Based on Sam Spike’s original reading list on taste, new aesthetics, and the loss of beauty. Each work is credited to its original author below. Check off each piece as you finish it; progress is saved in this browser.

• “Of the Standard of Taste” — David Hume (1757)
• “On Taste” — Edmund Burke (1759)
• Critique of Judgement — Immanuel Kant (1790)
• Lectures on Aesthetics — G. W. F. Hegel (1835)
• “The Lamp of Memory” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture — John Ruskin (1849)
• “The Nature of Gothic” — John Ruskin (1853)
• “The Painter of Modern Life” — Charles Baudelaire (1863)
• “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” — Friedrich Nietzsche (1874)
• “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation” — William Morris (1881)
• “The Futurist Manifesto” — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909)
• “Ornament and Crime” — Adolf Loos (1913)
• Toward an Architecture — Le Corbusier (1923). Especially the chapters “The Engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture” and “Eyes Which Do Not See.”
• “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” — Walter Gropius (1923)
• “Assimilation of the Machine” in Technics and Civilisation — Lewis Mumford (1934)
• “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” — Walter Benjamin (1936). Particularly the final third.
• “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” — Clement Greenberg (1939)
• “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment — Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1944)
• “Style” in Theory & Philosophy of Art — Meyer Schapiro (1953)
• “The Question Concerning Technology” — Martin Heidegger (1954)
• “The Machine Aesthetic” — Reyner Banham (1955). Also the book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) for a broader history of early modernist architecture.
• “The New Brutalism” — Reyner Banham (1955)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs (1961). Haven’t personally read this but canon.
• The Shape of Time — George Kubler (1962). One of my favourites.
• Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture — Robert Venturi (1966)
• “Style” — E. H. Gombrich (1968)
• Architecture and Utopia — Manfredo Tafuri (1973)
• “Fascinating Fascism” — Susan Sontag (1975)
• Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu (1979)
• “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” — Fredric Jameson (1984). The essay, not the book; especially the parts on pastiche and nostalgia.
• Non-Places — Marc Augé (1992)
• “Ur-Fascism” — Umberto Eco (1995)
• “The Generic City” in S, M, L, XL — Rem Koolhaas (1995)
• On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry (1999)
• The Abuse of Beauty — Arthur Danto (2002)
• “Junkspace” — Rem Koolhaas (2001)
• “Nostalgia and Its Discontents” — Svetlana Boym (2007). Also her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001).
• “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” — Mark Fisher (2014)
• The Saving of Beauty — Byung-Chul Han (2015)