Architecture: How Humans Build

Ballantyne's question is what makes a building architecture rather than just construction, and his answer involves meaning, memory and status more than beauty.

The single-volume world survey, genuinely global rather than European with appendices. Use it as the spine and return to it between modules.

Wilkinson covers how Egyptian temples were sited, built, decorated and used, including the parts of the ritual that the architecture exists to stage.

The only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, and the source of firmness, commodity and delight. Also full of advice on water supply, siege engines and where not to build a town.

Summerson treats the orders as a language with a grammar, which is exactly the right way to learn them. Six short lectures, and the fastest route to reading a classical facade.

Von Simson argues that Gothic structure follows from a theology of light rather than from engineering ambition. The flying buttress exists so the wall can become glass.

Specialist chapters on mosque architecture region by region, from Arabia to China to West Africa, which shows how little the form is fixed.

Kramrisch's classic on the temple as a diagram of the cosmos, from the ground plan to the tower. Dense, and worth the effort for what it does to how you see one.

Koch's survey of Mughal building from 1526 to 1858, showing how a Persian, Timurid and Indian synthesis was assembled deliberately and used as an instrument of rule.

The first full history of Chinese architecture in decades, built around the timber frame and the bracket set, a system that stayed recognisably itself for two thousand years.

Drawn rather than photographed, and better for it: cutaway illustrations of shrines, temples, castles and houses with the joinery visible.

How a goldsmith with no formal training roofed Florence cathedral, a problem nobody had solved in over a century. The best possible way into Renaissance building.

The standard short survey: Alberti's theory, Bramante's Rome, Palladio's villas, and how a classical vocabulary got rebuilt from ruins and one surviving text.

Read the chapter called The Nature of Gothic and no more unless you want to. Ruskin's argument is that you can tell how a society treats its workers from what its buildings look like.

Mumford's history of the city from the first permanent settlements, arguing throughout that the city is a container for culture and that industrialism nearly broke it.

Jacobs watches an actual street and demolishes a generation of planning orthodoxy with what she sees. Read the opening chapters on sidewalks before anything else.

Koolhaas calls it a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan: the grid, the elevator and congestion treated as a deliberate architectural programme rather than an accident.

The manifesto: the house as a machine for living in, ships and aeroplanes as models, and the five points. Period prose, and it repays reading as a period document.

The study that took the Strip seriously and gave architecture the duck and the decorated shed. Scott Brown drove the research and spent decades being left off the credit.

Italian-born, Brazilian by choice, and responsible for the MASP and the SESC Pompeia, two of the most generous public buildings of the century. This is the standard biography.

Two hundred and fifty-three patterns, from the region down to the window seat, each one a claim about what makes a place feel right. Usable by anyone, which was the point.

Fathy rebuilt a village in Egypt using mud brick and vaulting techniques the villagers already knew, and wrote honestly about why the project partly failed.

An English Quaker who settled in Kerala and spent forty years building beautiful low-cost housing out of brick, rubble and restraint. Bhatia collects the work and the writing together.

A structural engineer explains loads, forces, beams, arches and domes with almost no mathematics. After this you will look at a span and want to know how it is being carried.

Brand's argument is that buildings are not finished when they open, and that the ones people love are usually the ones that were easy to change. The photographs of the same building decades apart make the case.

Pallasmaa's complaint is that architecture has become something to photograph rather than something to inhabit, and that touch, sound and smell have been designed out.