Designers & Books is a website devoted to publishing lists of books that esteemed members of the design community identify as personally important, meaningful, and formative—books that have shaped their values, their worldview, and their ideas about design. Two of the sixty-six members of this select group, Barry Bergdoll and Witold Rybczynski, have chosen the two volumes of Professor Ford’s Details of Modern Architecture as one of “Ten books every architect must read.”

Barry Bergdoll is Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and professor of modern architectural history at Columbia University. He calls Ford’s Book:

A rare, completely fresh take on the history of modern architecture. The way Ford reads buildings and the complex issues of the representation of structural and material qualities in them by either direct or metaphoric ways is inspiring not only for studying the architecture of the late 19th and 20th centuries but also for developing an architectural expression today.

Witold Rybczynski, professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, writes:

Art historians merely describe the appearance of buildings, whereas Ford shows how they were actually built. A combination of philosophy and technological history, this book discusses iconic buildings of early modern architecture, from H. H. Richardson to Frank Lloyd Wright. The comparison of the (sophisticated) building technology of Beaux-Arts architects with the (crude) details of the early modernists is particularly fascinating..

Designers & Books was created by Steve Kroeter