No comments about Body, Memory, and Architecture (Yale Paperbound).

2 comments about Exploring Garden Style: Creative Ideas from America's Best Gardeners (Fine Gardening Design Guides) (Fine Gardening Design Guides).

1. Okay, I'm a sucker for gardening stories ... personal experiences of gardener's and their gardens. These are stories of real people and the evolution of their gardens. There are ideas here for everyone with great photos for inspiration and many stories include a layout of the garden. It makes for good browsing to get motivated to get out and work in the dirt to create my own special sanctuary.



2. In this book 20 garden designers share ideas and techniques for creating a beautiful garden in a unique style. The book is divided into three parts - Traditional Gardens, Naturalistic Gardens and Specialty gardens. Each part is composed of short, beautifully-illustrated articles written in a very personal style by a gardener, landscape designer or horticulturist.

   It is the personal nature of each article that contributes most to the appeal of this book. Take the opening of Nani Waddoups article titled "Tropical Garden, Temperate Zone". She writes "The newer parts of our garden look a little out of place..." How can you resist an opening like that? Her article describing her garden - listed in the Smithsonian Registry of Gardens - shows how her Hawaiian background prompted her and helped her to develop a lush pseudo-tropical garden in the Pacific Northwest.

   My favourite section is that on Naturalistic Gardens. Five writers form points as far apart as Connecticut and Texas share with the reader ways in which they used the local climate, geology, soil and plants to create a garden that has given each of them great pleasure and satisfaction.

   Top marks to the Taunton Press for introducing these garden writers first to Fine Gardening magazine and now in book form for those of us who like to sit down and read the whole collection. The editors have put together a book that offers gardeners a diversity of fresh ideas in a most attractive format.

1 comments about Scandimodern.

1. I love this book. It doesn't show period mid-century homes, or homes decorated to achieve the period look, but concentrates on clean, contemporary Scandinavian-sympathetic architecture that emphasizes the beauty of natural materials and bringing the outside in, and how modern and period pieces can look in such a setting. In particular, the emphasis on architecture will inspire the reader.

2 comments about Laboratory Design Guide, Third Edition.

1. The used book, listed as great condition, was in very crappy condition and I sent it back



2. Laboratory Design Guide, B.Griffin (Architectural Press,1999) ISBN 0 7506 3858 3

   Having moved in to a new laboratory for teaching and research 12 months ago, I wish that our faculty had had this book available to us 4 years ago while we were in the planning stage of the building. This would have given the laboratory staff insights into how buildings are built and how to go about consulting with the building designers, architects, engineering consultants, contractors and sub-contractors and all the other various people that most laboratory staff have little day-to-day experience with. It would have also improved the discussion on options for design of the laboratories and furniture by the faculty staff. The idea of adjustable benches would have been a better solution to our need to cater for disabled students than making a permanent low bench in each teaching laboratory which means these benches go unused if no disabled student is in the unit. The second half of the book is case studies and looking at new laboratories. Fourteen of the 17case studies are from Australia, all but two of these from NSW. How the architects responded to the needs of their clients and the different needs for different types of laboratories is discussed. The examples cover rnultifunctional tertiary teaching, research institutions, pure research, and commercial pathology and government laboratories. All the case studies are there to amplify points made earlier in the book. This book must be read in conjunction with the appropriate Australian Standards and the CCH manual and although it does not mention individual standards or CCH guidelines the text does give a good place to start your search of the standards and guidelines which are the definitive sources.

   Neil Ludvigsen, Northern Territory University, Book review in "Chemistry in Australia"

4 comments about The Owner-Built Adobe House.

1. This book tries to cover every aspect of building a house instead of focusing on the details that are particular to building with adobe. I would have prefered the author refer me to other books and reference material for surveying, electrical, plumbing, etc. It is impossible for anyone to do a thorough coverage of all aspects of building so why try.



