1 comments about Faster Construction Projects with CPM Scheduling.

1. This is by far the most interesting and comprehensive book I've ever read on project scheduling. The concept of Momentology is much more viable than Critical Chain and should really deserve more attention.
   
   Although not for the novice scheduler, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in CPM.

5 comments about Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods.

1. Although I haven't purchased this book, I have read a copy that I borrowed from a library.
   
   This is a very practical book. It is nice to know that there is a way in which suburbanites can become less car-dependent, and that you don't have to live in a city's downtown core to become less car-dependent! I also like the idea of suburbs becoming more like traditional towns surrounding each big city. If suburbs were like traditional towns, they would be much more pleasant and more interesting places to live in.



2. "Researchers have demonstrated that a feeling of community reduces suburban depression."
   
   The first pictures I observed upon opening this book were of a lovely neighborhood in much need of comfort and the beautiful results after the streets had been lined with trees. Sidewalks had also been created and pathways up to each front porch created a very inviting environment. The trees shaded the walkways and people enjoyed riding their bikes down the streets. The contrast was eye opening and the results very comforting. You can imagine the people living in this area finally feeling like they were home.
   
   The contents include:
   
   The Changing Face of Suburbia
   Reinventing Our Neighborhoods for Health, Profit, and Community
   Imagining a Sustainable Neighborhood
   How to Remodel a Neighborhood
   Germination: First Steps
   Leafing Out: Bolder Ideas
   Your Neighborhood Blossoms: Boldest Steps
   Suburban Revitalization I: Can This Dream Become a Reality?
   Suburban Revitalization II: Making Bold Dreams Come True
   Taking Care in the Neighborhood
   
   This book helps to emphasize the isolation of the typical suburban house and shows how the community design seems to emphasize private space instead of community. This promotes a lack of connection. Could the way we live promote depression and a lack of friendships? Could the way we build communities lessen domestic violence, encourage community interaction and promote a general feeling of well-being?
   
   Like Feng Shui, this book gives ideas for building or restoring neighborhoods to promote happiness and to reduce stress. While some say we are not a product of our environment, it only takes a little research to find out that where there is more hope and a greater sense of community, humans seem to thrive.
   
   "...research reveals that in a closely knit community, levels of serotonin (a natural anti-depressant) are higher, so the neighborhood is collectively more optimistic and energetic." ~pg. 26
   
   The transformations in communities is revealed in pictures that explore the role of nature in our comfort level. Would you rather live behind high brick walls or enjoy a more peaceful and serene landscape of short fences and flowered walkways? In one section, an alleyway between living spaces is transformed into a little piece of heaven.
   
   Some of the features include:
   
   Ten Basic Design Principles for Remodeling Neighborhoods
   How to Sponsor Community Dinners
   Neighborhood Clubs
   Organic Gardens
   Replacing asphalt with porous pavers - to reduce heat absorption
   
   As a child, I remember two types of homes. One with a backyard, tightly fenced in, and another with wide-open spaces and easy access to walking through community spaces. I can tell you, I preferred the latter.
   
   This book is filled with wisdom and great advice for city planners and I've seen the idea of producing an edible landscape work efficiently in some areas. As a child we used to pick fruit off trees on the walk home from school. It is a dream that can come true and this book has many ideas that once implemented will improve the lives of everyone in the community. By reading this book, you may also decide to move to a location that values these ideas.
   
   ~The Rebecca Review
   Currently living in an area without fences and lovely tree-lined walkways



3. Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods is a "self-help" book for urban and suburban neighborhoods. The suburbs are often car-dependent, land-hungry, strictly residential neighborhoods that are often isolated from schools, workplaces and civic centers. They often lack convenient links to parks and mass transportation and are typically not developed in ways conducive to meeting people.

   But, these challenges provide numerous opportunities for positive change! People can reinvent their neighborhoods based on economic, environmental, and social values. Superbia! provides a checklist of Easy, Bolder, and Boldest Steps that can lead to safer, friendlier, livelier, healthier, more productive, diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. Neighbors can chose the steps they think will create a stronger sense of place and connection to people, nature, and culture.

