Thinking Space
In Conversation with Leon van Schaik
17.11.25

Book Club is an opportunity for design discourse – news, views and reviews from the world of publishing in conversation with our favourite design authors, commentators and provocateurs.

Leon van Schaik is a Melbourne-based writer, curator, and educator specialising in architecture and design. With a career spanning critical writing, exhibition curation, and design research, he explores the intersection of spatial thinking, culture, and everyday experience. His work is known for bridging theory and practice, offering nuanced perspectives on how architecture shapes human life. Leon is also the author of Thinking Space, which takes readers on a journey through his own library—a collection cultivated over decades of teaching and reflection—revealing the texts that have shaped him, the personal connections they hold, and their enduring influence as conceptual touchstones.

NHO Writer & Producer, Hayley Tillett, recently spoke with Leon about Thinking Space. This is their conversation.

Portrait courtesy of Leon van Schaik.

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HT: Leon, thank you for joining me. Your emeritus professorial status and retirement sparked an introspective review of your home library – its contents, its organic yet meticulous organisation, its purpose, and its ongoing curation. What did examining your library in this way allow you to see or understand about yourself?

LvS: I began this book project as a mechanical exercise in deciding what should be done with my library. I annoyed two early readers by exaggerating my likes and dislikes. That set me back, and after some reflection I set off on another tack: what had all these books meant to me? I realised that during my professional career there was a direct import for me, when a book joined or departed. Even though I did not realise it at the time, these arrivals and exits marked shifts in my mental space. And, through my work, I was chiefly talking to architects and designers about their own mental space. I came to realise that the slow evolution of my own mental space was there in the library, the constant backdrop. Each purchase felt urgent and important: I was for or against the arguments in the books. This book moved me out of that turmoil and into a calm place. I have come to regard the books as a geological stratum on which I can rest. I still buy books, argue with them and de-access some. But softly.

HT: In Thinking Space, you describe arranging new titles in your collection beside those they’re “most in conversation with.” Reviewing your 42 shelves, you identified themes – a third of which became the foundation of the book. How did you determine which stories were most compelling to carry forward?

LvS: To me, all the 42 shelves are equally important, and the shelves sit in my mind’s eye. However, making a book is not a solo activity, you work with editors and their fact checkers and proofreaders and, vitally, with a book designer. So, although I worked through and wrote up 42 shelves, scoping the book with the editor and designer made it clear that 14 shelves would make a readable and affordable book. Editor, Mat Ward, selected his favourites and I was comfortable with the selection. Then with designer, Stuart Geddes, we worked these up into the book using a format that reflects my working process: ideogram, caption, text. We discussed an index and decided—this being a book about books—on the bibliographic index with which the book starts. And mimicking the library itself, this is cross referenced within the text.

HT: The ideograms summarising each shelf are evocative, combining text, illustration, and symbolism. When did you begin exploring ideas visually in this way, and how have these graphic explorations helped you analyse or re-experience your library?

LvS: Actually, my working method for many years has been to assemble the material that I am working on and then make an ideogram that captures my thinking on one page. Only then do I write. I first used this approach during my design thesis at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1970. I have stuck to the process ever since, whether writing or designing. In 2013, Lyon Housemuseum published Ideograms: Leon van Schaik, a book dedicated to my method. An earlier essay on the subject, Poetics of the Ideogram, also appears in Diagrams of Architecture, Mark Garcia (Ed.), published by Wiley in 2010.

HT: You cite your own profile as sitting amongst books centred around ‘The Social Nature of Being, Trusting People, Giving Agency.’ What are some of the key titles that have served as enduring touchstones in your work and life, and why do they continue to resonate?

LvS: I will name three works. After a reading from the book at Bookshop by Uro in Chippendale, a student asked me which book I would recommend to him if I could only name one. Immediately I told him to read Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s ‘Experiencing Architecture’. I told him how this book was required reading in my first year, but that I thought that it was too simple minded to take seriously. Later, I came to think of it as a foundational text for understanding what architecture can do. In this regard, I rank it alongside Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’. Not mentioned in Thinking Space is the role that art, specifically painting, plays in my life. Artist Richard Hamilton’s foundation year taught me most of what I know about designing, and when I moved to Australia, I believed that I could understand the country if I bought its art. I have a small collection, augmented by that of my son. In this context, I cherish Victoria Newhouse’s ‘Art and the Power of Placement’. This reveals how the placing of a work determines its meaning, and I think this can be reverse engineered into space-making. Finally, ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Humans have been much more creative in their social organising that we think. This wonderful survey on our deep history is heartening, as in a similar vein is Luke Kemp’s ‘Goliath’s Curse’ which I am halfway through.

HT: Thinking Space is also deeply personal, reflecting on relationships, memories, and identity. In Queer Life (and Death) you describe how this part of your collection offered a kind of community through which you engaged with your sexuality. How did encountering these texts help you navigate your own sense of self and connection with others?

LvS: My library is my empathy machine. It enables me to imagine other ways of living, other lives. The shelves have helped me to live my idiosyncratic life. It helps me encounter thresholds that once identified I have crossed or have not wanted to cross. In the books there are minds that I might not otherwise have encountered, and in the rudderless life outside easy norms these books have given me docking points leading to safe moorings. For me, my family, and my friends.

HT: You also described your library as “a map of my intellectual, social, and spiritual growth.” What value has it offered to your work and life more broadly?

LvS: In an ideogram dated 20/11/2023 I cite Vivian Gopnik on Albert Camus: “The great paradox of life: that humans are compelled to seek meaning in a world where meaning clearly is not to be found.” (NYRB Vol. LXX, No. 18, p. 20). My library is a series of event horizons, each of which has seemed to afford me a glimpse of purpose. Each glimpse is enshrined on a shelf, and there I can ‘see’ them, surf them virtually. As many have noted, libraries and gardens die when their creators pass on or away. When I die these glimpses will die too, unless this book passes them on to others.

HT: The book is as much about the act of reflection as it is about design. How do you see contemplation—and even the act of collecting—as integral to creative practice and the value of design?

LvS: Over the years in the design practice research program, I have encountered, across Australia, Asia and Europe, a few dozen exceptional architects and designers. In the intensive discussions leading to research progress reviews, it is manifest to me that all designers establish a mental space, and that space is the platform from which they design. I have not wished to tell them what books they should read, I have wanted to know what books they have read. Which films, poetry, music bothers them? What landscapes have framed their spatial intelligence? I could only ask these questions by being clear about my own answers.

HT: Finally, what do you hope readers will carry with them after closing Thinking Space – not just about architecture, art, or philosophy, but about living more thoughtfully in the world?

LvS: The question embeds the answer: ‘to live more thoughtfully in the world.’ I hope every reader thinks about their own shelves as they read about mine. That they consider the stories that their shelves house. And I know from responses of many readers that this is what happens when they read this book. Some have been moved to write to me and tell me about their shelves, occasionally some tell me where they house my books! I know the statistics of publishing, and that most books sell few copies. But I have treasured some books and pamphlets that have had very small print runs. They are in the book. My hope is that this book is cherished for what it opens in the mental space of its readers.

HT: Leon, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

LvS: Thank you for the close reading that has led to your questions. I appreciate this very much.

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Thinking Space is available to purchase via Bookshop by Uro and other select bookshops.