The Hour is Blue

Juhani Pallasmaa's Reading List

"I used to send a list of 40 books of novels and poetry to the newly accepted students."

— Juhani Pallasmaa, Designers & Books

This morning I woke up reading a passage from Desiderare, a novel by the Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara.

In the passage, two characters are waiting for a bus near the ancient Temple of Segesta in Sicily. One of them begins describing an imaginary garden.

The passage brought me immediately back to Juhani Pallasmaa.

As he wrote in The Atmospheric Sense:

"When reading a novel, we create entire buildings, places and cities with their inhabitants, activities and narratives in our imagination."

Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and architectural philosopher whose book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses I quote regularly during my architecture tours at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler.

But today I discovered something about him.

In 1992, while serving as dean of the School of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, Pallasmaa sent his incoming students a reading list of 40 books to read before beginning their architectural studies.

Not 40 books about architecture.

Books by Borges, Calvino, Chekhov, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Camus, and many others.

Borges's Labyrinths was number five. Calvino's Invisible Cities was number nine.

I had read many of these books before; others were already on my reading list, and several were new to me.

Pallasmaa believed that literature was fundamental to an architectural education. As he explained, "Because architecture is fundamentally about life."

The 40 Books — 1992

  1. Gaston Bachelard — The Poetics of Space
  2. Charles Baudelaire — The Flowers of Evil
  3. Ingmar Bergman — Laterna Magica
  4. Heinrich Böll — Billiards at Half-past Nine
  5. Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths
  6. Joseph Brodsky — Less Than One
  7. Joseph Brodsky — Watermark
  8. Luis Buñuel — My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel
  9. Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities
  10. Albert Camus — The Outsider
  11. Albert Camus — The Fall
  12. Truman Capote — Breakfast at Tiffany's
  13. Bo Carpelan — Axel
  14. Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep
  15. Anton Chekhov — Short Stories
  16. Anton Chekhov — The Steppe and Other Stories
  17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
  18. Anton Ehrenzweig — The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination
  19. Erich Fromm — Escape from Freedom
  20. Günter Grass — The Flounder
  21. Mark Helprin — Winter's Tale
  22. Hermann Hesse — The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
  23. Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf
  24. James Joyce — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  25. Franz Kafka — Short Stories
  26. Franz Kafka — The Trial
  27. Thomas Mann — Doctor Faustus
  28. Thomas Mann — Death in Venice
  29. Herbert Marcuse — One-Dimensional Man
  30. Robert M. Pirsig — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  31. Raymond Queneau — Exercises in Style
  32. Jean Renoir — My Life and My Films
  33. Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters to a Young Poet
  34. Rainer Maria Rilke — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
  35. Pentti Saarikoski — Diaries of Youth (available only in Finnish)
  36. Susan Sontag — On Photography
  37. Andrei Tarkovsky — Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art
  38. Mark Twain — Huckleberry Finn
  39. Mark Twain — Letters from the Earth
  40. Paul Valéry — “Eupalinos, or the Architect,” in Dialogues

Source: 40 Titles for New Architecture Students, published by Designers & Books, June 7, 2011.

Further Reading and Viewing