What to read this autumn? AA’s book selection
Essays, monographs, exhibition catalogues, comic books… This October 2025, AA offers a short selection of publications to discover without delay. Carefully selected by the editorial team, these works share a cross-disciplinary approach faithful to the spirit of AA, and are rooted in the issues facing our contemporary societies.
Light. The Natural Force that Makes Things Visible
Anna Heringer
German architect Anna Heringer needs no introduction. For more than two decades, she has dedicated her expertise to the communities of Bangladesh, where she once lived and realised her first project in the rural region of Rudrapur, in the country’s north. In this new book, Heringer intertwines personal reflection and field experience, exploring the bond between architecture and activism, between earth as a building material and the people who shape it. Her recent work with Rohingya refugees extends this commitment to a form of architecture rooted in empathy and empowerment.
Through these pages, she seeks to cast light on stories, individuals, challenges and solutions that too often remain in the shadows. The publication brings together the studio’s meditations on materiality — particularly clay — as well as textiles and natural light, all infused with a philosophical and ethical vision that defines Heringer’s practice. A pioneer of sustainable and socially engaged architecture, Heringer pairs her architectural reflections with her collaboration with the women of Dipdii Textiles, whose sari-embroidered blankets form both the visual and conceptual thread of the book – a poetic symbol of repair, resilience, and shared creation.
Anna Heringer, photographs by Kurt Hörbst, Fabio Marcato Lars Müller Publishers, 2025, 128 pages www.lars-mueller-publishers.com
The House of Doctor Koolhaas
Françoise Fromonot
Release by ParkBooks, ‘Gumshoe’ is a new series redefining architectural writing by blending scholarly analysis with the intrigue of detective fiction. Each volume investigates a single building as a mystery to be solved, bringing architecture back to narrative and inquiry. The first book, The House of Doctor Koolhaas by French critic Françoise Fromonot, examines Rem Koolhaas’s Villa dall’Ava in Saint-Cloud, his first completed project. Through a detailed and engaging investigation, Fromonot reveals its significance within Koolhaas’s career and modern architecture.
ParkBooks, 2025, 224 pages
www.park-books.com
How Water Shapes Worlds
Julia Watson
After LO—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, Australian-born designer, educator, and author Julia Watson continues her exploration of ancestral innovation in How Water Shapes Worlds: Indigenous Aquatic Technologies for a Climate-Adaptive Future. This new book reveals how Indigenous water systems – such as floating farms, tidal fish traps, and aquifer recharge networks – have sustained communities for millennia by working with nature rather than against it. Watson calls this synthesis of ancestral knowledge and innovation a ‘TEKnological Renaissance’, bridging ecology and technology to inspire a new design ethos. Co-authored with Indigenous knowledge-keepers and introduced by Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organiser Dr. Lyla June Johnson (Diné/Tsétsėhéstȧhese), the book explores traditional hydrological systems across global ecosystems – from Mexico’s chinampas to Micronesia’s tidal traps—alongside 22 contemporary TEK projects, including China’s Sponge Cities and Peru’s reed-insulated housing.
Visually crafted by designers Piera Wolf and Stephanie Specht, with illustrations by Lina Müller, the publication blends scientific insight and poetic imagery. Both field guide and manifesto, it invites architects, planners, and communities to design with water’s intelligence, envisioning a climate-adaptive future rooted in reciprocity, interdependence, and resilience.
Taschen, 2025, 558 pages
www.taschen.com
Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us
Wolfgang Tillmans
In the summer of 2025, the Centre Pompidou invited German photographer and artist Wolfgang Tillmans to take over the 6,000 sq.m of Level 2 of the Public Information Library, transforming the spaces – emptied of their shelves and readers – just before the museum’s closure for renovation. Photographs, workshops and luminous installations formed a ‘curatorial experiment’, bringing Tillmans’ work into dialogue with the library space, questioning it both as an architectural entity and as a place of knowledge transmission. For those who missed the exhibition, the bilingual catalogue (English and French) remains available – a lasting record of the artist’s exchanges with the architecture, and a final homage to the Pompidou Centre designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.
Florian Ebner, Olga Frydryszak-Rétat (dir.) Centre Pompidou, 2025, 272 pages www.boutique.centrepompidou.fr
Down Under
Formafantasma, Clément Vuillier
Down Under: The Curious Fall of a Child Who Knew Nothing and Became Everything is a picture book by the Italian design studio Formafantasma that fuses fiction and scientific research to foster ecological awareness among children and adults. Commissioned by the Belgian publishing house C-mine, it explores human, environmental, and interspecies relationships. The first part tells of a child’s journey through the Earth’s depths, illustrated by Clément Vuillier; the second features essays and interviews with scientists expanding on its themes. Inspired by Enzo Mari and Bruno Munari, the book invites readers to rethink extractivism and embrace interdependence and coexistence.
NERO and C-mine, 2025, 208 pages
www.neroeditions.com
Texts taken from press releases issued by the publishing houses.
