100 books like Moscow Monumental

Cherkaev also offers us a series of amazing stories informed by theory but written in a highly readable fashion. Many of her cases are about things that weren’t supposed to exist – about the stuff gleaned from the Soviet economy that allowed people to go on expeditions into nature, bury their loved ones, and make do in an economy infamous for its shortages.

You meet a lot of fascinating people, and she throws in some very provocative, well-argued, and cogently written discussion of the Soviet leadership’s changing understanding of how to build communism and the place of stuff in the project and its aftermath.

My consistent criticism of this book is that it ends too quickly – I wanted at least fifty more pages of Cherkaev’s witty prose and fascinating tales. 

I love how O’Donnell’s subtle narration, akin to the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, highlights the absurdities of a state improvising its way to power. She shows how the Bolsheviks were trying to figure out how to replace a capitalist concept of ownership with something. They hadn’t figured out what that something was and were simultaneously trying to establish their government and control over people and things.

O’Donnell makes this story vivid through following a variety of people’s attempts to create and navigate this new system, often with tragic consequences. 

Starks presents us with a marvelous story of the tortured relationship between Soviet society and smoking. On the one hand, Soviet leadership was generally opposed to smoking – both for health and cultural reasons. On the other hand, smoking became associated with both masculinity and the Revolution. Like many a smoker, Soviet society just couldn’t quit, even as the effects of smoking became more and more apparent.

What I love about this book is how Starks takes something omnipresent and disposable – the cigarette – and tells the story of the Soviet Century through it, touching on such a breadth of topics as gender, labor, political, medical, economic, and cultural history. This is a book you just can’t quit.

I don’t enjoy reading theory and I love reading a good story. Somehow, Golubev managed to write a book in which he makes theory accessible and tells a series of unexpected, fascinating tales about how Soviet people from the 1950s on interacted with everything from model planes and boats to stairwells and televisions.

It is difficult to describe what a weird and fun book this is – most attempts to do so would make it sound esoteric and focused on theory, but this is no ordinary book. It features a cast of characters as diverse as bodybuilders, wayward youth, and Soviet psychics whose stories are told through stuff. 

This is a fun sketching book to let your imagination run wild. More than just a coloring book, there are visual prompts that allow the user to modify or redesign an iconic building, or create one from scratch. It provides the framework; you provide the artistry. For kids and adults of all ages, this book will provoke creativity and encourage the architect in everyone.

From 2000 to 2001, I worked two blocks south of the Twin Towers. During my lunch breaks, I would grab take-out lunches and sit in the plaza of the World Trade Center, with the towers keeping me company. When completed, the Twin Towers generated immense controversy because they were “slum clearance” projects, and a government agency was erecting record-breaking buildings to compete with the private sector.

Gillespie’s book chronicles the creation of the Twin Towers and how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a port and transportation agency, suddenly found itself as a real estate titan. The book captures a moment in post-World War II New York that will likely never be replicated. It remains a key history in our post-9/11 world.

This book is an amazingly detailed chronicle of the history of New York architecture and engineering that led to the birth and growth of the New York skyline. Carl Condit was one of the 20th century’s best scholars on the history of building technology, architecture, and transportation. Landau and Condit have deep-dived into archives and historical documents to uncover how the first skyscrapers were built.

This book offers a different approach to a zombie-style story. Whatever the enemy is in this book, it’s got that zombie vibe to it. But they speak, shoot guns, and even drive. It was a very different but enjoyable read. The author has written many more novels but this was one of the first books I bought after taking up writing.

Because the ground itself obscures virtually all of the subterranean worlds of cities, the best way to actually represent and visualise them is through drawings and diagrams.

This book opened my eyes – as it has done for many – to the complexity, density, and depth of the foundations, pipes, tunnels, conduits, and infrastructures below cities.

In it, David Macaulay uses his unequalled drawing skills to illustrate everything from sewer valves; skyscraper foundations; the worlds beneath manholes to an amazing cross-section of New York showing shipping lanes, deep transport tunnels, and huge skyscrapers whose hidden, deep pile foundations can be almost as deep as their above-surface structures. 

I came of age in the 1980s. It was the time when I first discovered my love of New York. It was also a time when America was in the heady throws—partially fueled by cocaine—of an economic and real estate boom. More skyscrapers were erected in Gotham than in any other period, even more than during the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when every developer thought that if they bought a well-located lot, they could turn dirt into gold by building a skyscraper—a post-modernist one at that. 

Jerry Adler’s book follows the up and down fortunes of the young and ambitious New York developer Ian Bruce Eichner as he painstakingly assembled a large lot, raised financing, and erected a skyscraper on Broadway in Times Square. And then, just when he thought he had achieved his greatest glory, the real estate market tanked, and his crowning achievement became a ghost… show more.