4 comments about Boldt Castle: In Search of the Lost Story.

1. George Boldt, a German immigrant, became wealthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He bought Hart Island on the St. Lawerance River (as well as other places), changed the name to Heart Island, and had some wonderful buildings constructed. The largest, the Boldt Castle, was never completed. The story goes that, on the day George Boldt's wife died, workers laid down their tools and left the island castle incomplete.
   
   There are rumors as to why the Castle sat in near ruin after being abandoned. Did Boldt's wife, Louise, run off with another man? Or did she really die? If so, why the vagueness around her death? This story mixes what some might call the American Dream with an American Tragedy.
   
   Malo explores George Boldt's history in hopes of finding answers to why the Boldt's abandoned the Castle.



2. Boldt Castle, on Heart Island, might be one of the most romantic places in America. The public has been spoon fed the 'romantic' legend of the Boldts for far too many years. Professor Malo did his research. He spent time among the people who remember the Boldts. This book may not disprove the romantic legend, but it certainly puts a new slant on the story. Like Professor Malo, I much preferred the Island and the legend before the Bridge Authority got hold of the property and began to restore it - with, as Professor Malo points out, historical inaccuracy.

   If you've every been to Boldt Castle, read this book. It will open your eyes, and remind you not to believe *everything* you hear.




3. Having visted Boldt castle numrous times over the past 30 years, I was all ways disappointed that there was never any new information about the Boldt's and there lives. The story that was presented never changed from the "canned" love story. After reading Boldt Castle: In Search of the Lost Story I was still disappointed as ther really wasn't that much new material. The book raised questions about the standard "canned " story but never really disproved it. In the end the story of Boldt castle and George and Louise is a tragic love story.



4. Written with precise research and personal flair by Paul Malo (architectural historian and professor emeritus at Syracuse University), Boldt Castle: In Search Of The Lost Story contains the history of its title's namesake, which is a castle on the border of New York State and the Canadian province of Ontario. The magnificent mansion of Boldt Castle attracts millions of visitors from both sides of the international border, and its tragic history, including the premature death of Luisa Boldt, is the source of a wealth of folklore. Boldt Castle: In Search Of The Lost Story contains numerous interviews with Boldt family members and associates, creating an excellent primary reference to the history of this fascinating architectural structure.

4 comments about Earth Shelter Technology.

1. This is a comprehensive "high end overview" of the things you need to consider if you're going to design and build an underground house. It is not specific to a particular location or house design. As an engineer this book has provided me with a lot of insight into what I need to think about for my house. If you're looking for finished designs and building instructions this is not the book for you. It has been a great introduction for a house I'll be building in the Sierra foothills in the next few years.



2. (Rating should be about 2.5 stars)

   "Earth Shelter Technology" reads more like a very long abstract than a technical reference itself. There are many (262) references for the 194 pages of text and figures. The book covers the basic ideas of earth sheltering pretty thoroughly, but unless you dig into the references, you're left with very little practical information that you'd need to design an earth-sheltered building.

   I thought that I'd hit real meat with a formula for soil temperature as a function of depth underground and day of the year. Plug in mean temperature and annual temperature swing amplitude, and you're almost there. But this formula includes a constant for thermal diffusivity of the soil. Well, there's a table with thermal and other properties of various materials; BUT the authors left some blanks: the thermal properties for rock, heavy dry soil, or concrete -- precisely the materials of interest when constructing an earth-sheltered structure in dry areas -- are missing.

   There are also many figures with axes labeled but not dimensioned; you can get a qualitative idea of how things relate, but nothing like a quantitative relationship.

   The book is dated (copyright 1987); the references are of course even older, going back to 1949. The book reads as if written a decade earlier, though. The dated impression is partly due to the technology used in the book itself. There are no photographs; instead, there are hand-drawn ink illustrations that surely took quite a long time to produce, but lose much of the detail that a decent photograph would show (example: "Aerial view of the University of Minnesota Bookstore"). Also, the text refers to simulation programs for handheld calculators and for mainframes -- there's nary a mention of a PC.

   There are very few alternative books on this subject, so I'd recommend it for a conceptual overview. But you won't find enough information here to design an earth-sheltered building.




3. This is probably the only book that shows you how to engineer a underground house properly from start to finish. A must for anyone interested in underground building. Lots of illustrations, but no photos.




4. Boyer & Grondzik have pulled together all of the disparate sources of information required to properly design an underground facility.

