From an interview with American architect Peter Eisenman in Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books:

Without The Four Books on Architecture of Palladio no one would have cared about Palladio. A book lasts longer than a building: books are more important in the world than buildings. Without Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture there would be no Bob Venturi. Without Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York there would be no Koolhaas. Without Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, etcetera. That's why I have them on my top ten list. The books that I mentioned in the list made those architects. Without those books, they wouldn't exist for us. So for me, architects live beyond their time through the book.

Visit Yale University Press' site to watch a video preview of this small but handsome volume (which, sadly, must now return to the libraries' shelves, not ours).