From the The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World blog,
under the category "Modest home libraries."
1. The works of Christopher Alexander are a must. A Pattern Language is the archetypal and most important of the lot, a must have for any designer, builder, or architect. But all his books are important and valuable.
2. John Barrow’s Artful Universe: the Cosmic Source of Human Creativity. Here’s my Amazon review*, which should explain adequately.
3. The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. It relates beauty, proportion and ornament in architecture to the sacrificial rite – i.e., to the tragedy inherent in human life. You’ll never look at an old bank the same way again.
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*
By Kristor J. Lawson "kristor"
This review is from: The Artful Universe (Hardcover)
Barrow, of course, is with Frank Tipler the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which argues that the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the cosmos had to be more or less exactly as they are or life - thus our conscious, self-aware human life - could not have happened.
In The Artful Universe, Barrow explores in great and fascinating detail just exactly how the fine structure of the cosmos bears fruit in the structure of the human body, and in particular the structure of our ideas, preferences, values, aesthetic reactions, ways of thinking; our minds. The primary thrust of this wide-ranging survey is that animal minds and bodies subjected to natural selection are in big trouble if they embody propositions about the world, and therefore about the appropriate way to behave, that are in any important way essentially wrong. He argues that just as the structure of the eye constitutes evidence one way or the other for the correspondence to reality of our ideas about light, so the structure of, e.g., our mathematical faculties constitutes evidence for the mathematical structure of reality.
Barrow is terrifyingly erudite, and a clear, graceful writer. He manages to convey boatloads of highly technical concepts from numerous fields in crystalline arguments accessible to anyone with a basic scientific education. You will learn a ton from this book. You'll work for it - Barrow never condescends - but you will be well rewarded.
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Submitted By: Kristor