Winter Reading: 7 recommendations from top creative minds

Golnaz Afkhami is the founder and Creative Director at Renocon Design Center, an interior design studio in Vancouver where a globally curated collection of finishes, textures, materials, and products are housed.

Truly passionate about creating spaces, she admires Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who +Will Change the World by Tony Wagner. “Reading this book has aligned my intuition that creating a space that moves people and that comes from intention has the magic of cascading into many other creations by the users”, she says.

Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights is another pick, which made her “appreciate the professional journey that it has taken to arrive at where I am today”. Fearlessly starting her career at 23 in an industry “dominated by men”, she admits that her overwhelming need to do what she was passionate about allowed her to be fearless in the face of all that stood in her way.

Barcelona-based interior designer Esther Rico believes each interior should tell the story of those inhabiting that space. Her human-centered design approach was influenced by Material Designers Book, which portrays “how design can change the world”; a transformation starting from the material, she believes, “the very beginning”.

Rico also cites Oscar Guayabero’s essay The Design for the Day Before, which “addresses design not as a medium but as an intermediary” from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Her last pick is El diseño invisible. Siete lecciones sobre la intervención culta en el hábitat humano, by Norberto Chaves, who she admires for his “anthropological vision of design, his sensitivity to details and his critical insights into the profession”.

Italian-born architect Carmelo Zappulla is founder and managing director of External Reference, an experimental architectural studio developing international work on different scales: from exhibition spaces to urban, interior and product design.

One of his forever favorites is The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses by Juhani Pallasmaa. In this essay, the Finnish theorist emphasizes the precedence of eyesight over any other sense in the field, which “impoverishes the architectural experience” when “reduced to a simple two-dimensional image”.

On this same line, he also recommends Franco Arminio’s La cura dello sguardo: Nuova farmacia poetica and his “care of looking at things carefully, deeply”. “Poetry is an expression of observing the details, which we can crystallize with the power of word”, he says.

His research and creative process could not be such without a deep sense of nostalgia, which he shares with Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing by Charlotte & Peter Fiell. “I enjoyed his claim for freehand drawing not as a representation but as a design process”, he states.