The Architect and Designer Birthday Book

A thoughtfully curated collection in a stunning package that recognizes and celebrates the birthdays of famous, infamous, and often-overlooked designers and architects.

The gift book for design and architect professionals and students they didn’t know they needed but will no longer be able to live without. Drawn from architect James Biber’s epic Instagram project in which he posted a birthday bio of a famous (or less famous) designer or architect every day for a (mid-pandemic) year, The Architect and Designer Birthday Book is filled with personal, opinionated, and humorous observations on fascinating design and architect figures past and present.

The minibiographies and birthday profiles in the book cover a range of international architects and designers, as well as artists, including:

• Architects from the Aaltos (Aino and Alvar) to Zumthor
• Rivals Bernini and Borromini
• Photographers Lee Miller, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Vivian Maier, Dody Weston Thompson, Margaret Morton, and Judith Turner
• Midcentury modernists Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, and Florence Knoll
• Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, Anne Tyng, and Denise Scott Brown

More anecdotal histories than authorized biographies, these daily profiles are not only fun to read but provide spot-on commentary for anyone interested in how designers and architects relate to each other as well as their place in history. It is the intersection of Biber’s life and the history of architecture and design.

James Biber is an architect and founder of the firm Biber Architects, based in New York. He has designed projects as diverse as the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, the USA Pavilion at the 2015 Expo in Milan, Italy, the restoration of Richard Neutra’s Sten-Frenke house in Santa Monica, and, for one client, twelve houses across the country.