What happens when a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic meets up with a MacArthur Fellow architect and the topic of their conversation is books? Shortly before it was announced that Jeanne Gang had been named by the MacArthur Foundation as a recipient of one of its 2011 awards, she and Paul Goldberger had a conversation about the book list that Gang submitted to Designers & Books this fall. They also spoke about Gang’s book Reveal, as well as how her idea of “turning off reality and letting yourself imagine” applies both to the design development process of a building and the interior monologue that goes on when you are reading a book.

Paul Goldberger:  Your work is wide-ranging; so, it would seem, is your taste in books, and what I particularly loved was the fact that this list moves back and forth between architecture and other subjects. It isn’t one of those “inside baseball” kind of lists that is of interest only to other architects and design professionals, but neither is it one of those lists that seems, as some of them do, almost ostentatiously to go in the other direction, as if bending over backward to prove that a designer is interested in other things. Were you conscious of moving in and out of architecture as you pulled this group of books together?

Jeanne Gang:  I just asked myself what were the most exciting, inspiring books. They had to be on my shelf still (my books are arranged using the Dewey Decimal System), things that I have gone back to.

PG:  There’s something quite wonderful about an architect who on the one hand uses the latest technologies, but on the other hand works in an office surrounded by books. It’s particularly wonderful to be able to put together a list like this by simply looking around your own office.

JG:  A lot of times I remember a book by its color.

PG:  I do, too. Or by its place on the shelf. I can close my eyes and picture it on that shelf somewhere on the left, or somewhere on the right.

JG:  The physical book is also something that works in the office because I share my library with everyone, so if it’s something that I saw, and I remember, I’ll just run back to the office, get the book, bring it into a meeting, and people will take it home. It’s very much in the spirit of the library that Benjamin Franklin imagined—the Lending Library.

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