   Easy Steps include sponsoring community dinners, establishing a community newsletter, and creating car and van pools for work commutes. Some neighbors have started book and investment clubs. For example, the Hillcrest Neighborhood Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sponsors a book club where neighbors "get together with fellow book enthusiasts to converse, discuss, and debate current bestsellers and classics," according to the group's website. Superbia! describes how there are hundreds of potential links between people within neighborhoods - links that can reduce time, human energy, and money spent by individuals on tight schedules as well as tight budgets. Easy Steps help people know one another better helping them discover links that lead to Bolder Steps.

   Planting a community garden or orchard is a Bolder Step. A composting project can serve the community garden and individual yards. Planting shade trees and windbreaks reduces energy costs, provides wildlife habitat, and increases property values. The Highlands Neighborhood in Littleton, Colorado, took a Bolder Step by tearing down fences. There was already a neighborhood tradition of parties in backyards, but neighbors decided to go a step further and took down their six-foot fences and opened the space to the neighbors creating a better sense of community.

   Boldest Steps include creating a community energy system and creating a common house and community-shared office. A Boldest Step was taken by New York's Darrow School when the failure of a conventional wastewater system provided an opportunity to install a Living Machine - a greenhouse-contained biological waste treatment facility that uses natural methods rather than harmful chemicals to recycle human waste. This system is also used as a hands-on laboratory for a variety of classes including science, chemistry, mathematics, and even art.

   With a history of how the suburbs came to be, 31 ways to make the suburbs better, examples of people who have created more sustainable neighborhoods, and a Resource Guide, readers can actively transform their suburbia into Superbia!

   Authors Chiras and Wann walk their talk. Chiras built and lives in a sustainable, solar home, and Dave Wann helped develop and lives in Harmony Village co-housing. They are also co-directors of the Sustainable Futures Society's Sustainable Suburbs project. Visit www.sustainablecolorado.org to learn more.

   Susan Bilo is an energy and resource conservation consultant with Sustainable By Design, LLC.




4. To inject life, fun and spontanaeity into North American suburbs will not be easy. Many neighbourhoods were built after WW II, when land and resources such as electricity and gasoline were plentiful and cheap; developers, government and the public were not very conscious of there being limits to, or issues with, creating vast car-centric suburbs. Now, many of us live in an energy-inefficient home on a long, straight street that forms one line in a grid that is populated by far more motor vehicles than pedestrians. Here, we easily grow fat and sedentary, often not knowing who lives one or two doors away.
   In Superbia!, the authors prescribe 31 steps to transform neighborhoods into places where there is a true sense of community, and where hard resources (e.g. cars, washing machines) can ultimately be shared by groups of families, and consumable resources (electricity, gasoline) are used in more environmentally responsible ways.
   The encouraging news is that neighborhoods in the USA, Europe and elsewhere have implemented these 31 steps. It often took a lot of persuasion of local politicians and bureaucrats to, for example, tear up existing streets to make them narrower, for the purpose of calming traffic. While the authors, to their credit, indicate that some of the 31 steps are plainly challenging to implement, and ential people changing their mental models, the authors at times neglect to address the role and response of some key stakeholders as neighborhoods transform themselves. For example, as I read the steps about removing fences between people's yards, and subsequent encouragement of kids in the neighborhood to congregate in certain areas of this newly-created 'open' space, I visualized the trepidation that the insurance companies covering these homes might have; what happens when you encourage everyone onto your property, and then someone gets hurt? In general terms, I felt that the book could at times have been more rigorous in tipping off the reader as to what to expect from other stakeholders relevant to the transformation process.
   I support what the authors propose. The main message I got from the book is: don't wait for politicians or developers to be the ones to build or retrofit neighborhoods that are environmentally sustainable, and offer building structures and juxtapositions to foster social cohesiveness; rather, strike out on your own, with the modest first step being to organize a potluck supper for your immediate neighbors. From there, transformation events can evolve; the authors have demonstrated, through numerous anecdotes, that this process can indeed work.



