3 comments about Stone Houses: Colonial to Contemporary.

1. This book is just as at home on your coffee table as in your collected works on masonry. Goff provides a wonderful pictorial tour of stone buildings, from simple country cottages to splendid manors. The pictures are of excellent quality, and done by someone who knows a thing or two about how to compose with light and shadow. He provides some interior views as well, which give an added perspective to the house you've seen from the outside. But a weak spot is a distinct shortage of interior stonework photos, save for fireplaces.
   
   The text is relatively sparse; Goff clearly lets the pictures speak for themselves while providing some historical perspective. This isn't a book you pick up to learn about the evolution or science of masonry, it's something you use for inspiration and ideas before you start to incorporate stone into your own design. Well worth the price.



2. Full of beautiful photo's of exteriors and interiors of 43 different Stone Houses built in America from prehistoric times through the twenty-first century, along with descriptions of each house and discussions on each time period. This is a great book for anyone interested in stone work of any kind.



3. Stone Houses is a splendid survey which focuses exclusively on residential architecture in the USA. The book begins with several breathtaking photographs of historical sites in the Southwest where the Anasazi built beguiling settlements out of local stone over one thousand years ago. It then proceeds to document numerous stone structures of interest from colonial times right through to the present. Moreover, in addition to his commentary on the buildings presented within the pages of this beautifully realized volume, Lee Goff provides a thoughtful discussion of the qualities of stone itself which makes for such a superb, durable building material in the first instance as well as an inspirational source for imaginative residential design. To quote briefly from the introduction: "Stone has different moods. It can be warm or cold, protective or inhospitable. Before all else, however, stone evokes an image of power, strength, impregnability and endurance. Even more subliminally it conveys a sense of the primordial...Instinctively, we feel the millions of years ago the stones were formed. Thus, the materials of nature become the material of shelter, and the form the shelter takes in turn reflects the origin of the stone and the house's setting, connecting the dwelling and its inhabitants to the most permanent world of all-the natural world."

   Stone was the first material used for shelter. It can be (and has been) assembled in any number of creative, aesthetically pleasing ways. Stone Houses takes us on a wondrous tour of many of the possibilities inherent to this medium of construction. "Whether cottage or château, cabin or castle, stone houses embody feelings of romance and the picturesque. Their walls speak of permanence and history; their stones give whispered accounts of their prehistoric creation. They are an ongoing part of what Tennyson referred to as 'the eternal landscape of the past.' "

1 comments about 25 Tropical Houses in Indonesia.

1. 25 Tropical Houses In Indonesia showcases architecture adapted not only to the needs of the user, but also the environmental and climate issues of daily life in the tropics. Full-color photography on virtually every page as well as black-and-white diagrams reveal structural and visual approaches, while the text describes at length the details of each house's unique features for lay readers and professional architects alike. Houses range in size and appearance from lofty to neo-cubist to resembling a cathedral. A majestic coffee-table book that wondrously captures the spirit of Indonesian architecture.

3 comments about A Chicago Tradition: Marshall Field's Food And Fashion (Chicago Cultural Center Foundation).

1. First of all the format is way, way too small, what was there was nice but I wanted to see more of everything, more recipes, more historical photos, more contemporary photos of the interiors, some advertising and graphic design would have been nice, I came away unsatisfied. Perhaps the author didn't have access to alot of the archival materials since it was going to be sold off to FDS. BOO!



2. This book not only has recipes from Marshall Field's Restaurants, but also beautiful pictures and a history of the store itself. I was very pleased with this book, I bought three of them, one for myself and one for each of my daughters as a remembrance of all the wonderful times we've spent at Marshall Field's. We all intend to make the recipe for the Walnut Room's famous Chicken Pot Pie!



3. This is the one of the neatest little books on Chicago that I have ever seen. Recently, I was on a business trip to the windy city and purchased two little books by Joan Greene that were done as a series for the Chicago Cultural Center Foundation.
   
   The one on Marshall Field's is great -- wonderful photos -- old and new and a good tribute to a Chicago institution that will be changing it's name next year. Growing up near Chicago, Marshall Field's Walnut Room Restaurant was always a treat at Christmas time and I love that the books has several recipes included. What I did not know and the book talks about is the number of retail first that began at Marshall Field's. If you like shopping or history or Chicago, this little easy-read is a must. I am ordering one for my sister to enjoy over Christmas.
   
