The Cambridge and UCL Architecture Reading List

Ask an architect how to prepare for an architecture degree and you'll probably hear one word. Draw.

It's good advice. But the applicants who really stand out at top schools like Cambridge and UCL can also talk about why buildings look and feel the way they do. They've noticed things. They have opinions about the street they walk down every morning. More often than not, a good book is what got them noticing.

This reading list is built around that idea. Some of these books are about cities, and some are about light and memory. A couple are mostly pictures, and one is a film. They're here to sharpen your eye and give you something real to say in your personal statement and at interview.

If you'd like an expert to guide you through the whole application, book a consultation with us. We'd love to hear from you.

Where to start: widening your view

Before you zoom in, it helps to zoom out. These books show how much ground architecture covers, across time and across the world.

Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture

Written in the first century BC and dedicated to the emperor Augustus, this is the only major book on architecture to survive from the ancient world. It covers everything from building materials to town planning. Most famously, it says a good building needs firmitas, utilitas and venustas, usually translated as strength, usefulness and beauty. Two thousand years on, those ideas still come up in design reviews. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man drawing is based on his ideas about the proportions of the human body, too. Don't worry about reading all ten. Start with the first.

Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture

First published in 1896, "Banister Fletcher" has been the architecture student's bible for well over a century. The latest edition, renamed Sir Banister Fletcher's Global History of Architecture, covers far more of the world than the originals did. It was edited by Murray Fraser, a professor at the Bartlett. It's enormous and expensive, so treat it as a reference. Borrow it from a library and dip in whenever a building catches your eye.

Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects

In 1964 Rudofsky put together an exhibition at MoMA in New York full of buildings no trained architect ever designed. Cave towns, granaries, tree houses and whole villages. The book is mostly photographs, and it's a joy to leaf through. It's a useful reminder that the Western canon is only part of the story, and it makes a great starting point for sketchbook studies.

James Corner and Alex MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape

MacLean's aerial photographs show fields, irrigation circles, dams and highways from above. Corner, a landscape architect, responds with drawings and maps that try to "measure" what's going on down there. It's an unusual book and a beautiful one. If you know the High Line in New York, you already know Corner's later work, because his studio designed its landscape. This is a particularly good read if your portfolio leans towards mapping or collage.

Cities and the people in them

Architecture rarely happens in isolation. These books look at what goes on between buildings, and at the people who actually use them.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jacobs was a journalist with no architectural training. In 1961 she took on the planners who were bulldozing neighbourhoods to make way for highways and tower blocks. Her idea of "eyes on the street", and her description of the everyday "sidewalk ballet" outside her home in Greenwich Village, are still quoted in design studios today. If you only read one book about cities, make it this one. It'll give you plenty to argue about at interview, too.

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Koolhaas wrote this in 1978, before he'd built much at all, and called it a "retroactive manifesto" for Manhattan. He tells the story of how the grid and the skyscraper produced a whole new kind of city life, with Coney Island's amusement parks as a testing ground. It's wild and witty. Read it after Jacobs, because they look at the same city and see something very different.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas

In 1972 a group of architects took their students to study the Las Vegas Strip. They came back arguing that architects should stop sneering at it and start learning from it. This is where the famous "duck" and "decorated shed" come from. It's provocative and often funny, and it'll make you look again at the ordinary buildings around you, right down to the petrol stations and retail parks.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Made in Tokyo

Atelier Bow-Wow, the Tokyo practice led by Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, went round their city cataloguing odd hybrid buildings that nobody would call beautiful. The best known is a supermarket with a driving school on its roof. They call it "da-me", or no-good, architecture, and they draw each example with lovely clear axonometrics. It's a close cousin of Learning from Las Vegas, and a brilliant model for documenting your own city in a portfolio.

Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City

Borden, a professor at the Bartlett, looks at how skateboarders use the city in ways its designers never imagined. A handrail or a bench becomes something completely new. It's a brilliant example of how architecture is shaped by the bodies moving through it. It's also a nice reminder that your own hobbies can be a way into architectural thinking. Look out for the updated edition, Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History.

Reading London

If you're applying to UCL, or anywhere else in the capital, the city itself becomes your textbook. These two look at London from very different angles.

Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

Ackroyd treats London like a person, and he tells its story by theme instead of in date order, often jumping across centuries in a single chapter. It's long, so there's no need to read it straight through. Pick the chapters that catch your interest, then go and walk the streets he describes.

Rowland Atkinson, Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London's Super-Rich

Atkinson, an urban researcher, looks at London's most expensive homes, many of them bought as investments and left largely empty. "Necrotecture" is his word for these costly, lifeless buildings. It's a short academic paper, so it's a quick read, and if it hooks you his book Alpha City goes much further. It's a great way into questions about housing and who a city is really for, which come up at interview a lot.