5. Superbia! is a strikingly simple book, proposing that neighbors can create
   friendlier and healthier neighborhoods by getting to know each other and
   working together. The beginning Steps it suggests are easy - things like
   having neighborhood potlucks and baby-sitting coops - but the advanced steps
   will take some real teamwork. You and your neighbors won't set up a
   neighborhood energy system or buy a house for use as a common building until
   a high level of trust is established. By the time the advanced steps are
   taken on, the neighborhood will be like an extended family, with all its
   benefits -- as well as liabilities.

   But Chiras and Wann argue that the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.
   For example, they don't propose a loss of privacy, but rather an increase in
   options and flexibility. What do we do when the car won't start, we go on
   vacation and the plants need watering, or we just need someone to talk to?
   Call a neighbor.

   This book is well-researched, documenting how neighborhoods took the shape
   they did, with wide streets, huge lawns, and barricade-like garage doors.
   The 50 million suburban homes in the U.S. (and all their associated
   infrastructure) are then seen in the book as ingredients for cooking up a
   better neighborhood. As the authors suggest, why can't we create common
   areas for the kids and a community garden by donating parcels of our
   backyards and creating a pathway where alleys used to be? Why can't we
   establish a neighborhood recycling system, a carpooling and even car-sharing
   system? Why shouldn't part of our yards also become low-maintenance, "edible
   landscapes" that provide cherries and grapes rather than just grass
   clippings?

   As the book compellingly asks, Why can't we work together to save time,
   money, and human energy, and in the process, have some fun? In the median
   income U.S. household budget, $3,000 a year could be saved if our costs for
   food, energy, entertainment, health, and transportation were reduced through
   neighborhood efforts that also meet an often- expressed need for a sense of
   community, and a sense of place.

   What Superbia! is about is basic improvements in the quality of our
   lifestyles. Less of an emphasis on buying our lives, and more on just living
   our lives. Far from being just a Utopia-like dream, the book's ideas are
   already being implemented in neighborhoods across the country, and several
   chapters in the book are dedicated to case studies of each Step - where and
   how it was implemented. Another series of chapters presents a fictitious
   neighborhood that walks the reader through the evolution of the Fox Run
   neighborhood, from suburbia to Superbia!

   If your neighborhood association needs a spark of energy, get a copy of this
   book and form a discussion group around it. At the very least, you'll
   emerge with a roster of neighbors and a fresh perspective on what a
   neighborhood can be.

1 comments about Exhibit Design: High Impact Solutions.

1. Exhibit designers have several interesting problems. In many cases the exhibit must be mobil. It travels from trade show to trade show around the country, even around the world. Then it needs to be set up, quite possibly by people who have never seen it before, and at the end of the show the exhibit has to be torn down, usually by people who have been working at the show all day, are tired, don't care where things get put, and are ready to head to a bar.
   
   Here is a book on exhibits by outstanding design companies from around the world. These are not the little ten foot square booths you see around the edges, but the kinds of booths you would expect from Mercedes-Benz.
   
   Actually only about half the book is on business/trade show exhibits. The rest of the book is on more permanent structures such as information booths or museums. All in all, this is an idea book on how to do exhibits that attract attention, show off the company and the products, and create a memorable experience for the visitor.

5 comments about Eero Saarinen.

1. Merkel's study of Eero Saarinen is authoritative while making some important normative points about the obligation of architects to honor their clients' objectives.
   
   She describes his studio's method:
   
   1. Definition of the "functional program" with considerable research
   2. "Expression of the program" in the concept
   3. Selection of appropriate "structure"
   4. "Design"
   
   The client was involved in each phase, participating in the research to define and prioritize requirements, reviewing architectural concepts for resolving their specific conflicts and approving structural approaches, materials and budgets prior to beginning detailed design.
   
   "His were unusual, ambitious, challenging buildings. The variety in the work, the "style for the job" philosophy, as it was called, was really the result of the way he worked and the fact he believed architectural form should derive from function in the broadest possible sense."
   
