25 Great Books About New York City Architecture

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Architecture is the primary form of art in New York City. It's the first thing you see and experience -- from brownstones to skyscrapers. Life is contained within structures defined by the aesthetics of the day and of past days. Over the years I've read through a great many books on New York's defining works of architecture. Here's just a short sampling of some of my favorites books which explore the history of New York through its grandest structures, the architects who made them and the critics who shaped them.

Guide to New York City Landmarks
The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It
Higher
Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age
The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream (The MIT Press)
Divided We Stand: A Biography Of New York's World Trade Center
The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York
Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New York Review Books (Hardcover))
Five Hundred Buildings of New York
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
Rise of the New York Skyscraper: 1865-1913
The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture)
Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification And The Search For Authenticity In Postwar New York