Best books of 2025: Art, Architecture and Design

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Visual Arts

by Jackie Wullschläger

Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh (Yale University Press)
Religion and art always shadowed each other, but why in secularising 1890s-1960s Britain did so many artists and writers choose Catholicism: decadent Aubrey Beardsley, reclusive Gwen John, visionary David Jones, waspish Muriel Spark? McDonagh writes scintillating, witty, probing intellectual history that is also extremely moving. A Christmas joy for believers and reluctant atheists alike, and my favourite book of 2025.

Lee Miller by Hilary Floe and Saskia Flower (Tate Publishing)
She could turn fingers on the door of a Paris parfumerie into “Exploding Hand”, and a lone singer in Vienna’s ruined opera house into a voice for a lost civilisation. Spinning her surreal photographer’s eye from fashion to fascism, Miller illuminated Europe from 1920 to 1945, as charted in this scholarly, sensitive catalogue to Tate’s current exhibition.

Goya: The Complete Prints by Anna Reuter and José Manuel Matilla (Taschen)
“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with reason, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” Goya’s prints dispersed that singular, tragicomic vision far and wide, and so should Taschen’s splendid, comprehensive, affordable volume, every image reproduced large-scale to crystalline perfection.

Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves (Modern Art Press)
Freud forbade a catalogue raisonné in his lifetime; now it’s here, as marvellous and relentless in scrutinising the paintings as he was in making them: acute, nuanced, formidable, pleasurable. Gossip falls away, yet every page exhilaratingly shows how, as Freud said, a good picture contains “a little bit of poison”.

Walt Disney’s Children’s Classics 1937-1953 by Charles Solomon (Taschen)
Nostalgic as a vintage sweet shop, the original art for Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, Pinocchio, Peter Pan and co shine here even brighter than in memory. A delightful fairytale anthology, and an entertaining history of Disney’s dazzling animators, heirs to the 19th-century golden age of children’s illustration.

Architecture and Design

by Edwin Heathcote

Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs by Izzy Kornblatt (Lars Müller)
Together with her late husband Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown created some of the most familiar and influential works of postmodern architecture, from the house for her mother-in-law outside Philadelphia to London’s National Gallery Sainsbury Wing. But this book of her photos reveals her to have as sharp an eye for social and human issues and townscape as she ever did for architecture. Street photography through an architect’s humane and quirky lens.

Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect by Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira (Princeton)
A kind of architectural Zelig, Ella Briggs trained with the Vienna Secessionists, moved to New York in its Gilded Age then designed social housing in Red Vienna, was jailed in Mussolini’s Italy, suspected of spying, had a successful career in Weimar Germany until she was chased out, and landed in London where she was involved with the capital’s postwar reconstruction. I admit I’d never heard of her, yet hers is surely one of the most remarkable stories in architecture.

The Labor of Architecture: Creativity, Design and the Building of a New Class Consciousness by CG Beck (Monthly Review Press)
Architects have historically expended a lot of energy on justifying their elite professional status. It is a self-deception that has allowed it to be an exploitative, poorly paid (relative to the amount of training and responsibility) and often abusive industry. Beck, who unionised his US architecture firm, contends that architects are in fact part of the working class. A lively, timely and compelling Marxist upending of the conception of an industry that does not quite understand itself.

Brutalist Interiors edited by Derek Lamberton (Blue Crow)
Brutalism is usually depicted from the outside — raw concrete; bold, sculptural forms; fierce-looking towers. This lovely book presents a more nuanced portrait of a style that was once derided and is now supercool. From architects’ houses to subway stations via museums and cathedrals, it presents a compelling (if selective) global survey of brutalism’s civic, domestic and often surprisingly intimate highlights.

Italian Palaces by Massimo Listri (Taschen)
Lush acres of palazzi with frescoes, marble floors, sculptures, baroque staircases and impossible beauty captured by Florentine photographer Listri. Almost as heavy as a palazzo, not quite as expensive, this is one to flick through and dream after too much pudding.

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Maria Crawford
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: Critics’ choice

Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain by Holly Smith (Verso)
Smith traces the high point of British social housebuilding in the postwar era, its much dwelt-on failures and its less celebrated but widespread successes. It seems almost impossible today amid our burgeoning skylines of investment towers that the highest buildings in the 1960s and ’70s were almost all council housing, meant for all. It’s an odd book, which also covers quirkier episodes, gentrification and resistance, but an amazing story.

Before and After: The Architecture of Disaster by Eyal Weizman and Ines Weizman (Diaphanes)
With the flattening of Gaza now becoming more horribly visible, this short conversation is an intriguing contemplation of the history and uses of the now familiar before-and-after photo. Weizman, founder of Turner Prize-winning Forensic Architecture, continues to explore how architecture and its tools can be used to fight for social justice and humanitarianism.