A fascinating book on architecture written by Christopher Alexander, a professor at UCB. It's not really a 'book on architecture' - it's a manual for how to do architecture.
The book's particular and extraordinary innovation is not in its contents per se (although they are very interesting, and often fairly radical), but in its organisation: it describes a set of 253 'patterns'; as Alexander says, "Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.". The patterns themselves are not new; some of them are millenia old; it's the idea of formally capturing them as self-contained (but interrelated) entities in order to provide a toolkit for building solutions that is new. The idea of a pattern language isn't restricted to architecture; it's been used extensively in software engineering, for example.
Sounds like A New Kind Of Science. No it doesn't.
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