No comments about The First American Women Architects.

No comments about City Walks with Kids: San Francisco: 50 Adventures on Foot (City Walks).

3 comments about The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Dover Books on Architecture).

1. I think that generally Dover Books are to be congratulated on reprinting many books that otherwise might never be seen again and priced very reasonably too. I don't think any plaudits are in order on this book though. I found the text very dull and the pictures gave an overall impression of blackness.
   
   Hugh Ferris managed to develop a wonderful rendering technique (being trained as an architect no doubt helped) that seemed so suited to commercial buildings of size, especially skyscrapers. His black and white artwork is simply stunning but it needs to be printed on quality paper to bring out the subtleties of grey shading. The main problem with the book is the paper does nothing for his work and I was really made aware of this when I recently bought 'Power in Buildings' (ISBN 0940512114) a lovely reprint of his 1953 book. The fourth of his famous renderings from Evolution of the Set-back Building appears in both books but in the 'Power' edition the image looks so right.
   
   His writing in 'Metropolis' came across as very long-winded, for example, this is from the last page of the book:
   'As for personal and specific proposals, the author well knows how many parapets, other than the one we are now leaving, overlook the imaginary "Metropolis of Tomorrow" and he shares the common belief that few of the many visualizations currently being formulated can contribute more than a particle to the ultimate actuality'
   The ten pages of words and pictures devoted to Set-back I thought the most interesting part of what he had to say.
   
   Get his 'Power' book for a much better appreciation of his architectural thoughts and the fifty main renderings really look beautiful on good paper.



2. Ferriss's drawings had an immediate impact on architecture. Some of his projections are the purest distilling of Art Deco application to buildings one can find from the age. But Ferriss's effect on cinema and illustration has been very powerful as well, and far less documented. The 1-star-off is because the reproduction quality -- quite good, no doubt -- leaves some to be desired, nonetheless: the sfumato effects appear more like soft-focus than atmosphere and the graininess brings to mind infra-red film more than the grit of a huge city fueled by leaded gas and coal.



3. To say that this 1920's classic is anything other than a masterpiece would be proof of insanity. By "interpreting" a Law, (NY Zoning 1917), Ferriss found beauty in the hope of what might be. In today's world of 3D CAD and computers, Ferriss was able to use canvas to convey not merely ideas and requirements, but opportunities and emotions. There are few books that inspire architects more than this. The value of original prints of this is evident in that single plates are sold in New York for $20 apiece by street vendors Architects are usually too caught up in the details to appreciate the beauty of buildings. Leave it then, to a painter to bring out the beauty and grace of buildings that were meant to inspire, or were not meant to be.

4 comments about Ultimate Kitchen Design (Ultimate Books).

1. Some comments about this book:
   
   1) It's all pictures, not text. Something which I like (personal preference though). 700 pictures/500 kitchens.
   
   2) Most of the kitchen (including the "romantic/traditional" ones) are really modern ("European" as some would call it here), not a book for people looking to create the "traditional" kitchen. Something I like, but again a personal taste.
   
   3) I actually do not like most of the kitchens layouts in the book (again personal taste), but it helped me a lot to decide about combinations of materials (dark floor/light floor, corian/stone, metal/wood, etc.). I now know what NOT to do.
   
   All in all, a good source of ideas.



2. The book is great if you want 700 pages of sterile looking European kitchens. But if you want lots of ornate wood and raised panel cabinet doors, find a different book; this isn't it.



3. I think the kitchens are all european. The pictures are mostly full page. There is almost no text. There is very little sourcing (names of some designers in tiny type on the side of the picture, you'll have to google to find contact information, and then they'll be somewhere in europe.). This isn't a guide to fixtures. This is a book you'd use to communicate what you want to architects.
   
   I love this book, but again, there is no sourcing, and you can't use it as a guide to fixtures.



4. Whether you are working with a designer, building a house or just looking for ideas, this is an important and valuable book. NOTE: it is 99% photos of different styles and designs of kitchens. It is broken up into modern, country, minimalist, etc, and each section has about 30 photos of different kitchens. It contains no descriptions of materials or how toos. The photos are fabulous and the ideas are varied. I guarantee that you will find a kitchen that fits your style in this books. Good luck!

4 comments about New Orleans Style: Past and Present.

1. Well written and good in its selection of a variethy of types, typically found in New Orleans. The photography, exceptionally important in this kind of book, is excellent. New Orleans' architecture is unique, from its shotgun cottages along the river, to its grand, Garden District houses. They're all here, and make me yearn to return to New Orleans.



2. This is a gorgeous book of homes of residents of New Orleans. These are real people who love their city, their history and their residences. Susan Sully shows that to its full extent.



