Search for a Book
Search for print books and/or e-books in Scholar OneSearch. There are four views in Scholar OneSearch to convey more clearly what is available domestically and internationally online, and in person at Snell Library in Boston, MA and at F. W. Olin Library at Mills in Oakland, CA.
- Boston Campus (Snell Library) Scholar OneSearchIncludes online materials and print books available at Snell Library on the Boston, MA campus.
- Oakland Campus (F. W. Olin Library) Scholar OneSearchIncludes online materials and print books available at the F. W. Olin Library on the Oakland, CA campus.
- International Campuses Scholar OneSearchIncludes online materials available to users studying at international campuses in Canada and England.
- United States Campuses Scholar OneSearchIncludes online materials available to users studying at campuses in the United States other than Boston, MA and Oakland, CA.
Requesting Print Books from the Snell Library (Boston, MA) Remote Annex
Not all print books are located at Snell Library on the Boston, MA campus. Some print books have been moved to the Remote Annex facility. To request an item located in the Snell Library Remote Annex, follow these directions:
- Make sure you are logged in to your Scholar OneSearch account
- Click the "Request" link under the item you need and submit the form
- We'll send an email when items are ready for pickup at the Help & Information desk
How to Find an E-book
For additional information about accessing e-books, consult our E-book guide.
E-book Platforms
- Art and Architecture ePortal (Yale) This link opens in a new windowScholarly books on art and architecture history, decorative arts, and design, from Yale University Press. You can search the images in the books as well as the text.
- Library Stack This link opens in a new windowE-books and other digital materials from the arts, design, theory, and architecture fields. Includes often-overlooked ephemera such as artists ebooks, podcasts, filmed lectures, typefaces, and more. Some items require registration (free) to view.
Selected New Books
- The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century by How do we create the new from the old? The Architecture of Influence explores this fundamental question by analysing a broad swath of twentieth-century architectural works--including some of the best-known examples of the architectural canon, modern and postmodern--through the lens of influence. The book serves as both a critique of the discipline's long-standing focus on "genius" and a celebration of the creative act of revisioning and reimagining the past. It argues that all works of architecture not only depend on the past but necessarily alter, rewrite, and reposition the traditions and ideas to which they refer. Organized into seven chapters--Replicas, Copies, Compilations, Generalizations, Revivals, Emulations, and Self-Repetitions--the book redefines influence as an active process through which the past is defined, recalled, and subsequently redefined within twentieth-century architecture.Call Number: E-bookPublication Date: 2023
- The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use by The Architecture of Persistence argues that continued human use is the ultimate measure of sustainability in architecture, and that expanding the discourse about adaptability to include continuity as well as change offers the architectural manifestation of resilience. Why do some buildings last for generations as beloved and useful places, while others do not? How can designers today create buildings that remain useful into the future? While architects and theorists have offered a wide range of ideas about building for change, this book focuses on persistent architecture: the material, spatial, and cultural processes that give rise to long-lived buildings. Organized in three parts, this book examines material longevity in the face of constant physical and cultural change, connects the dimensions of human use and contemporary program, and discusses how time informs the design process. Featuring dozens of interviews with people who design and use buildings, and a close analysis of over a hundred historic and contemporary projects, the principles of persistent architecture introduced here address urgent challenges for contemporary practice while pointing towards a more sustainable built environment in the future. The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use offers practitioners, students, and scholars a set of principles and illustrative precedents exploring architecture's unique ability to connect an instructive past, a useful present, and an unknown future.Call Number: E-bookPublication Date: 2021
- Black Landscapes Matter by The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation's landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places--ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit--exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America's past and future cannot be understood.Call Number: E-bookPublication Date: 2020
- Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present by Although race--a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination--has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality--from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants--Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.Call Number: E-bookPublication Date: 2020
- The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape by The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited discussions of how architects, landscape designers, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called social diseases of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today's chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape. Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan FundCall Number: E-bookPublication Date: 2021
Museum Publications Freely Available Online
- MetPublicationsSelect books and catalogs published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read online or download as a PDF.
- Guggenheim Exhibitions PublicationsExhibition publications made available through the Internet Archive. Read online or download as a PDF.
- Getty Publications Virtual LibrarySelect Getty Publications available for individual research and study. Read online or download as a PDF.
- Getty Research PortalAn online platform providing access to digitized art history texts from contributing institutions.
- ACI Online Art BooksE-books published by the Art Canada Institute (ACI)/ Institut de l’art canadien highlighting twentieth century Canadian Artists.
Interlibrary Loan
- ILLiad log-in (Opens in new window)Need a book, book chapter, or article not available at Northeastern? Current US-based Northeastern faculty, staff, and students can request materials that aren't available at the Northeastern University Library through ILLiad, our interlibrary loan software.