   Although the book was written in 1987, there are no other books which have pulled together all of the design issues and formulas required to properly design a structure, including heating & ventilation, waterproofing techniques and studies of existing structures.

   While people have been building and using underground housing for thousands of years, most of the published material consists of "how we did it" or analysis of ancient buildings. This is the first book I've found which brings the material required to properly engineer a design into one place.

   The focus of the book is on the engineering aspects, so don't expect much in the line of architectural design. Site selection, including soil types and proper detailing for passive solar heating, load balancing for heating & cooling systems, drainage system design and proper daylighting design are all covered very well.

   This is not the ideal resource, I would like to see a more current book, which would give analysis of exiting structures over a longer time-frame (many of the structures analyzed were built during the "energy crisis" of the 70's & early 80's, and thus only had a decade or so of occupation.)

   Overall, if you are interested in designing an underground home which will provide a safe, secure and low maintenance facility, this is a good reference. Oh, you might find you can easily design a "no-power" dwelling, at least as far as heating/cooling costs. Unless you like paying utility bills....

   This is a technical book, some engineering knowledge is desirable when reading it, but it is not beyond the level of a high school student with some physics.

1 comments about Edwin Lutyens. Country Houses (Country Life).

1. Lutyens excelled in the creation of great country homes. He designed in the best English tradition and his estates on the exterior often looked like they had been there for decades or a century or more. Of course he is most famous for his Vicroy's House in New Delhi and his work with Baker on the master plan for imperial Delhi of the British Raj. Lutyen's was a British treasure, one of the great traditional English architects. This book has enlightening text and wonderful images, it really shows off his work in its best light. Highly recommended indeed.

No comments about Contemporary Seaside Houses (Evergreen Series).

1 comments about Dream Homes Coastal California: Showcasing Coastal California's Finest Architects, Designers & Builders (Dream Homes).

1. Please, don't waste your good money on this book. It's hard to understand where the author's inspiration came from when choosing the homes......I found the homes to be uninteresting displays of wealth. Perhaps the homes displayed in "Dream Homes Coastal California" are not so much a dream as they are a nightmare.

5 comments about Reinventing the Wheel.

1. Fun book, brilliantly layed out, but would have liked to see the backsides. And really, the photographers were so lazy much of the time to not get the info disks in register with the die-cuts. I presume this was the author's collection or from like-minded collectors and/or conservators. This flouting of attention to detail is conspicuously disconjugate to the demanding esthete of this type of person. Enjoyable none the less. Despite my pleasure, in reference to my conclusion, I reject a reverse: I object; no obverse. Julian Mason, Beaufort SC



2. bought the book for the pictures and the paragraph about each one. haven't read most of the text and don't particularly care to.
   
   a shoulder surfer actually thought some of the wheels were real, the reproductions are that good.
   
   4 out of 5 because I didn't read/rate the text.



3. Jessica Helfland appears caught here between her inner love of collecting trivia, and her academic role: and while the graphics put on display her remarkable collection of wheels and volvelles her text unfortunately veers toward academic pontificating of the worst order as she uses her collection in an attempt to ruminate on how we see life, and how linearity as in the design and format of books (left-to-right, one page after another) is confining compared to the multidimensional viewpoint afforded by circles. Helfand's writing is rigidly locked into the very paradigm she criticises, and in the end her more human Foreword is by far the most interesting text in this handsome hard back volume.
   
   Handsome? Graphically, this is an outstanding book - well-designed, beautifully typeset, graphics gorgeously reproducing the collection of wheels, even the paper seems especially chosen - but I found Helfand's logic and her weak arguments quite frustrating. It reads like the first draft of a thesis - before the student's overseeing Professor has had a real go at the author. ("Come on - you've made a leap in logic here!")
   
   So this is one book where the pictures can do all the talking. The text and the often redundant captions (they describe what we can already see, thank you) is frankly superfluous.



4. interesting trivia and great for a collector of wheels but I was looking more for a visual mapping type of collection. Nice book for nostalgia seekers.



5. This book is an excellent research on the subjet with very good examples. Interesting for designers.

No comments about Architecture and Feminism (Yale Publications on Architecture).

5 comments about Information Architects.

1. Well, what can you expect of a book? And what can be expected of this book? In it I found a collection of some good responses (from press, to brochures, websites, interactive CDs, etc) to complex communicational problems, even when not all of them satisfy my aesthetic expectations, each work must be understood as "for who is it made", "in what media it will reproduce" and "what wishes to communicate". This book isn't a hip catalogue of what's cool, trendy or fashionable. The only short come of the book is that the comments are "just that" in most of the examples.