2. Great book. It has excellent drawings and photographs. It is a good basic manual for adobe building.



3. good book for the beginner, but very little in the book for those in need of advanced adobe info.



4. If you are going to build you own adobe home, this is a great book for the first time adobe builder.

   Had details on all aspects of the house. From electrical to pouring bricks to septic. Details as in the formula for a perk test, and footing sizes for load weights.

   I have a lot of adobe books, this is second "good" one I have seen.

   Very good.

3 comments about Candida Hofer: Architecture of Absence.

1. A quiet humor wanders like a ghost through the laconic photos of Candida Höfer -- no people can be seen but via the devices of the rooms, libraries, hotels, halls, museums, canteens -- one can suspect still the existence of human beings indirectly. With a similar humor understanding the physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once wrote: "If the posterity of the year 35.000 (or another planet's class of sensible nature) would find a lady suit completely undone and if they wanted to determine the figure of the ladies who would have been covered with that, -- what figure would come out?" The aesthetic experiments of the German Photographer Candida Höfer activate such associations. One of her book publications is entitled "Room Monuments" (of course without any human being). Before the beginning of her studies (learning from the renowned professors Bernd and Hilla Becher in Duesseldorf, Germany) Candida Höfer had taken photographs of Turkish fellow citizens in business, tea-rooms and parks. The people then disappeared from her photos. Was this the bad influence of her studies with the married couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, who had photographed only the industry architecture of the German Ruhr district maniacally (stubbornly ignoring all that connections between Nazi-politicians and steel-industry, around Hitler and Krupp, Goebbels and Thyssen) ? Or is there hiding a shock, Candida Höfer experienced, as the role of her father, Werner Höfer, a famous TV-talkmaster in the 1960's, was criticized by investigating journalists, checking his own role in the Nazi-era? Did this chase the daughter in a kind of social phobia? Although there is a coffee-table book of Candida Höfer with live (locked in zoo animals) she mostly prefered to make pictures of prepared, dead animal bodies in museum collections. Is such a misanthropic distance necessary to create a counterbalance against traumata, suffered by the modern mass culture? Writers like Canetti (Austria) or Saul Bellow (USA) reacted with comparable feelings -- or philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer (Germany) or Ortega y Gasset (Spain). Perhaps there is a third evident explanation of Candida Höfer's decision how to work (besides the Becher-studies and the father trauma): the minimalist aesthetics theory of the Bauhaus tradition; quiet, empty rooms help to fulfill a meditative, calmed, laconic life-style attitude -- a task to which the painting of Piet Mondrian or Josef Albers also felt obliged -- why not photography as well?



2. As with other Becher students, Hofer's images are captivating because of their expansiveness and detail - neither of which are reflected in the layout of this book. The images are tiny for no apparent reason. This effectively reduces Hofer's amazing work to a series of oversized postage stamps.
   
   Unless the design is intended as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the title, this dilettante overview is a miserable failure.
   
   I suggest purchasing Candida Hofer, A Monograph. It is large, bold and a substantial compendium of her work.



3. 
   The collaborative work of Constance W. Glenn, Mary-Kay Lombino, and Virginia Heckert, Candida Hofer: Architecture Of Absence is a spectacular full-color monograph featuring the photos of Candida Hofer, who has taken snapshots of cultural centers such as libraries, museums, theaters, cafes, waiting rooms, universities, and churches for over thirty years. The images reveal structures created to gather, organize, and perpetuate human purpose. An introductory essay guides the reader through the photographer's intent and efforts in capturing such locations on film, but the majority of Candida Hofer: Architecture Of Absence is simply devoted to the sweeping images themselves - empty of people at the time the picture is taken, yet showing rows of seats or broad hallways just waiting to be filled. This is an exceptional and welcome addition to architectural as well as photography collections.

No comments about Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky.

No comments about Efficient Building Design Series Vol. I: Electrical and Lighting (Efficient Building Design Series).

No comments about Bath & Spa.

4 comments about The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (New Series in NASA History).

