Recommendations

A book about how spaces affect us, and why some places never quite let us go. Twelve conversations with architects such as Juhani Pallasmaa.

Böhme describes atmospheres as what lies between us and things. Felt before it can be named. Böhme sees aesthetics above all as a theory of perception. (In German.)

Architecture is not only seen. It is experienced with the body. Light. Space. Narrowness. Sound. For Böhme, architecture above all creates moods. (In German.)

The buildings and designs of Zaha Hadid. Curves of concrete. Glass. Steel. Architecture that seems to move.

Sixty unusual places in London. On the cover, a swimming pool beneath Gothic arches. Photographs by Peter Dazeley. Rooms most people walk past.

The Welsh myths. Eleven tales from the Red Book of Hergest, among them the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Magicians. Kings. And a woman made of flowers. Blodeuwedd is made from the blossoms of oak, broom and meadowsweet.

A catalogue of the wild plants of Pembrokeshire. Each species with its habitat. Abundance. Location.

The birds of Pembrokeshire. Which ones breed. Which ones pass through. Which ones stay for the winter. With the landscape, the climate and the places to watch them.

An anthropology student and a Yaqui shaman in the Sonoran Desert. The books are about perception, control and how solid the world we take for real actually is. Whether the encounters happened as described is disputed. (German editions.)

The chemist who discovered the effects of LSD on himself in 1943 tells the story of his discovery. About research, about misuse, and about the question of how much of what we see is made in the mind. (In German.)

160 recipes from Creole cooking. Guadeloupe on a plate. Photographs by Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle. (German edition.)

A famous house by Rem Koolhaas in Bordeaux. Shown not by its architects but by Guadalupe Acedo, who cleans it. With bucket, mop and her own views on exposed concrete and leaking roofs.

Yasuo Moriyama lives in Tokyo in a house by Ryue Nishizawa: a scattering of small white cubes on one plot. He reads, listens to noise music, watches films. A house that looks like an experiment. And a man who simply lives in it.

To launch the book, the two talk with Jacques Herzog and Tatiana Bilbao about spaces that do something to us. More than an hour long.

A man who cannot sleep furnishes his flat entirely from a catalogue. Then it blows up. A film about order that no longer holds anything together.

Two teenagers end up inside a 1950s television series. Everything is black and white. Everything is in order. Every day is like the last. Then the first colour appears.

Three people at the edge of a cliff. A woman in red points down. A man crawls to the edge on all fours. A second man stands and looks out to sea. White chalk, two trees like a frame, beyond them only light.

A man in a dark green coat stands alone on a rock. We see only his back. Below him fog, with peaks rising out of it. Where he looks, we look with him.

A wave taller than anything else in the picture. Its crests break into claws. Beneath it, three boats. The oarsmen crouch low. Far behind, small, Mount Fuji under snow.

Dots on walls, floors, pumpkins, bodies. In the Infinity Mirror Rooms, every wall is a mirror. Lights hang from the ceiling. The room no longer ends. Anyone standing inside sees themselves a hundred times over.

A concrete dome, almost two thousand years old. At its centre a round opening, nearly nine metres across. No glass. When it rains, it rains inside. The light moves across walls and floor like the hand of a clock.

The museum for the art of the twenty-first century. Bands of concrete that slide over one another, cross and run out into nothing. Black staircases hang in the light. You never quite know where one space ends.