With e-readers more ubiquitous than ever, its become harder and harder to judge a book by its cover. The brilliantly curated site, Designers&Books is a public platform for creative luminaries like Shigeru Ban, Elizabeth Diller, Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher and Steven Heller (the latter two are part of the Core77 Design Awards Graphic Design Jury) to share books that are "personally important, meaningful, and formative—books that have shaped their values, their worldview and their ideas about design." All judging aside, it's fascinating to read through these lists and the accompanying commentary from some of our most creative minds. Best of all, you can start your own reading list to email or print (and add to it every Tuesday when the new contributor's book list is unveiled!).

Celebrating their 70th contribution, today Designers&Books published the New Yorker Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger's list of 33 must-read titles with a fascinating essay, "Books Every Architect Should Read," If you read a novel, you are connecting directly to the thing that interests you, but if you read an architecture book, you are not. What books about architecture have to offer is vicarious experience. Even the best architecture books, like museum exhibitions about architecture, leave us one layer removed from the reality of seeing a building, the experience of walking around it, the feeling of being inside it.

Still, for all that we like to believe that in architecture—as the great Latin phrase res ipsa loquitur has it—the thing itself speaks, not all buildings do. Some of them need help in speaking, in making us understand what they have to say. So the first role of books about architecture is to interpret and explain: to be, in effect, the label on the museum wall, or the note in the concert program.

Read the full essay here!