explorations and endeavors of ian jean gilpin cozzens

reading list

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reading, read, intending to read, read a long time ago, changed my thinking, sitting next to my desk, crucial reference, would recommend, would recommend with major caveats, trying to find, authors I need to look up, subjects I need to research, cited somewhere else... so much reading to do.

contact me, if you like, to recommend further readings on any of these topics.

also there's a "readings" category on the updates page, with whatever I'm actually reading at various moments...


  • mysticism, the idea of the house
    • Gaston Bachelard
    The Poetics of Space
    Robert Harbison
    Eccentric Spaces
    Scott and Helen Nearing
    The Good Life
    Martin Heidegger
    Dwelling
    Ann Cline
    A Hut Of One's Own
  • anarchism & self-organization
    • David Graeber
    Direct Action
    The Twilight of Vanguardism (essay in Art Against Authority, below...)
    Herbert Read
    Anarchy & Order
    Paolo Freire
    Pedagogy of the Oppressed
    Martin Buber
    Paths In Utopia
    Josh MacPhee &
    Erik Reuland, eds.
    Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority
  • informal building, humanist architecture
    • John F.C. Turner
    Housing by People
    Nabeel Hamdi
    Housing Without Houses
    Robert Neuwirth
    ...
    Bernard Rudofsky
    Streets For People
    Architecture Without Architects
    Stuart Brand
    How Buildings Learn
    Christopher Alexander et al.
    A Pattern Language
    The Timeless Way of Building
  • gender & sexuality (lumped together kinda sloppily)
    • Julia Serano
    Whipping Girl
    Jean Genet
    Querelle
    Our Lady Of The Flowers
    various other stuff...
    Jason Cromwell
    Transmen & FTMs
    David Wojnarowicz
    ...
    Patti Smith
    Just Kids
    Tahar Ben Jelloun
    The Sand Child
    Susan Stryker &
    Stephen Whittle. eds.
    The Transgender Studies Reader
  • language, culture, & symbol
    • Dick Hebdige
    Subculture - The Meaning of Style
    George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
    Metaphors We Live By
    Roland Marchand
    Advertising the American Dream
  • history of form, inside and outside, lots about windows
    • Robert Venturi
    Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
  • process, form, drawing
    • Robin Evans
    Translations From Drawing to Building
    The Projective Cast
    Steve Oles
    ...
    Francis D.K. Ching
    Building Construction Illustrated
    Jay Hambidge
    The Elements Of Dynamic Symmetry
  • assorted architecture & urbanism
    • Hugh Pearman
    Not Building: The Lure of Desolation
    James Howard Kunstler
    Road to Nowhere
    Home From Nowhere
    John Silber
    Architecture of the Absurd
  • materials & construction
    • Siegfried Giedion
    analysis and tracing of the balloon frame structure
    Cecil D. Elliott
    Technics and Architecture: The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings
    Esmond Reid
    Understanding Buildings
  • kitchen -- ideal and function
    • Martha Van Rensselaer
    and Julia Rose
    Saving Steps
    (Cornell University home economics dept. pamphlet on kitchen efficiency, 1800s)
    Catherine Beecher
    (the kitchen as spiritual center of the home)
    Elizabeth Cromley
    (architectural historian interested in kitchens)
    Jane Horwitz
    (environmental psychologist)
    Joan Jacobs Brumberg
    (women, children, and family life)
    ?
    (german/Bauhaus research on kitchen efficiency)
  • historical perspective on what was a good idea in building houses...
    • George Nelson
    and Henry Wright
    Tomorrow's House
    Frank Lloyd Wright
    The Natural House
    Le Corbusier
    ...
  • perspectival control of space, spatial hierarchies, power asserted through space
  • asymmetricality in plan
  • other assorted...
    • Patti Smith
    Just Kids
    Susan Sontag
    journals
    Jean Baudrillard
    America
    Frances K. Pohl
    Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist In A Cold War Climate
    Rainer Maria RIlke
    Stories Of God
    ....
  • um... fiction? :)
    • Garth Nix
    Octavia Butler
    Kim Stanley Robinson
    Ursula K. LeGuin
    ....

    infrequently updated. so it goes.



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