2. I was very disapointed when I read this book. I am a professional graphic designer and very interested in information design. This book is a paradox. A book about information design wrapped in ugly design. It is too big, too selfabsorbed and seems to be oldfashioned too. A group og designerfriend padding eathother on the shoulders. It is not woth buying, however the book: "Information Anxiety by the same author is great, but has ugly confusing design too, -I dont understand why!



3. Saul Wurman is one of these artistic types who use closely spaced white on black text. The book is therefore an example of bad design and extremely difficult to read. His examples might be good, but it is hard work to read about them. The book is therefore NOT a design guide for information. However, the pictures look nice, so you may want to leave the book around if you have no other means of impressing visitors.



4. This year, those of us who always gravitated to the picture books on library day have had two reasons to celebrate. Edward Tufte published his third magnificent work, Visual Explanations, and Richard Saul Wurman has favored us with this beautifully produced edition. First and foremost, this book is about sheer visual delight. The delight we get when we discover new facts and relationships revealed in graphic ways by the information architects presented. White text on black backgrounds notwithstanding, (See another review elsewhere in this section. I don''t find it difficult for my 45 year old eyes to follow) Wurman has the good sense to resort to extremely high quality design and printing methods to compliment the books contents. Okay, after all that frothy introduction, what's this book really about? It's about information design and "the heart of a good explanation". It presents the work of 24 individuals or groups of designers, faced with a "Tsunami" of data, whose passion "is to make the complex clear." The designs range from Alexander Tsiaras' computerized photographic medical visualizations and Clement Mok's web sites to David McCaulay's insightful freehand sketches and finished drawings. The presentation of the evolution of McCaulay's book, Underground, gave me the chills. I felt plugged into his brain as the concept develped into the finished book. This book, like it's contents, is about discovery. The "rediscovery" of Richard Curtis' work for USA Today and Don Moyer's work for the Steelcase furniture catalogs are recognized for the style and clarity they brought to those media. This is a book that I return to often both for it's sheer beauty and because each time I return, something new is revealed in it's illustrations. Based on my experience with this book, I picked up Wurman's Access travel guide to Boston before a recent trip. Another revelation and very a well presented visual guide. I'll check for Wurman's Access guides before taking any more trips. This book earns my highest recommendation (could you tell?)



5. Many of the pieces in this book are wonderful, both the graphics we see and the narrative accounts of how projects were done. But why is the book so hard to read? Is it the abundance of white on black text, of exclusively sans serif type, of a little block as a substitute for standard paragraph indentation? Why is it hard to cite the book? If Peter Bradford is the editor, what is Wurman? And why is it so hard to find the publisher information? In brief, maybe what the book needed was a good book designer.

No comments about MODERN ARCHITECTURE Since 1900.

2 comments about The Historic Core of Los Angeles (Images of America).

1. This is a very informative book on the development and growth in downtown Los Angeles. The book needed to spend more time regarding the growth and business climate of South Broadway and their impact to Los Angeles County! Fantastic pictures that let you feel as if you were stepping back in time yourself. This would be a nice addition to your library.



2. A sense of loss and fallen grandeur pervades this book. It chronicles the core neighbourhood of downtown Los Angeles. This area, centred on Main Street, saw its glory before World War 2. Very upscale, with ornately carved stoneworks on many buildings. Fancy hotels clustered together. All this revolved around the rail networks and the proximity to Union Station, which was completed in the 1930s. The many detailed photos attest to the vibrancy and upscale nature of that time and place. You might wistfully peer into these photos, looking for a vanished milieu.
   
   Alas, the book goes on to tell what happened after the war. As autos became far more common and convenient than trains, Los Angeles grew immensely outwards, into far flung suburbs. New fancy shopping centres and hotels arose elsewhere, no longer needing to be close to railway lines. We see a 60 year decline in the core. Once posh hotels for the wealthy degenerated into single resident only (SRO) flophouses. The core became Skid Row. Littered with junkies and homeless. Exacerbated by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 90s.
   
   The one benefit, if it may be called that, is that the sheer depression of the area has acted to scare away developers tempted to tear down the buildings. If you go today to some of the streets shown in the book's photos, and look upward, the skyline is largely how it was in the 1930s.
   
   The authors suggest that now, in the early Naughties, the core might be turning around. Maybe.