Senses, atmosphere and imagination

Some of the best architectural writing comes at buildings sideways. These books deal with light, mood, memory and imagination. They're the ones most likely to change how you see your own home.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

A short essay from 1933 in which the Japanese novelist mourns what electric light was doing to traditional Japanese homes. He writes about lacquerware glowing by candlelight, paper screens, dim alcoves and even toilets. Architects keep coming back to it, and you can read it in an afternoon.

Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres

Zumthor is the Swiss architect behind the thermal baths at Vals, and he won the Pritzker Prize in 2009. In this slim book he tries to put into words what makes a space feel the way it does, from its materials and sound to its temperature and light. It pairs beautifully with Tanizaki. Read them back to back, then go and sit quietly in a building you love.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Strictly speaking, it's a novel. Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to the emperor Kublai Khan, each one a page or two long and each stranger than the last. It's really a book about how we imagine and remember places. Generations of architecture students have turned its cities into drawings and models.

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Life A User's Manual

Two for the price of one, because Perec is that good. Species of Spaces starts with the space of the page, then moves outwards to the bed, the bedroom, the flat, the street, the town and finally the whole world. It's playful and full of little exercises in noticing. Life A User's Manual is a huge, puzzle-like novel. Imagine a Paris apartment block with its front wall peeled away like a doll's house, and a writer visiting each flat in turn to tell the stories of the people inside. Architects love it because it's essentially a section drawing turned into a book.

Peter Greenaway, H is for House (film)

A break from reading, and it'll only take ten minutes. Greenaway's short film from the 1970s was shot at his family's home in the English countryside. A narrator lists words beginning with H while the camera lingers on the house and garden. It's gentle and quietly funny, and a lovely way to think about how we name and catalogue the places we live.

For the ambitious: big ideas about space

These are harder going, and you certainly don't need them. But if you've enjoyed a few of the books above and want to push further, this is where university-level thinking starts.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Eliade was a historian of religion, and this is his account of how people have always divided the world into sacred and ordinary space. He writes about temples and thresholds, and about the house as a small model of the cosmos. It'll change how you think about something as simple as a front door.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

The heaviest book on this list, and one of the most influential. Lefebvre's big claim is that space is socially produced, shaped by the way people live and the way power works as much as by architects. You won't need to finish it. Even the first chapter and a good summary will give you a lens that half of architectural theory uses. Borden's skateboarding book leans on Lefebvre, so the two make good companions.

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City

Rossi was an Italian architect, and in this 1966 book he argues that a city builds up slowly over time, almost like a collective memory made physical. He's especially interested in buildings that outlast their original purpose. His favourite example is the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, a medieval hall whose uses have changed many times while its form has stayed the same. It's dense in places, but the big idea is easy to hold onto. It also gives you plenty to say about how old buildings get reused today. Try reading it alongside Jacobs, who was writing about cities at almost the same time from a very different starting point.

Jane Rendell, The Architecture of Psychoanalysis

Rendell, another Bartlett professor, brings psychoanalysis into conversation with architecture. She's interested in thresholds and in-between spaces, both physical and emotional, and in how we write about the places we care about. It's demanding, so save it until you've read a few of the others. It pairs neatly with Eliade.

Go beyond the books

Reading is only half of it. Architecture is something you learn by looking, so the best preparation happens with a sketchbook in your hand.

• Visit buildings. Open House London opens hundreds of buildings to the public every September, most of them for free. If you live elsewhere, look for a similar festival near you.

• Draw what you read about. Take Tanizaki to a dim café, or Jacobs to a busy high street, and sketch what you see.

• Read the magazines. The Architectural Review and Dezeen will keep you up to date with what architects are building and arguing about right now.

• Listen in. 99% Invisible is a brilliant podcast about the hidden design of everyday things.

Turning your reading into an application

Most top architecture schools, Cambridge and UCL included, will want to see a portfolio, and many will ask you about it at interview. This is where your reading really earns its keep.

You don't need to read every book here. Depth matters far more than breadth. Pick two or three that genuinely grab you, and let them change how you work. Once you've finished one, ask yourself a few questions.

• What did it make you notice that you hadn't before?

• Do you agree with the author? Where would you push back?

• Could you test the idea in a drawing or a model?

• Which building near you would the author love, or hate?

A tutor will be far more interested in a sketchbook page responding to Perec than in a long list of titles in your personal statement.

To find out more about how we support Architecture applicants, take a look at our Architecture course page.

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Reading widely helps you build the kind of curiosity admissions tutors look for. More importantly, it's how good architects keep learning long after university.

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Happy reading, and happy drawing!