There are many books in the most diverse areas available for free on the Internet, but there are some categories in which it is more difficult to find quality material that is offered for free.
Architecture is one of them, but now there is good news for all students and those interested in the subject, MIT Press has launched MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies, a digital collection of classic architecture and urban studies books, on its MIT Press Direct digital book platform.
Available at this link, we can find books that are already out of print, hard to sell in physical format. This is a collection funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book Program, which co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Among the books there are many texts that were published before the advent of electronic books and remained undigitized. Thanks to this funding and the efforts of an expert open access digitization team, MIT Press has succeeded in securing permissions and adding new forewords that bring new insights into books.
Many of the titles will also be available on the open access platform PubPub, where readers will be able to interact and annotate the works with contemporary context and related readings.
Titles include Architectural Space in Ancient Greece by Constantinos Doxiadis, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman, and four volumes of Survey of the Architectural History of Cambridge.
Each chapter of each book can be downloaded independently in PDF, and if you need to obtain the text, you can use an online ocr that we have talked about on several occasions