3. "New Orleans Style" is a sumptuous, colorful tribute to our city and a worthy companion to Susan Sully's other books on Charleston and Savannah. Her research is, as always, impeccable with rich, lush prose appropriate for this most exotic of U.S. cities, and it's ideally complemented by Paula Illingworth's photographs. No student of American architecture and style should be without Sully's dazzling trilogy of the Deep South's "treasure cities."



4. how can you have a book about past new orleans and not mention shotgun houses a very bad decision

1 comments about Cities: X Lines: Approaches to City and Open Territory Design.

1. This ambitious production presents a well organized and defined typology of urban form. The ten categories comprising the 'x' in the title, are explained by way of a logical progression of contemporary case studies and historical precedents. Each chapter is divided into two parts, a collection of images followed by text. The dynamic CAD imagery and radical spatial diagramming provide in-depth analysis of highly complex architectural projects. The text succinctly draws out the key concepts of each of the projects, and more importantly, locates them in an historical continuum.
   
   Despite the value of the text and imagery in themselves, the physical dislocation of the imagery from the related writing (to the point of presenting unlabeled images) can be annoying at times. One imagines the author intended the images to be experienced first without textual guidance as one might experience a visit to an unfamiliar city. It is an interesting idea, but it encroaches on the overall readability of the book as one is forced to flip back and forth excessively.
   
   The organizational structure of the content extends to the physical design of the book itself. Two types of paper are combined in an elegantly produced object. Unfortunately, the library copy which I borrowed was already losing pages from the middle. In a book less than a year old, this indicates a structural problem with the binding. Nonetheless, this is an exciting project that will leave students, educators, and practitioners with a broader understanding of the nature of urban form.

No comments about The Big Book of Lofts (Big Book of).

5 comments about Bucky Works : Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today.

1. I've been interested in the ideas and work of Buckminster Fuller for a long time but whenever I've tried to read his books I can't get through them, they're too dense for me. J. Baldwin has a clear and concise writing style which he enhances with illustrative photographs. His book really shows the practical applications of Bucky's work. I highly recommend this book to anyone.



2. I bought tis book several years ago based on a recommendation as a good intro th Buckys work. This book is a gem for all of those who are inclined to engineering and design, not only because of the explanations and ilustrations, but also as testimonial to the thought of the great genius.
   
   Im still amazed that Bucky's thought have not been embraced by us modern citizens.
   
   I am trying to introduce a revolutionary solar coating here in Venezuela [..], I think of the aluminum domes built in Ghana that used natural convection for cooling, and people thoight they were in fact to cold!!! sustainable development has been around longer than we thought, are we ever going to strat smelling the coffee???



3. Inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, "Bucky," died in l983 at age 88. He is known the world over for his invention of the geodesic dome. The author of this book knew him for 31 years.
   
   Bucky, as he was known to everyone, (except his wife of 66 years) was not a college graduate, yet he received 47 honorary degrees during his lifetime. His influence on architectural and product designing was--and still is--tremendous.
   
   This book is of interest not only as a tribute to his inventiveness, but for detailing why many of his concepts, to this day, have not been accepted. The full-page cartoon on page 20 is a classic example of his frustration. It depicts an automobile being made on the driveway of a home. Bucky argued for years how ridiculous it is that we build houses 'from scratch' on a house lot. If we built cars that way, as the cartoon shows, they would cost $300,000! It should be noted that the American Institute of Architects (AIA), in 1928, passed a resolution "...on record as inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-line reproducible designs." Others, sewer system builders, carpenters, electricians, etc., indicated they too would oppose home-building innovations.
   
   One reason the geodesic dome concept succeeded was that the military did not need to consult zoning and codes when it needed a transportable light weight and super strong structure for a mountain top or an Arctic location.
   
   You will be amazed at how much his 1934 car designs resemble today's vans. Equally amazing is his "traveling cartridge," a small car transportable by air or rail. No need to rent a car. It could even be used as a sleeping unit.
   
   His "Triton City" was designed as a floating city (100,000 people) for Tokyo Bay. You see variations of this idea almost every year and it is invariably presented as a new idea. His "Fly's Eye" dome is now under commercial development and you may be seeing into the future when scanning this section of the book.
   
   An example of the tremendous respect for Fuller's concepts can be seen in the naming of the 60-atom carbon molecule discovered in the early 1970s. It is called "buckminsterfullerene" and is often referred to as "Buckyball." Its soccer-ball-pentagon-hexagon pattern very much relates to Fuller's icosahedron-based constructions.
   
   Fuller maintained that the entire universe, from atoms to galaxies, "is make made up of islands of compression in a continuous sea of tension." This "tensegrity" concept may even apply to biological cells according to a recent (1993) paper by Dr. Ingber.
   
