A chronological list to read through at your own pace. Your progress is saved in this browser.

• Of the Standard of Taste — David Hume (1757)
• On Taste — Edmund Burke (1759)
• Critique of Judgement — Immanuel Kant (1790)
• Lectures on Aesthetics — G. W. F. Hegel (1835)
• The Lamp of Memory — John Ruskin (1849)In The Seven Lamps of Architecture
• The Nature of Gothic — John Ruskin (1853)
• The Painter of Modern Life — Charles Baudelaire (1863)
• On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life — Friedrich Nietzsche (1874)
• The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation — William Morris (1881)
• The Futurist Manifesto — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909)
• Ornament and Crime — Adolf Loos (1913)
• Toward an Architecture — Le Corbusier (1923)Especially “The Engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture” and “Eyes Which Do Not See.”
• The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus — Walter Gropius (1923)
• Assimilation of the Machine — Lewis Mumford (1934)In Technics and Civilisation
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Walter Benjamin (1936)Particularly the final third.
• Avant-Garde and Kitsch — Clement Greenberg (1939)
• The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception — Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1944)In Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Style — Meyer Schapiro (1953)In Theory & Philosophy of Art
• The Question Concerning Technology — Martin Heidegger (1954)
• The Machine Aesthetic — Reyner Banham (1955)For wider context, see Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960).
• The New Brutalism — Reyner Banham (1955)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs (1961)A canonical work; not yet personally read.
• The Shape of Time — George Kubler (1962)One of my favourites.
• Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture — Robert Venturi (1966)
• Style — E. H. Gombrich (1968)
• Architecture and Utopia — Manfredo Tafuri (1973)
• Fascinating Fascism — Susan Sontag (1975)
• Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu (1979)
• Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — Fredric Jameson (1984)The essay, not the book; especially the sections on pastiche and nostalgia.
• Non-Places — Marc Augé (1992)
• Ur-Fascism — Umberto Eco (1995)
• The Generic City — Rem Koolhaas (1995)In S, M, L, XL
• On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry (1999)
• Junkspace — Rem Koolhaas (2001)
• The Abuse of Beauty — Arthur Danto (2002)
• Nostalgia and Its Discontents — Svetlana Boym (2007)Also see The Future of Nostalgia (2001).
• The Slow Cancellation of the Future — Mark Fisher (2014)
• The Saving of Beauty — Byung-Chul Han (2015)