Books

Eccentric Spaces, Knopf and Deutsch, 1977; Avon, 1980; Godine, 1988; Secker & Warburg, 1989; Ecco Press, 1994; MIT, 1999.

Deliberate Regression (Primitivism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Kandinsky), Knopf and Deutsch, 1980.

Pharaoh’s Dream (Subjectivity in Narrative from Gilgamesh to Proust), Secker and Warburg, 1988. Chosen by Anthony Burgess, Adam Mars-Jones and Robert Nye in their best books of the year, 1988.

The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable, in Pursuit of Architectural Meaning, Thames & Hudson and MIT, 1991; German edition, Birkhauser, 1994; Chinese edition, Taipei, 1995; Japanese edition, Tokyo, 1996; Polish edition, Warsaw, 2000. Shortlisted for Banister Fletcher Prize.

The Italian Garden, photographs by Geoffrey James, text by Robert Harbison, New York: Abrams, 1991.

Creatures from the Mind of the Engineer: The Architecture of Santiago Calatrava, Zurich: Artemis, 1992.

The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches, Andre Deutsch, 1992. Chosen by Marcus Binney and Michael Ratcliffe in notable architecture books of the year, 1992.

Architecture and the City: Sauerbruch/Hutton in Berlin, (in English and German), Birkhauser, 1996.

Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture,
MIT Press, 1997.

Reflections on Baroque, Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 2000. Chosen by Andrew Graham Dixon as his book of the year and by Tim Hilton in notable art books of the year.

Frances Alys: Seven Walks, essay by Robert Harbison, Artangel, 2005.

The Daily Telegraph Guide to England’s Parish Churches, new enlarged edition of Shell Guide, Aurum Press, 2006.

Travels in the History of Architecture, Reaktion Books, 2010

Ruins and Fragments, tales of loss and rediscovery, Reaktion Books, 2015. Architectural books of the year, Financial Times (Edwin Heathcote)