   
   He was singularly collaborative in his approach, using the resources of his clients, among them "the technical innovators of his period (General Motors, MIT, IBM, Bell Labs)" to automate design, adapt new materials, and refine his craft.
   
   "Eero could meet each client on his own terms. He respected his clients and what they wanted to do (something that many architects with their own objectives fail to do) because, though he believed architecture should aspire to be art, he saw it as one grounded in use."
   
   For more on the fundamental difference of his approach from that of such stylists as Frank Lloyd Wright.
   A Management Consultant @ Large: Best Practices in Architecture



2. Merkel's handsome volume is a pleasure to read and to view, as it contains great vintage photographs of Eero Sarinen's projects. The author's special contribution is her insightful contextualization of Saarinen's original and eclectic output through discussions of his background, working methodology, and the critical reactions his buildings elicited.



3. Merkel's book is one of those monographs that open so many doors onto the work of an artist or architect that you never view it in quite the same way again. Saarinen's buildings are analyzed in all their surprising variety, with an open acknowledgment of their differences, rather than an insistence on an individual style. The special emphasis placed on the critical responses to the projects when they were built is particularly enlightening and should serve as a model for the study of modern architectural history. The author, with a refreshing willingness to deal with negative material as well as positive, asks and answers the very interesting question of the reasons for the decline in Saarinen's reputation after his untimely death. This book is very valuable as a study of Saarinen and also for its insights into the development and fluctuations of movements in modern architecture.



4. Disclosure: I'm an architect who began the journey towards the profession by writing an undergraduate thesis on Saarinen in the late 1960s.
   Many of the things that were intriguing about his work then-the curious combination of 50s zen emptiness with passages of delicate, almost decorative, details-and the search for form which veers from neo-Miesian boxes to the curves and cylinders of MIT to the neo-vernacular stone of the Yale Colleges to the sinuous curves of the TWA and Dulles terminals-these explorations fascinate still and have much to teach us.
   Merkel's book takes all these strains, examines their roots and development in a clear and comprehensive way.
   Merkel has made a wonderful book, one that brings Saarinen's work back to life.
   The images are stunning and so full of information, a nice balance of design process and completed buildings.
   The text is full of fascinating information, much of it freshly researched-a compelling read.
   The book design is gorgeous, and I don't just mean the stunning visual design.
   Merkel has focused on design explorations and the strong built work of Saarinen without stalling us unduly in the less successful work.
   If you're interested in Saarinen's work, get this book!



5. This is an articulate and well researched review of an icon in architectural history. Merkel weaves his professional and personal journey in a manner which is pleasure to read.

3 comments about Katsura: Imperial Villa.

1. If you want some solicitude and repose, here is a book for you.
   This book is extremely well crafted to show the essence of Katsura.
   Status of Katsura in Japanese garden art production does not
   demand any further explanation. Katsura is to Japan, what Alhambra is to Andalusia!
   
   In it, I found that disciplinary simplicity can be profound and strong.
   Especially in a world where one is inundated with images and media.
   Katsura is an art that invites physical presence and spiritual
   meditation. In that sense, it's an irony and a paradox to recommend to
   experience Katsura thru a book...
   
   Katsura is an art of water & island body formation/ relationally
   positioning pavilions / sculpting stones/ borrowing landscapes/ laying
   stone/ perfecting the shoji screens and combing the thatched roofs
   naming the places and tea pavilions to arouse imagination/ etc, etc, etc.
   
   However, what makes it stand out is that each mode of art does not stand
   alone. It had synergetic effect by being relational to one and another.
   Combined together, the density of experience exponentially grow to
   challenge infinitum. Hence, here is an art that tells us, "the whole is
   eternally greater than the parts."
   
   The parts are orchestrated in such a way to arouse the art of seduction.
   Not in a flamboyant manner, but in a subtly simple manner. Photographic
   images in the book tell us the multi-faceted, yet almost tea-ceremonially
   calm, story of Katsura. The book will make you retreat from the bustling
   noisiness of daily life.
   
