[View original](https://thehourisblue.com/juhani-pallasmaas-reading-list/)

_16 Oct, 2026_

"I used to send a list of 40 books of novels and poetry to the newly accepted students."

— Juhani Pallasmaa, [_Designers & Books_](https://www.designersandbooks.com/designer/booklist/juhani-pallasmaa)

This morning I woke up reading a passage from [_Desiderare_](https://www.marsilioeditori.it/libri/scheda-libro/2979302/desiderare), a novel by the Italian neuroscientist [Giorgio Vallortigara](https://webapps.unitn.it/du/en/Persona/PER0033020/Curriculum).

In the passage, two characters are waiting for a bus near the ancient Temple of Segesta in Sicily. One of them begins describing an imaginary garden.

The passage brought me immediately back to Juhani Pallasmaa.

As he wrote in [_The Atmospheric Sense_](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-24942-7_6):

"When reading a novel, we create entire buildings, places and cities with their inhabitants, activities and narratives in our imagination."

Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and architectural philosopher whose book [_The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses_](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781394200702) I quote regularly during my architecture tours at the [Audain Art Museum](https://audainartmuseum.com/) in Whistler.

But today I discovered something about him.

In 1992, while serving as dean of the School of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, Pallasmaa sent his incoming students a [reading list of 40 books](https://www.designersandbooks.com/essay/40-titles-new-architecture-students) to read before beginning their architectural studies.

Not 40 books about architecture.

Books by Borges, Calvino, Chekhov, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Camus, and many others.

Borges's _Labyrinths_ was number five. Calvino's _Invisible Cities_ was number nine.

I had read many of these books before; others were already on my reading list, and several were new to me.

Pallasmaa believed that literature was fundamental to an architectural education. As he explained, "Because architecture is fundamentally about life."

## The 40 Books — 1992

1.  Gaston Bachelard — _The Poetics of Space_
2.  Charles Baudelaire — _The Flowers of Evil_
3.  Ingmar Bergman — _Laterna Magica_
4.  Heinrich Böll — _Billiards at Half-past Nine_
5.  Jorge Luis Borges — _Labyrinths_
6.  Joseph Brodsky — _Less Than One_
7.  Joseph Brodsky — _Watermark_
8.  Luis Buñuel — _My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel_
9.  Italo Calvino — _Invisible Cities_
10.  Albert Camus — _The Outsider_
11.  Albert Camus — _The Fall_
12.  Truman Capote — _Breakfast at Tiffany's_
13.  Bo Carpelan — _Axel_
14.  Raymond Chandler — _The Big Sleep_
15.  Anton Chekhov — _Short Stories_
16.  Anton Chekhov — _The Steppe and Other Stories_
17.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky — _Crime and Punishment_
18.  Anton Ehrenzweig — _The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination_
19.  Erich Fromm — _Escape from Freedom_
20.  Günter Grass — _The Flounder_
21.  Mark Helprin — _Winter's Tale_
22.  Hermann Hesse — _The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)_
23.  Hermann Hesse — _Steppenwolf_
24.  James Joyce — _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_
25.  Franz Kafka — _Short Stories_
26.  Franz Kafka — _The Trial_
27.  Thomas Mann — _Doctor Faustus_
28.  Thomas Mann — _Death in Venice_
29.  Herbert Marcuse — _One-Dimensional Man_
30.  Robert M. Pirsig — _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_
31.  Raymond Queneau — _Exercises in Style_
32.  Jean Renoir — _My Life and My Films_
33.  Rainer Maria Rilke — _Letters to a Young Poet_
34.  Rainer Maria Rilke — _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_
35.  Pentti Saarikoski — _Diaries of Youth_ (available only in Finnish)
36.  Susan Sontag — _On Photography_
37.  Andrei Tarkovsky — _Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art_
38.  Mark Twain — _Huckleberry Finn_
39.  Mark Twain — _Letters from the Earth_
40.  Paul Valéry — _“Eupalinos, or the Architect,” in Dialogues_

_Source: [40 Titles for New Architecture Students](https://www.designersandbooks.com/essay/40-titles-new-architecture-students), published by Designers & Books, June 7, 2011._

## Further Reading and Viewing