1. Without a doubt, Johnson has meticulously researched and documented the systems engineering and management processes as they arose in the Air Force, NASA, and other government research organizations. However, the book reads like a dry and dense textbook. While it may be that presenting this material any other way is difficult, I suspect that more attention to organization (of the text) and better editing would greatly improve the reading experience.
   
   That said, the content remains fascinating and Johnson must be applauded for packaging so much in such a small book. Definitely required reading for those in the area, but not worth the time of casual science or engineering enthusiasts accustomed to the (exceptional) writing of Simon Singh and the like.



2. Dr. Johnson's book The Secret of Apollo provides the reader with the critcial overview of how systems management was development by the American military and how it became to be applied in the civilian space program. The book provides a unique persepective on how success was achieved through the utlization of concurrency and systems management. There are many success and failure stories spread throughout he book as examples that tell the story. The book is easy to read and to undesrtand without having advanced degrees in either engineering or project management. Therefore, I commend this book as worthwhile reading from a histoc standpoint. Systems management, clearly, has been the American space program strength that was been transferred to our European allies.



3. This important book by Stephen B. Johnson of the University of North Dakota's Space Studies Department, skillfully interweaves technical details and fascinating personalities to describe the rise of systems management in the U.S. and Europe. It is a very important work that uses Apollo as its key example. Only through the application of sophisticated management concepts were such a complex activity as the Apollo Moon landings accomplished.
   
   Reviewers received Johnson's work warmly and it has been accepted as an exceptionally important study of how Apollo technology succeeded. As Erik Rau of Drexel University commented: "[Systems management (SM)] forced new temporal and financial discipline on contractors and engineers, imposed practices that undermined functional organization and loyalties, and subjected to scrutiny all institutions and firms involved in the project. Schedule and cost slippages on large government-sponsored projects may have continued, but Johnson asserts that SM minimized their rate. In fact, Johnson persuasively argues that without the bureaucracy of SM, success on several large aerospace projects would have been unlikely" ("Enterprise & Society" 3 (2003): 372-74).
   
   While Johnson argued that systems management allowed the accomplishment of large-scale technological endeavors such as Apollo, it did not do so on the cheap. Costs rise as the engineering team manage for schedule and reliability, since they are interrelated and must be managed as a group. This held true for the Apollo program. The schedule, dictated by the president, was firm. Since humans were involved in the flights, and since the president had directed that the lunar landing be conducted safely, the program managers placed a heavy emphasis on reliability.
   
   Accordingly, Apollo used redundant systems extensively so that failures would be both predictable and minor in result. The significance of both of these factors forced the third factor, cost, much higher than might have been the case with a more leisurely lunar program such as had been conceptualized in the latter 1950s. As it was, Johnson concludes, this was the price paid for success under Kennedy's lunar landing mandate. Of course, understanding the management of complex structures for the successful completion of multifarious complex tasks was an important outgrowth of the Apollo effort.
   
   This is a critically important book in the historiography of Project Apollo and human spaceflight. It is must reading for anyone interested in the evolution of spacefaring in the last fifty years. I recommend it highly as a worthy study of the history of the systems management that allowed the success the Apollo program.



4. This book is more a history of how systems engineering evolved than a look at the apollo program. It starts with a long look at the problems with the early military ICBM program and the hard lessons learned from its development as well as going into a look at the major players in the early military space program. It then goes on to problems with the early spacecrafts at the jet propulsion lab and how these were fixed through applying principles of systems engineering. And of course it goes in depth into a look at the managing of the Apollo program. This ends with a good look at the early failings of ELDO (initial european rocket program) and the successes of ESRO (precursor to the European Space Agency).
   
   Reading this book, you begin to get a clear understanding of the complexity involved in trying to develop massive systems such as rockets and spacecraft. This is a must read for anyone looking to go into management in the aerospace sector or is interested in learning how the sector is managed or anyone interested in the history of the players in military space program.