   P. S. The Chicken Potpie recipe from Field's is included. I remember my mother ordering that when I was a child. The book made me want to stop by Field's for a meal the next time I am in town.

1 comments about Voysey, C.F.A..

1. As an Architect always in search of refreshing ideas I was truly pleased when I first reviewed this book. All architects should be familiar with Voysey's career and work. Next to my monograph of Mellor Meigs and Howe I can think of no more favorite book that I have purchased this past year. Voysey was a forerunner of the modern movement, a true innovator and artist.

No comments about China Living.

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.

5 comments about The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home.

1. She found lots of perfect $100k homes -- too bad they weren't perfect for her!
   
   I enjoyed this book immensely -- read it in two days.
   
   With a warm and friendly writing style, Ms. Jacobs (former editor at Dwell magazine) introduces us to host of talented architects, each with their own take on the $100,000 home, based on local needs, economics & politics and aesthetics. Some are mid-century moderns, some are updated classics, and others defy classification. All are interesting!
   
   Along the way she gives us some insight into what's going on across the spectrum in the world of architecture, from the huge corporate builders to the "one-off" customs.
   
   As others have noted, there aren't enough pictures (just one black & white drawing for each chapter), but the two page index of the architects' Web site URLs make up for that in spades. I spent two hours surfing them and had a ball!
   
   Finally, I'm glad it was her doing the extended road trip and not me -- I surely would not have lasted as long as she did!



2. It sounds like a great concept: An architecture writer with $100,000 in the house sets out to see what she can buy for that money somewhere in America. And the first chapter, where she goes to "architecture camp" in Vermont sets us up for something promising.
   
   But the promise isn't fulfilled because for a book like this which is as much travelogue as reporting requires that we have a guide that we enjoy spending the trip with, and Jacobs is that most obnoxious sort of New Yorker: No place is good enough because it just isn't New York. The other cities in America, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, are just places to get through on the way to another rural area which will be dismissed because it's just some remote area where there aren't enough hip people (or too many hip people) for it to be comfortably similar to living in Manhattan.
   
   Worse still, in a book about architecture, there is one essential ingredient which is painfully absent. PICTURES. I'm sorry Ms Jacobs, but your prose is not sufficient to convey the feel of the homes you describe without abundant illustration to accompany them. Instead we're treated to one(!) illustration per chapter, which often isn't even the most interesting-sounding building from the chapter.



3. I wavered as to how many stars to give this book. I enjoyed the story of the author's attempt to find or create her dream home. But I think many people are going to buy this book in the hopes finding practical advice for their own search and in that respect it falls down.
   I wanted to know more about the homes themselves and as good a job as the author does describing them, I wanted pictures and, even more for a book so much about architecture, plans and elevations.
   I wonder whether the $100K price tag has become too low a target 3 years later. Perhaps the most telling thing is that by the end of the book the author has not found a house that works for her.
   An answer for that perhaps would have been instead to focus more on the story of the homeowners who lived in the homes she passed on and why those homes were the perfect ones for them.



4. The book is rather like a long magazine article. You get the idea and the attitude early on, and nothing changes. She's pithy and terse but the situations become redundant, even for a design nut like myself. I didn't miss photographs, allowing Gary Panter's breezy illustrations to stoke my imagination.
   
   Reading the jacket tells you where she lives now, so the ending is no surprise. But it probably wouldn't have been anyway. I have the strong suspicion Ms. Jacobs is really looking for the right woman to settle down with.
   
   For a more involving and satisfying tale, try Kate Whouley's "Cottage for Sale, Must be Moved." I'd call it a minor modern classic.



5. I suppose I was expecting a journey along the lines of Tracey Kidder's House, something personal and organic.
   
   I found this book frustrating for two basic reasons:
   
   1. The lack of photographs, especially of the specific houses discussed was frustrating. Akin to discussing the merits of a painting, without a picture of it! I don't know if this oversight was the fault of a cheap publisher's budget, or the author's choice, but the book suffers as a result.
   
   2. The author's voice: seemed bitter or jaded or tired of her journey about two-third's before the road trip was done. Needless to say, it seems that she never found a house that she could actually commit to.
   
