1 comments about Senior Residences: Designing Retirement Communities for the Future (Wiley Series in Healthcare and Senior Living Design).

1. The book doesn't deliver on presenting a computer application system for evaluating performance. It takes the CCRC's accredition questions and just expands on them. From the information that was presented I not sure if the authors know what an application system is. In any event the book lacks any hard technical information, or performance standards, that can be used for evaluating and designing a project. It's presentation is more like a general business plan from a recent MBA graduate.

2 comments about Barns, Sheds & Outbuildings.

1. This is a direct reprint of an 1881 classic, with an informative new forward by Castle Freeman. Halstead selected some of the most popular published designs from over two decades of the farm journal, The American Agriculturist. Designs include barns, stables, carriage houses, animal shelters, corn cribs, ice houses, spring houses, dog houses and bird houses. This book is still an inspiration for country builders.



2. Although this book was quite informative it was not what I was looking for as it is lacking the tecnological side of building barns, sheds etc. It is written with reference to a previous time period--I did not find this book very useful for today's building and planning of such structures.

1 comments about Dealing With Builders.

1. Dealing With Builders is a comprehensive how-to manual for both novice and seasoned buyers of homes. The book walks a prospective purchaser, step by step, through the myriad stages, financial arrangements, and documents with which he or she will have to develop a comprehensive familiarity in order to shepherd the process of building a new home or buying an existing one to a successful conclusion. It also introduces the reader to the various professionals -- including foremen, supervisors, salespersons, lenders, and others -- whose interactions with a buyer and with each other must be carefully synchronized. It explains the argot of the construction industry term by term, and it includes worksheets, checklists, charts, and a litany of do's and don't's that if faithfully applied will transform a new home purchaser into a skilled negotiator.

No comments about Low-Tech Light-Tech High-Tech.

No comments about Built of Earth and Song: Churches of Northern New Mexico.

No comments about Texas Houses Built by the Book: The Use of Published Designs, 1850-1925 (Sara and John Lindsey Series in the Arts and Humanities , No 3).

1 comments about Outdoor Living Spaces: Courtyards, Patios and Decks.

1. Eighty-one courtyards, decks, and patios from homes in all parts of the world are featured--from Japan to South Africa, Iceland to Australia, the United States to South America. With each are at least two or three and in many cases more sharp color photographs showing the courtyard, etc., from different angles and in varying detail. Where there are the more photos, these are usually of the entire house, then closing in on the outdoor feature. With many of the individual sections for each of the numerous outdoor areas are architectural floors plans of the entire residence so the location, adjacent parts of the home, and the relative size and configuration of the area can been seen. In each section are a few paragraphs on the idea behind the particular patio, etc., and its materials, lighting, and other design elements. With the design and quality of a coffee-table book, "Outdoor Living" is more than an attractive book with pleasing photographs on a subject of interest to homeowners meant to be displayed. With its multiple photographs of each courtyard, deck, and patio, its expertly-drawn floor plans, and the details in its commentary, it provides design ideas and also construction guidance for homeowners, interior designers, and architects.

5 comments about Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture.

1. The author/architect, as another reviewer aptly put it has his heart in the right place. This reader found the book interesting, but after the first few projects the pictures really say it all. The residences were interesting, from a material and design point of view. I believe the design of the meeting places were all too small to be effective. I thought it was a unique, rewarding book, in an area I had never considered before, and I thought it was a win-win situation, young architects get to experiment with designs and some rural poor struggling homeowner obtains an upgraded house. Perhaps anopther "only in America situation" can it be said that a rural struggling southern village should sport some avant gard architecture. Interesting use of packed earth throughtout the book, but limited in scope



2. I think Mockbee has taken decency and kindness to a whole new dimension. I love seeing someone completely change perspectives in an industry, or anything else for that matter. This is a great book about the future role of architecture.



3. Truly an inspirational collection of the internationally reknown Sambo and the Rural Studio. This is a must for every idealistic designer who would like to see the social ramifications architecture could have. Proceed and be bold.



4. Visionary Architect, Sambo Mockbee, practiced and taught the importance of designing for all people. The beautifully vernacular, student-built structures not only stimulate the rural imagination, but serve the most basic needs of their owners. This collection of stories and remembrances of The Heart of the Rural Studio programme, is informative and inspiring. Also contains an index of Rural Studio projects '01-'03 and many of Sambo's original sketches and paintings. A must-read for all young architects. A treasure for all that love and miss Sambo.



5. Heart seems to be in the right place...definately unsophisticated idealistic student work...Replacing traditional shacks with funky new age scrap shacks...Traditional/functional vernacular type buildings might have been a better long term choice and value for those concerned...

1 comments about Architecture of the Everyday.