   Isozaki's nicely written essay propels the experience of Kasura to
   a thinking level. He has placed his viewpoint in contrast to the earlier
   writers such as Bruno Taut/ Sutemi Horiguchi/ Kenzo Tange. Tange's
   earlier writing was Mondrian-like, cropping Katsura to a abstract level.
   The essay by Isojaki sets the curatorial tone to the images. It's very
   expository, revealing indigenous and rustic elements.
   
   The book also provides the hidden dimension of buildings. By providing
   field-measured drawings, readers will be able to analyze quintessential
   element of plans and sections of traditional buildings. Five past
   writings of world-class architects and critics are also part of
   publication.



2. I have been to Katsura several times, and have several books on Katsura villa, and this new book is the best.
   This is how architectural books should be produced and photographed so other architects and people interested in architecture can actually learn and use the book not only as a beautiful catalog but as a tool.
   
   The beautiful photographs are architecturally photograhed in 1 point perspective except for details, gardens, and exterior. This is helpful as you can deduct the proportion and scale of the rooms. Most of the drawings have measurements, and are very well drawn.
   
   The introduction and text by Isozaki is excellent for understanding Katsura and Japanese architectural idealogy. Additionally, there are several past texts by Tange, Taut, Gropius, and etc. to get different perspectives.
   
   Katsura, along with several temples and villas have been meticulously maintained for the last 400 years.



3. The best way to know the traditional architecture of Japan. Very good pictures, technical drawings and very interesting articles explaining the Katsura Villa.

No comments about Ultimate Restaurant Design.

2 comments about The Houses of Key West.

1. Excellent pictures of great Key West houses including addresses. No interior pictures. Book fell apart at binding after very little viewing.



2. I love this book. If you enjoy the unique look of Key West Conch architecture you will enjoy this book. Color full page and full page plus photographs fill the book. Most pictures are full close-ups of the front of the house. It is a nice reminder of time spent in Key West. If you are interested in architecture it contains examples of the various unique Key West styles used. I enjoyed looking at picture of the famous houses and reading about why they are famous. Almost forgot it, contains the addresses of the houses in case you want to see them for yourself.

1 comments about Architecture: Residential Drafting and Design.

1. This item is also a workbook that is useless without the textbook it coralates with.

1 comments about Design Details for Health: Making the Most of Interior Design's Healing Potential (Wiley Series in Healthcare and Senior Living Design).

1. I am a professional Health Care interior designer who is always looking for resources to enhance my knowledge base for creating healing enviornments in the health care market. A few years ago I attended, along with about 300 other designers, a presentation by a nationally known health care designer. At the end of the 1.5 hr. lecture, there were six of us left. The focus of the talk was entirely philosophical: there were no gems of knowledge or tools we could take back to our design practices to make our projects better. Ms. Leibrock certainly doesn't have to worry about anyone leaving her presentation. The book has been delegated to my reference shelf and I am sure will become dog-earred.

   The specific types of healing environments included in the book range from birthing centers to long-term care facilities and all that is in-between. The philosophical issues are presented and then followed by research findings and case studies which support those concepts. Then the GEMS! Lists and lists and lists of hands-on guidelines which are distilled from the vast experience and research of the author.

1 comments about Luxury Houses Country (Luxury Houses).

1. With room to spread out; often a view of the ocean, valley, mountain or lake; fewer restrictions on things like building codes, the opportunity to develop fantastic houses away from city life has long been popular. At one end of the scale is a crowded campground or small house in a crowded area. At the other end are the houses shown here.
   
   In this book the author has selected twenty-two houses that I believe any of us would call luxurious. From a 16,000 square foot house in upstate New York overlooking a valley to homes with a view of the sea in Hawaii, Italy and other places, the homes here are fantastic. Each house is profusely illustrated with color pictures.
   
   This book is produced by teNeues. The teNeues books are truly beautiful. The company is headquartered in Germany and they bring a sense of quality to their books that is not common. The books are printed on heavy paper using very high quality printing techniques. While this is essentially a coffee table picture book, or perhaps an idea book for the house you are planning, it is beautifully done, almost a work of art.