NEW
YORK
ARCHITECTURE+ DESIGN
BOOK
CLUB
Join New York’s only architecture and design book club (that we know of!)
The New York Architecture + Design Book Club, organized by Head Hi and the design journal Untapped, is a lively public program and book subscription series that explores remarkable new titles in the field. The books’ authors, contributors and industry experts lead a discussion at each quarterly gathering, which seeks to build deeper connections between people, ideas, and the world in which we live.
HOW IT WORKS
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
UPCOMING EVENT
Join us on Wednesday, December 9, 6:30pm!
Our next title for the New York Architecture + Design Book Club subscription and event series is The Imperfect City: Design, Serendipity, and the Real Life of Cities (Knopf Publishing Group). In the book, a Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic explores how modern cities thrive when urban planning leaves room for happy accidents and innovations.
Goldberger brings the world’s cities to life on these pages, mixing stories of bold planners and architects bidding for immortality with random, often haphazard elements that pop up in cities as if by accident. Both are necessary, he argues, since no city can be designed down to the last square foot, but neither can the growth of a city be left entirely to chance. All cities are a mix of planning and happenstance, and the best cities are the ones that blend great design with casual, ordinary places: “The city is a collage, not a portrait,” Goldberger writes.
Drawn from a lifetime of appreciation, dating back to his own tender-aged first arrivals in Manhattan, Paris, and beyond, this warm and brilliant book shows that the joy of urban experience comes not from seeking the perfection of order, but from embracing the energy, beauty, and unpredictability of cities at their best. The Imperfect City helps us to understand how cities, and people, truly evolve—by luck, accident, and design.
The book was published by Knopf Publishing Group in November 2026.
Questions about how the book club works? Email us at hello@headhi.net.
EVENT GUESTS
For the event on December 9, we are thrilled to be joined by the author Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He began his career at The New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism for his writing on architecture. Later, and for fifteen years, he was the architecture critic for The New Yorker. He is the author of many books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, Why Architecture Matters, and, most recently, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. He is the Joseph Urban Professor of Design at the New School, and lectures widely on architecture, design, historic preservation, and cities. He lives in New York City.
PAST NEW YORK ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN BOOK CLUB PICKS
2025-2026
Jasper Morrison, A Book of Things
Featured Guests: Nick Olney and Jonathan Olivares
Review by George Kafka
Bruno Munari: Design and Visual Communication
Featured Guests: Jeffrey Schnapp and Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Review by Jarret Fuller
Architecture Against Architecture, Reinier de Graaf
Featured Guests: Reinier de Graaf, Lauren Sinclair, and Craig Sinclair
Review by Eva Hagberg
The Art of Dwelling, Charlotte Perriand
Featured Guests: Alex Gilbert and Cristina Grajales
Review by Lauren Gallow
2024
Minerva Parker Nichols, In Search for a Forgotten Architect
Featured Guests: Margaret (Molly) Lester, William Whitaker, Heather Schumacher and Elizabeth Felicella
American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana
Hélène Binet
Archigram Ten
Featured Guests: Barry Wark, Winka Dubbeldam and Michael Young
2023
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling
Featured Guests: Nile Greenberg, Matthew Kennedy, and John Sorensen-Jolink
A Dark, A Light, A Bright The Designs of Dorothy Liebes
Featured Guests: Susan Brown, Alexa Griffith Winton and Juan Jofre Lora
Touch Wood: Material, Architecture Future
Featured Guests: Carla Ferrer, Thomas Hildebrand, Celina Martinez-Cañavate and Neil Pederson
Stephen Burks Shelter in Place
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.
Untapped is a design journal that looks back to look forward. Their stories identify the most important knowledge about improving the built environment, and contextualize it for today and tomorrow.
We believe that both the near and distant past hold valuable insights for architects and designers. People have already solved, or are making headway on, many of the challenges the industry currently faces—but such achievements are often overlooked among an excess of data or in the pursuit of innovation, or when they are presented in convoluted ways. Our stories unpack and add a fresh critical perspective to those achievements, explaining why they’re significant and how they can be useful right now.
Untapped is not anti-innovation. We believe that the most efficient path to progress begins with building on what we know. This is the information that the journal is dedicated to gathering, making sense of, and reflecting on, and that we can’t afford to forget.
Collectively, Untapped’s stories form an encyclopedia of ideas: a gateway to knowledge that serves as a timeless, ever-growing resource for all.
www.untappedjournal.com
@untappedjournal