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 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.

2 comments about The National Park Architecture Sourcebook.

1. The book is an incredible feat of covering the national park historical architecture. The writing is excellent and filled with facts and observations. It helped me to enjoy the parks in an informative way. I packed it along on trips this summer and recommend it as a great resource.



2. We purchased this book for the Mesa Verde National Park Library as Mesa Verde's historic headquarters and CCC buildings are featured. The historic building were discussed, but no pictures were included of the buildings. Instead, pictures of the ancestral puebloan dwellings were shown and they were terribly mislabeled. A few of the other parks I was familiar with looked like they had accurate information, but I cannot speak for everything else.

4 comments about The Cape Cod Cottage.

1. living ih holland, this kind of design was completely unknown to myself,very adequate for expanding. i was hoping to see more floorplans. george from holland.



2. The author returns to his origins, geographically and aesthetically; he knows the hype about "the new" and "the old," he's neither cynical nor sentimental. Just the facts and the photos: the worn stepping stone at the door, the picket fence like the hem of a dress, the decorative pane reserved for the entrance door, the low doorways, wood that resembles trees. A threatened species, these cottages, remnants of a modest past, pre-vulgar. This plain beauty, seized by these gentle photos--like catching a butterfly without rubbing the dust off its wings.



3. The text in this book (called simply "Essay" by Professor Morgan) is only ten pages! The photographs, half archival and half taken by the author, are exquisite in their simplicity, though I craved a little more information than just location and date. (I wanted to know why Professor Morgan chose to include a particular house or show a particular detail: was it typical? atypical? a good example of what can be done with a Cape Cod cottage to improve it? an example of how the ideal has been corrupted?). While the Essay is clearly an appreciation of the Cape Cod cottage (with an occassional delicious dig on the current popularity of mega-mansions and hard-to-heat great halls), Morgan doesn't oversell us on the Cape's merits. There is enough discussion of history, philosophy (including references to Zen Buddhism), and social influences to be provocative, but not so much as to be cloying, "soap-boxy," or patronizing. And he does provide a bibliography for anyone who wants to explore this topic more deeply. This book will appeal to people with a general interest in architecture or the concept of "home," and to people who grew up in a Cape Cod style house or who own one (and might be thinking of expanding or altering it in some way). The photographs reward repeated viewing.



4. This is an amazing study, highly recommended. A North American will quickly recognize the houses of his/her childhood in this study. By discussing the influence of the Cape Cod Cottege in North American architecture, Professor Morgan covers allot of ground - within the US and to to some extent within the psyche of the nomadic American. One sees in this history (as written and photographed) evidence of an innate American desire for community togetherness and for the cozy, simple, independent lifestyle of the 'American Dream'. This book is as much about the 'Cape Cod Cottege' as it is about the independent lifestyle that has been part of the typically enthusiastic, positivistic, and pragmatic American outlook. Many readers will associate these buildings with their grandparents' homes, with childhood, with their roots - wherever they have lived in the US.

2 comments about The American Airport.

1. For those who love airports and airplanes, this is a wonderful book to have. Simple, well-written, but unpretentious, it is loaded with lots of good period photographs and illustrations that cover the historical development of airports and the growth and transformations of the passenger airline industry in the United States. It would have been great if it were not limited to airports in this country, but had also included the develoment of airports all over the world. My suggestion to the author is to try just that: a second book devoted to international airports around the world and the development of the international airline system, particularly in Europe and Latin America, and, of course, including some of the exciting and ultra modern airports built in recent years accross the globe, especially in the Middle East and Asia. I'll be first in line to buy such a book! If you are an airport and airline enthusiast like me, I am sure you will very much enjoy The American Airport.



2. From the first days of aviation--biplanes using dirt fields for landing and takeoff--to the modern state-of-the-art airports like the new one built in Denver--this book takes you on a historical and pictoral journey across the history of the American airport.

   To most travelers, all airports are alike other than the variety of restaurants and shops contained within; most people never stop to look at the amazing architectural details of many of today's American airports. From the art deco style of Regan National's updated terminals to the Native-American inspired "tents" of Denver International to LAX's futuristic Theme Building, this book gives a great overview of the distinctive styles and the functionality of our airports today.

No comments about The Fourth Dimension in Architecture: The Impact of Building on Behavior : Eero Saarinen's Administrative Center for Deere & Company, Moline, Illino.

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

No comments about Bath & Spa.

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.