   As the author often notes, Fuller--as a person and as a designer--had his faults. However his accomplishments and his influence on others far outshine his failures. Many inventors can relate to the problems due to being "before your time" and to the difficulty of displacing the "established way" of doing something.
   
   This book is crammed with photos, many never before published. Buy it, enjoy it. Donate it to your local school library. There is a whole new generation out there that can be inspired by it.



4. Buckminster Fuller has fascinated me since my teens because of his borderline science-fictional ideas and his quest to use technology to provide for 100% of humanity -- which unfortunately is a moving target during an era of population growth. Baldwin's book doesn't quite satisfy my curiosity about the current state of Fuller's posthumous work, since he gives me the impression that it's stuck somewhere back in the post-Hippie 1970's. I certainly hope that the field has advanced further along than the dumbed-down "Whole Earth Catalogs" version which celebrated geodesic model kits and "sustainable" (i.e., voluntarily hardship-inducing) technologies.

   What I would like to see in a proper review of Fuller's legacy includes (a) mathematicians' assessment of his synergetic geometry, which is more radically anti-Euclidean than non-Euclidean in that it rejects the whole Greek paradigm of "abstraction" from physical objects; (b) economists' assessment of his argument that with proper resource use and rational design decisions we really could take care of 100% of humanity; (c) a discussion of why, if Fuller's goal is indeed practical, after 250 years of industrial and technological progress we've devolved from objectively useful work -- making and moving stuff on farms, in mines and in factories -- into to a situation where we hold absurd, time-wasting and nonproductive "jobs" in "services" (which sociologist Daniel Bell characterized as postindustrial "games between persons"), while billions of other humans don't even have the basics for a materially decent life; (d) and why this goal isn't on the agenda of any major politician or other world-recognized and respected figure.

   In other words, I find implicit in Fuller's work the question, "When do we declare victory in the Industrial Revolution, and go on our long-overdue vacation that futurists used to call 'The Postindustrial Leisure Society'?" Although Baldwin supplied me with some useful information on "Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today," it wasn't quite what I wanted.




5. I haven't actually read this book but JB is my professor and a fascinating human. Everyday of class is a treat to listen to his life experiences and stories. He was a student of Fuller and clearly understands his theories and has furthered them in ways that would make Bucky proud.

5 comments about Southwest Style : A Home-Lover's Guide to Architecture and Design.

1. Living in Ontario, Canada and designing an adobe like home is difficult and we need lots of inspirational books. This one is highly valued in our home during this design period and we recommend this book for anyone in our circumstances. We found it inspirational and useful to our architect who has little exposure to the southwestern style. But...we need more books just like this and find it difficult to buy a book on your site without you providing additional information about the book...for exmample...peeks inside at some of the photographs. That would be so useful. But don't hesitate to order this one; it is well worth the investment.



2. Given my passion for the southwest, I expected to love this book, but I didn't. Certainly I found the photos lovely, but somehow the overall package does not convey the excitement, spirituality, and drama of the region. In other words, the book is a little flat. And what I expected to be a good read turned out to be more of an encyclopedia style rundown of facts (in other words, boring). The book comes off as a cold report on what is in fact a fabulously exciting and inspiring region.



3. The pictures are pretty but the book is a boring read.



4. Extremely beautiful and informative. Finally a substantive look at the style of the southwest.



5. I do NOT find this book limiting; when searching for decorating style of the SW; there is so FEW out there, it is refreshing to find one that covers such a broad area of the SW. I LOVE THIS book...Normal decorating books have so LITTLE of this area and for those of us who LOVE IT, the book is wonderful. REFRESHING and NOT CUTESY! At present I live in the Midwest of America and it is so limiting to NEW ideas so often. Our local library had this book, and I was searching to see how many others were out there, not many... so I MAY end having to OWN this book.

   Thank you for carrying this as well as several others pertaining to this area of the USA.

2 comments about Bungalow: The Ultimate Arts & Crafts Home.

1. This is my first contact with Powell/Svendsen's books, and while it is indeed coffee table size (it needs to be large to accommodate the beautiful photography)it is so charming and readable that, without so intending, I READ it (in one sitting, yet). We have several other books of gorgeous bungalows, many with the same houses as subjects, with accomanying commentary equivalent to dry stale cornflakes; this one is crumpets and cream. Like others documenting bungalow style architecture, this book is not intended as a construction or instruction manual, but as inspiration. For admirers of bungalow style and for those seeking a picture to replace the thousand words BUNGALOW is an easy choice.



2. This book is lovely to look at with marvelous pictures. A great 'coffeetable book. My only complaint is that it is light on 'how to' information.