Architecture is a profession in which very little emphasis is laid on the most important activity… i.e. reading books…
Designing, in my opinion, requires a lot of reffering back and forth on books, not for getting "inspired" by designs, but to know the better of the ways of doing things, placing services, organizing spaces etc.. I am not against getting ‘inspired by designs’ or for that matter, ‘copying’ it completely… if we see sombody’s parker pens or a particular levis t-shirt and likes it, then we all buy it inspite of it being allready bought by others… so why not a good design… is it some different… i think we can ‘copy’ a design as long as the act of copying is justified or our design really needs that element or concept of somebody elses design.. i would personally not prefer it though.. and avoid it as long as possible as copycat architects – an outcome of the postmodernist era – are not so much looked upto thesedays…
Anyways, not diverting from the topic, the books reffered above (esp form space and order, dk ching) are exceptionally helpful books as they are written for the architectural student in focus… after you are through with these… you should take your reading to the next level… read whatever good and informative you find… if not read, just flap through pages… grasping some bits and pieces of information as you go along… even this is very useful… i practice that because i was never in a habbit of reading books completely… so the idea is to read anything useful… searching books by the information they contain… not by the name or the author… i think any book on history of architecture is very useful as it will construct an architectural vocabulary and grammar for us which we will be using our entire life… and books on the various architectural movements like art noveau, art deco, modernism, postmodernism, deconstuctivism etc are also exceptionally useful in getting to know the recent architectural evolution better…
I personally will not recommend any authors as i myself dont read books that way… mostly people when recommended authors to me… i didnt liked their poetic way of explaining things (partly because they were’nt written for students as such)… so i prefer to read any book in which the content is very clear and to the point… as they save time and energy…(the other poetically written books have to be read many times to make your own personal inferences and not the authors inferences, which is good for creating your own stand on any architectural issue and ultimately for our architectural evolution…. but i prefer the other way round…)
As i said its a personal choice… so you have to figure out what you enjoy reading the most and how you enjoy reading the most….
Chao….