Below are texts suggested to supplement course lectures and required readings, as well as readings of general interest to any critical investigation of design. They are arrange by thematically by topic heading.
Design and Technology:
Corn Joseph J. ed. Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.
Jakle, John A. City Lights: Illuminating the American Night. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Lubar, Steven. “Learning from Technological Things.” Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies. Ed. W. David Kingery. Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. 31-34.
Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.
Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
Taste and Culture:
Binkley, Sam. “Kitsch as a Repetitive System: a problem for the theory of taste hierarchy.” Journal of Material Culture v.5, n.2 (2000): pp. 131-1.
Harris, Neil. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Lubbock, Jules. The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550-1960. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Design and Consumption:
McCracken, Grant. “The Making of Modern Consumption” in Culture and Consumption. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Silverman, Debora L. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siécle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Williams, Rosalind. Dream Worlds, Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
World's Fair and International Exhibitions:
Allwood, John. The Great Exhibitions. London: Studio Vista, 1977.
Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Findling, John E. Chicago's Great World's Fairs, Studies in Design and Material Culture. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Gronberg, Tag. "Cascades of Light: The 1925 Paris Exhibition as Ville Lumière." Apollo 142, no. 401 (July 1995): 12-16.
Gronberg, Tag. Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Harris, Neil. Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993.
Mattie, Erik. World’s Fairs. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.
McKean, John. The Crystal Place: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox. London: Phaidon, 1994.
Morton, Patricia A. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions 1876-1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Rydell, Robert.. The Books of Fairs: Materials about World’s Fairs, 1834-1916 in the Smithsonian Institution. Chicago: American Library Association.
Rydell, Robert. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
Rydell, Robert. World of Fairs: Century-of-Progress Exhibitions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Design History:
Dilnot, Clive. Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Doordan, Dennis P., ed. Design History: an Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750. Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1986.
Theory and Criticism:
Agrest, Diana, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, eds. The Sex of Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Flâneur.” Charles Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans., William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1986) 1990.
Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time, and Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
McLuhan, Eric and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. London: Routledge, 1997.
Simmel, Georg. “The Problem of Style (1908).” Theory Culture Society 8, 63 (1991): pp.63-71.
Design and Gender:
Agrest, Diana, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, eds. The Sex of Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Colomina, Beatriz, ed. Sexuality and Space. Princeton: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
Kirkham, Pat. ed. The Gendered Object. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Lupton, Ellen. Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines: From Home to Office. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: NYU Press, 1999. pp. 58-69.
Wigley, Mark. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1995.