1. In Architecture of the Everyday Harris and Berke produced an anthology of essays on the architecture of the everyday. It is ordinary, banal, and quotidian. Yet such a normative, or major, theory encompasses the authority of examples from history. We can only learn how to conjecture, and thereby design, from history.

   New ideas, or minor theories also abound and are expressed as critical commentary in contemporary art, architecture, and landscape. One minor theory in landscape is that the landscape needs a dynamic language. After all-- "a landscape is worth a thousand pictures". The vast complexity and ephermeralness of the landscape as a subject of inquiry and contemplation requires more tools. Text and even drawings and still images are orders away from the intensity of percept bombardment from the real world.

   The landscape is not a still life, but determined by time, sense, movement, function, spatial structure, and perhaps most significantly by the internal landscape narratives, or fantasies. Poetry may be the essential and functionally driven language of spatial structure. Filmakers are spacemakers. Copyright 1998 Robert Hotten

1 comments about City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren.

1. St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, St. Bride, Fleet Street and St. Stephen Walbrook (the 'dress rehersal for St. Paul's Cathedral') are familiar to most Londoners; their elaborate spires, now hemmed in by ugly office-blocks, spatter the horizons of tidy panoramas of 18th century London by Canaletto and Samuel Scott. Every one of these - with maybe the exception of St. Martin Ludgate - was gutted during the Second World War, by which time many of their pews, reredos and glass had been ousted in favour of convenient but sytlistically incongruent fittings. St. Dunstan-in-the-East, not exclusive in Wren's oeuvre as an exercise in 'Gothick' architecture (in spirit rather than in form), is now a pretty free-standing tower looming over a formal garden. St. Mary Aldermanbury was rebuilt in Wisconsin, whilst St. Michael Bassishaw, and St. Christopher-le-Stocks (to name but two) survive only as drawings and descriptions. Jeffery's 'City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren' is an affordable, nicely produced survey of the 52 London churches built from 1670 to replace those gutted during the Great Fire in 1666. After several discursive essays on design, attribution, fittings and other aspects of their conception, Jeffrey provides an expansive gazetter of each church.

   His objective is - as he states in his introduction - to present a case for the conservation of the 20-odd churches that remain, whilst addressing aspects of authorship and parochial history relevant to the particular buildings. For those who find the twenty volumes of the exhaustive (and undigested) Wren Society journals daunting and (in the case of most copies accessable) rather fragile, Jeffery's parochial histories and surveys of expenses, craftsmen and subsequent renovations to the churches are brief, concise, and specific. The photographs and engravings included (as appropriate) are eloquent and printed to a high standard. Furthermore, plans (some in Jerrery's own hand) of churches of which little information can be milked (St. Olave Jewry, St. Matthew Friday Street and St. Mary Woolnoth before Hawksmoor replaced it, etc.) are included with each entry in the gazetter, and this section is the author's finest; but his excursions in problems of authorship give frequent pause for thought.

   The attribution of St. Paul, Benet's Wharf, and St. Edmund the King to Robert Hooke is reasonably well established: the elevation of the recessed ranges of Bethlehem Hospital and the east and west elevations of Ramsbury Manor are sufficiently close in detail to identify Hooke as the probable author. Furthermore, the similarity of St. Martin Ludgate to St. Edmund means that Hooke's oeuvre is more elastic than one might have anticipated. However, the oblique and hazy attribution of the steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow to Hawksmoor is, quite simply, unhistorical: a drawing by Hawksmoor for the church (complete with an unbuilt three-bay brick loggia with stone coigns and pilasters) is not sufficient ground for the attribution that Jeffery implies. Furthermore, the delegation of 'thirds' of the city to respective surveyors (which has some documentary support) contradicts Jeffery's own conclusion that autograph works by Wren are largely concentrated in the north and west of the city. This would account for St. Clement Danes and St. James Picadilly (whose authorship has never been doubted), but the churches grouped far further east (around St. Vedast, Foster Lane, and St. Lawrence Jewry) are similarly attributed to Wren in other studies on what seem sound traditions. Jeffery does not delve into stylistic analysis to a sufficient degree to play with questions of this sort, and the results he presents should be treated with caution.

   As a book that pleads for the conservation of these sometimes crude, ugly or obscure but consistently fascinating and diverse churches, The 'City Churches' succeeds. Thomas Archer's vast Westminster church, St. John, Smith Square, is at present a concert hall; similarly, Wren's St. Magnus the Martyr, whose rusting iron cramps are staining the coursed rubble masonry at the east-end, has been relegated the status of an uninteresting, decaying hybrid wedged onto a narrow site. Jefferys study underlines - in its imperfect but worthwhile scholarship - that the City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren, despite mutilation and neglect (All Hallows, Lombard Street, was pulled down, in the face of fairly serious disgust, as recently as 1938), continue to warrant study and are of considerable architectural interest.