13 New Design and Architecture Books to Gift This Year

To this day, Rosario Candela’s work defines the Upper East Side’s architecture of luxury, and now — finally — comes a book that gives us not just a photographic record of Candela’s work but also essays on the prewar architect by three design authorities: designer David Netto, architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and architect Peter Pennoyer. Using a breadth of archival material, Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment: 1927–1937 goes deep on 19 of Candela’s buildings, revealing how he brought luxurious layouts and grand-scale rooms to apartment living — like, for instance, a two-story staircase window in a penthouse at 834 Fifth Avenue. To enter this book is like dancing with Fred Astaire, no lessons needed. — Wendy Goodman

Fifty-two years after the canonical Learning From Las Vegas pushed the city’s dazzling main strip into the classrooms of architecture students, Rome — Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses presents the two cities through the eyes of Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan. There are no captions to tell you where you are, and the overall effect is a flattening of the globe that blurs the line between both cities as sites of ruin and mass consumption. Baan’s images are filled with humor and poetry that reward repeat viewing: Behind a street sign for “Paradise Road,” the Sphere is lit in a paradisial vision of purplish clouds; a man waiting in front of Michelangelo’s David sucks a cigar like a modern-day Goliath; and the stone shoulders of gods at the Trevi Fountain are, in his frame, less interesting than the bare skin of the tourists sweating out front. — Adriane Quinlan

The full-bleed pictures in this second book of prints from John Derian are so beautiful that you’ll be tempted to carefully extract them and hang them on your wall. All are images from Derian’s personal archive, in which he’s collected everything from flowers to birds, animals, fruits, vegetables, shells, insects, music sheets, and anatomical charts. Like a picture book for adults, it’s just pure visual pleasure, and I dare you not to love every single page even if hedgehogs are not your cup of tea. —Wendy Goodman

Tricia Romano’s hugely entertaining oral history of The Village Voice is of course a book for any gray-ponytail New York dad. But don’t rule it out for younger relatives who have been drawn to alternative literature or movies or music or politics of any kind. What we see in this book is that the Voice, even at its zenith of power and financial success, was made by a bunch of people at editorial war with each other, week after week. It’s a reminder that countercultures, even when they seem like a unified mission from outside, are often roiling engines of combustion within. Keep it in mind next time the “Dems in Disarray” theme shows up yet again: It was always thus, and the messiness doesn’t rule out getting things done. — Christopher Bonanos

Is it possible to sustain a “Talk of the Town” story for 500 pages? Turns out somebody can: Ian Frazier, longtime writer of New Yorker essays that seem like light whimsy on the surface and gradually reveal themselves as deep excavations of time and place. He’s been absorbing culture from the Bronx for a couple of decades now, walking a literal thousand miles of its streets and reading vast amounts of its history, not quite aimlessly but definitely eccentrically. He’s knitted it all into Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough, a book that itself feels like a semi-random city walk but never gets lost. Sholem Aleichem and Sonia Sotomayor make appearances on the same block and the same page. Robert Moses isn’t far from the Joker Steps. Gouverneur Morris crosses paths (sort of) with KRS-One. FLAT FIX tire shops make multiple appearances. The borough and its fortunes rise, fall, bottom out, begin to gentrify. It’s a biography of a borough as someone you know, or ought to. — C.B.

Marvin Newman (1927–2023) was far from the most famous member of the Photo League, that storied club of New York mid-century image-makers that included Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, Morris Engel, and so many more. Despite decades of steady work, especially shooting sports, Newman’s level of recognition as an artist-craftsman didn’t quite keep up with his skills — until his 90s, when (having outlived most of his cohort) he started to get noticed for the significant figure he was. A huge Taschen retrospective volume, published in 2017, helped drive his rediscovery, and it’s just been reissued as a posthumous tribute. A large number of the photographs were made in New York, and they depict places you have seen a million times: Times Square, the subway, Coney Island. What’s different (apart from the everyday-life texture they document that inevitably grows more interesting with age) is his knack for framing — the Coney Island pictures especially put people and buildings together in interesting ways — and his zingy handling of high-saturation Kodachrome color. The book also includes a 1971 series shot at the Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s first legal brothel, that lingers on the touching backstage details of the young women’s lives: the coffee station, the little inspirational posters on their walls. What an eye he had. — C.B.

Like the dense urban places he advocates for, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti packs a lot into a compact package. This eminently portable manifesto makes the grandest possible case for architecture, not just as the art of putting up individual buildings, but as a tool to help people from different cultures interact. Asking architects to tackle global social problems is an invigorating form of overreach, the kind that challenges the author and his colleagues to think about doing less harm. — J.D.

Artist Malene Barnett started her career designing textiles and carpets for two decades before she went on to pursue her M.F.A. in ceramics at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University in 2020. During that time, she took a deep dive into her Caribbean heritage; her mother is from St. Vincent and her father from Jamaica. This book, Barnett’s first, showcases the work and processes of over 60 Caribbean artisans through photographs and interviews. It is a treasury of not just their beautiful work but how they view themselves within the African diaspora. — W.G.

The latest book by Maira Kalman is a collection of stories about her own family woven together with literary and historical figures, including Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Eugene Delacroix, Cleopatra, and Cicero, each one illustrated with Kalman’s uniquely dreamy paintings of interiors and still life tableaus. The primary themes of the text are loss and grief, including the loss of Kalman’s grandparents in the Holocaust. And yet the drawings, focused on arrangements of everyday objects, offer a quiet counterpoint to the sorrow that pervades the stories. — W.G.