folio
Paris, 2013, 208 p.

It almost seems like a cliché to recommend this book because it is so well known in architecture schools, but it is truly a work that I enjoy and return to. Calvino’s writing on imaginary cities liberates our thinking and celebrates the fantastic urban imagery that words can elicit. This book, together with Six Memos for the Next Millennium, should be in every architect’s library.

 

 

 

 

Art as Experience
John Dewey, Penguin Random House
New York, 2005, 384 p. 

With today’s overuse of the word ‘experience’ (as it’s become ‘visitor experience’, ‘user experience’, and ‘customer experience’, for example), it is possible to lose the meaning of what an experience actually is. Dewey discusses an art experience as something that helps us develop a new attitude about the ordinary. He also addresses the act of making, which to me is interesting from the perspective of the design process, as the book explores the necessity of tension and a sense of discovery being key components of an art making experience.

 

 

 

You can find this article in the 428th issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, available in bookstores and on our online store.

In May 2018, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui dedicated an article to the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, designed by Studio Gang. Click on the image below to read the full version.