Books on the theory and practice of architecture
From anarchitecture to the architecture of fisheries; from radical pedagogies to unsung paragons of the field like Amaza Lee Meredith and Yasmeen Lari; from the built infrastructure of the radio to landmark studies in abstraction, the MIT Press is thrilled to share some of our favorite books for World Architecture Day. Established in the 1960s and never more resonant than today, the MIT Press architecture portfolio unites imaginative inquiry, skillful writing, and bold ideas. Our award-winning books center transformative research that challenges assumptions alongside sui generis gems that defy expectation. Bringing forward the vast and rich narratives that make up the architectural field, MIT Press publications celebrate the world while confronting the challenges of today’s built environment.
Read on to explore these and other topics in our related architecture journals Thresholds, CriticalProductive, Perspecta, and Grey Room, and sign up for our newsletter to hear more updates about our publications.

The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture by Aaron Betsky
Lurking under the surface of our modern world lies an unseen architecture—or anarchitecture. It is a possible architecture, an analogous architecture, an architecture of anarchy, which haunts in the form of monsters that are humans and machines and cities all at once; or takes the form of explosions, veils, queer, playful spaces, or visions from artwork and video games. In The Monster Leviathan, Aaron Betsky traces anarchitecture through texts, design, and art of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, and suggests that these ephemeral evocations are concrete proposals in and of themselves. Neither working models nor suggestions for new forms, they are scenes just believable enough to convince us they exist, or just fantastical enough to open our eyes.
“[A] substantial installment… hugely ambitious… this will be one of those books that follows the reader around.” —Apollo

Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic by André Tavares
Architecture Follows Fish is set in the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In this book author and architect André Tavares explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and architectural practice, the book oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Fisheries are unique, and this book sheds light on that uniqueness through an articulated narrative and a wealth of iconography.
“Beautifully illustrated and compellingly written, it will make you rethink ideas about architecture, ecological history, and the role of fish in creating the iconic and diverse coastal communities across the North Atlantic.” —Loren McClenachan, University of Victoria; coauthor of Marine Historical Ecology in Conservation

Radical Pedagogies edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister
In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture’s status quo.
“The architectural histories of the 1960s and 1970s foregrounded here, which uprooted the environmental, material, political, and technological status quo, have much to teach us.” —Giuliana Bruno, Harvard University

Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class by Jacqueline Taylor
Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity. Through her charismatic protagonist, Jacqueline Taylor derives new insights into the experiences of Black women at the forefront of culture in early twentieth-century America, caught between expectation and ambition, responsibility and desire.
“Taylor’s work shines a light on this trailblazing figure in history.” —Essence

Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar and Architekturzentrum Wien
After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume—edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar and winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal—presents Lari’s trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive photographs, drawings, and plans from Lari’s archive, most of which have not previously been shown or published.
“Strong words from a strong woman who, throughout her life, has been on the road less travelled.” —Metropolis

Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin by Alfredo Thiermann Riesco
In 1945, having occupied German territory, Soviet troops made two strategic moves: they dismantled the Deutschlandsender III radio transmission tower, the single tallest structure at the time in Europe, and they seized the Haus des Rundfunks in West Berlin, a monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig. These moves were crucial both symbolically and technically, as together they sparked what would become a veritable radio war between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In Radio-Activities, Alfredo Thiermann Riesco investigates this spatial conflict as he interrogates the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with the remote transmission of information.
“A meticulous examination of Berlin’s prescient environmental history, the book posits the broadcasting house as a new typology, incorporating ideology and media back onto a terrain that actively affects the conception and production of architecture.” —Mark Lee, Harvard University

Architecture and Abstraction by Pier Vittorio Aureli
In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries.
“Lucid and brilliant… Architecture and Abstraction poses one of the most important questions facing the profession: what might it mean to be an architectural worker today?” —Adrian Lahoud, Dean of School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art

Something Completely Different: Architecture in Belgium by Christophe van Gerrewey
Since the foundation of the country in 1830, architecture in Belgium has been an expression of the key issues of modern Western societies. In Something Completely Different, Christophe Van Gerrewey uses this small European country as a case study to describe, interpret, and criticize more universal spatial problems and behaviors. In seven wide-ranging essays, he looks at the activities of architects from the past two centuries to better understand political evolutions, social gaps, aesthetic considerations, housing and planning, transport and infrastructure, order and chaos, and culture and ecology. The result is a literary text full of surprises and discoveries, showing both the shortcomings and the merits of what architects do.
“Perceptively told, sometimes with irony, van Gerrewey turns Belgium’s troubled relationship with architecture into an allegory for the architecture of our times.” —Adrian Forty, UCL