Books – Detail

A new biography of architect Albert Kahn.

Maureen Meister distills key elements of Arts and Crafts architecture, and her broad national perspective reveals new insights, including the close relationships among the movement's leaders.

Calder-isms is a collection of fascinating, irreverent, and often profound quotations from the influential modern American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976), who is most famous for his invention of what his friend Marcel Duchamp dubbed the "mobile."

A comprehensive, first-of-its-kind book about Chicago's residential architecture and the stories that shaped it. This is an entertaining and precisely illustrated story of Chicago homes from the city's earliest days through the postwar era, revealing everything about what makes a home a Chicago home

This lively, richly illustrated publication features works in a wide range of media by a diverse group of artists, including Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and many others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Art Museum, November 8, 2025

Your home is your sanctuary -- a safe space that nurtures your emotional, physical, and mental well-being. In Elements of Timeless Style, Erin shares her decades of expertise to guide you in making thoughtful choices, big and small, that enhance your living space.

This book seeks to recreate Fifth Avenue as it grew, flourished and failed. Over 200 archive photographs help tell the story of Fifth Avenue’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture and society.

The life and work of an unconventional architect.

Financial Times: Best Books of 2025: Architecture and Design

The fascinating journey of one of the art world's great midcentury power couples The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore how Fiske and Marie Kimball, together and in their own respective ways, shaped the experience and understanding of art and architecture in the twentieth century.

Editor Marie Frank is a former Athenaeum employee.

The life, works and legacy of a Philadelphia architect.

Tim Carpenter--lead investigator of the FBI Art Crime team--uncovers over 40,000 artifacts and remains from around the world that had been stolen by a Midwestern graverobber

A reappraising history of the remarkable women who Pablo Picasso shared his life with - whose individual stories and influence on the artist have been overlooked until now. Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women shared Pablo Picasso's life and were instrumental in his career, yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses.

Lost Synagogues of Europe recreates in vivid color paintings and chronicles the life stories of seventy-seven majestic- and destroyed-synagogues built from the early 1600s to 1930 and spanning sixteen countries, helping to revive a thriving European Jewish culture and heritage.

A global survey of 250 of the most creative women practicing interior design from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.

During World War II, French artist Henri Matisse and his family remained in Nazi-occupied France despite the dangers of war. Matisse at War examines this period of the artist's life, highlighting his and his family's connections to the French Resistance and the significant artworks he created during this time.

This two-volume publication examines in depth the work of Samuel Yellin (1884-1940), a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who became the single most important ironworker in America. Excellent new photographs bring to life many extraordinary objects. Thanks to unlimited access to the Samuel Yellin Metalworkers archives, a wealth of archival material--photographs, drawings, and business records--is published here for the first time.

2 volumes (xv, 528 pages; xv, 615 pages)

Wallace traces how, over the span of some forty years, this unspoken rivalry was reciprocal and mutually beneficial, with each learning from the other's brilliance, quietly seeking to best the other's work and secure his own legacy.

Catalogs a nationwide participatory public art and history exhibition seeking to elevate the next generation of monuments that reckon with and reimagine public memory.

The culmination of Robert A.M. Stern's monumental history of architecture in New York City and a comprehensive record of building over the last twenty-five years. A landmark in architectural publishing, New York 2020 explores the planning and politics of building in New York City during the first decades of the 21st century.

In his inventive manuscript, Anthony Fontenot reveals the affinities between Friedrich Hayek's libertarian conception of state power and the aesthetic deregulation sought by "non-design" architects and urbanists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Jane Jacobs.

Hetletvedt explores contextual approaches to existing buildings in disinvested communities as an alternative to demolition, explains why these buildings matter, and what communities and professionals can make of them, together.

During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the "historic shrines" in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions.

How the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens transcended scandal to enrich their times.

The future of cities is female... As cities around the world face mounting crises - climate change, traffic congestion and growing inequity - the need for bold, people-first solutions has never been greater. Enter the women leading the charge. In Women Changing Cities, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett highlight the groundbreaking work of female mayors, planners, advocates, and policymakers in reshaping urban spaces for the better.