MIT PRESS: The following books are highlighted for World Architecture Day 2026:
Since our founding in the 1960s, the MIT Press has been considered a premier publisher of architectural scholarship. To celebrate World Architecture Day, this year we are highlighting some of our latest books on architectural theory and practice—including a study of anarchitecture, an investigation of an enigmatic Italian architect-designer, and an abecedarium-style book exploring architect’s intersection with animal life.
An Open Work: At Home with Marco Zanuso in Midcentury Milan by Shantel Blakely
An Open Work investigates the celebrated, enigmatic Italian architect-designer Marco Zanuso (1919–2001). Zanuso’s buildings were widely recognized in Italy, and today his object and furniture designs, which won many awards in their time, can be found in prestigious museums worldwide, yet few scholars have addressed the different scales he worked at as parts of a whole. This beautifully written, lavishly illustrated book opens the door to Zanuso’s acclaimed work, specifically his dual focus on architecture and industrial design, a form of practice that many architects in Milan pursued as the Italian economy rebounded in a surge of industrialization after World War II.
Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto by Jack Halberstam
Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic by Gabriele Neri
Drawing on his pioneering expertise in the relationship between graphic satire and architecture, Gabriele Neri retraces Alan Dunn’s path from painter to renowned cartoonist, offering an unconventional perspective on architectural and urban transformations—and on their perception within society. Featuring 200 carefully selected images, including Dunn’s correspondence, unpublished cartoons, preliminary sketches, watercolors, and rare photographs, Alan Dunn demonstrates the critical potential of caricature and cartoons for architectural history. Through Neri’s deft analysis, the book also reveals the complex intersections of architecture with media, publishing, commerce, society, art, and politics.
The Architect and the Animal edited by Kostas Tsiambaos
In The Architect and the Animal, 26 different architects look at how 26 different animals, from A to Z, have found their way into modern architectural discourse. The animal was typically approached in this discourse not through its various cultural or symbolic identities but as a body examined under a formalistic scientific lens. In this volume, the authors explore a less operative—and more meaningful—understanding of animal references and representations in twentieth-century architecture. Both playful and serious, there is nothing quite like this book.
Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing by Frederick Kiesler
Magic Architecture was the architect Frederick Kiesler’s most ambitious book project, an epoch-spanning history of human housing from prehistory to the atomic era, submitted to editors after World War II but left unpublished. In its holistic view of habitation through the lens of anthropology, ecology, and the life sciences, Magic Architecture is one of the most extraordinary texts on architecture written in the twentieth century, now at last published in the twenty-first. Kiesler’s exploration of the effects of modern technology in combination with the alternative epistemology of “magical” practices associated with cave drawings and the first artifacts of human industry reflects his profoundly interdisciplinary perspective on the development of art, architecture, and design.
Rewriting Alberti by Peter Eisenman
Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space.