   As a result of the above, the reader leaves the book neither caring about the author's quest or any closer to discovering where to find the perfect $100,000 house.
   
   Perhaps the only thing I got from this book was a fleeting desire to subscribe to Dwell magazine.

4 comments about Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture).

1. Vizcaya is one of the great Gilded Age estates, build by an heir to a huge fortune, who had no family or children, so he devoted all his time and wealth to this palace on Biscayne Bay..and if you've ever layed eyes on this pile you can appreciate it was money well spent. This book is the best resourse I've seen on Viscaya; the text is scholarly and extremely well researched. The images are very well realized, and frankly in a book like this, great images are a must, because you can't imagine a place like this, unless you can actually see it, no description, no matter how articulate can do this place justice. If you have any interest in great residental architecture, or the history of south Florida or just appreciate great books, then I can't imagine you not loving this book.



2. In my opinion, Witold Rybczynski is the best observer of architecture writing today. Laurie Olin is in the same class as an observer of landscape architecture. The chance to read the two of them writing about this estate is an unusual treat. This is the kind of book somebody might give you and although the cover is attractive, you give a small inward sigh, knowing you will never read it. Not with this book. The writing is simply vastly better than books like this usually are. If you are at all interested in the design process either in landscape or residential architecture you will not be disappointed in this book.
   
   And if you like this book, check out the two books I have linked to which are classics.The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)



3. This book by two architects that is the story of Vizcaya, the James Deering Estate built in the early twentieth century in Miami as the lavish and sumptuous expression of the great wealth of its tractor-manufacturer owner, is an exceptionally first-class literary production from every point of view that could have a bearing on its subject. Written in the technically precise phraseologies appropriate to architecture and interior decoration, its prose is free of and stands above the contamination that abounds in the otherwise usual debasement of modern literature, and it is illustrated with a landslide of stunningly magnificent photography in both color and black-and-white. But something else with which it is illustrated is what recommended this book to me. I am neither an architect nor an interior decorator, nor has the stuff of those callings ever engaged much of my attention, but as soon as my eye fell on the watercolors painted of Vizcaya by John Singer Sargent when he was a guest of Deering's there in 1917, while I turned the leaves of a friend's copy of the book, I knew immediately as one with a profound attachment to watercolor painting that I must own this book for myself. For although I have held perhaps a hundred Sargent watercolors in my hands in the Metropolitan, Brooklyn and Boston Museums, and seen many more besides in other books, I had never before seen these, as they have lain quietly in private collections without ever being published to my knowledge until now, and they are among the finest examples of Sargent's amazing wizardry in this medium, which defies belief that a human being could have painted them. And the rest of the book is a plus even for one not particularly attracted to matters of residential design or interior décor, for it is a record of an era of refinement, gentility and taste, a belle époque in American history that is gone.



4. An impressive architectural achievement of the Gilded Age when country manors and their gardens were a conspicuous documentation of personal wealth and power by their owners, the Miami estate of Vizcaya was the equal to such famous contemporary structures as the Bilmore and the San Simeon. The collaborative work of Witold Rybczynski (Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, University of Pennsylvania) and Laurie Olin (Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania), Vizcaya: An American Villa And Its Makers" is the complete story of how this magnificent building came to be constructed, landscaped, and utilized as a 180-acre estate on Biscayne Bay complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion. Enhanced with a wealth of seventy color and 96 b/w illustrations, "Vizcaya" is an informed and informative body of impeccable scholarship presenting a seminal study that is very strongly recommended as an addition to professional, academic, and community library American Architectural History reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

2 comments about Domus 1928-1999. Vols. 1-12.

1. Quite simply, I love you. Your art books beguile me out of whole paychecks. Just the sight of a Taschen flexicover fills me with wonder and delight. Awestruck, I turn your books over in my hands. I even smell the pages while gleefully noting the paperstock. You're a real pro, Benedikt. From comic book publisher to art world King. Your quality is deliciously heartbreaking. My friends and I have spent many an eve discussing your work with envious gleaming eyes and admiring sighs over glasses of wine. Domus beckons from your website; from bookshelves; and from museum bookstores everywhere. "Own me," it says. "Six hundred smackers," I reason. Instead, I buy "Collecting Contemporary, ($30)," a sophisticated "How To" book for the budding afficionado. It tides me over and yet... Domus.



2. The greatest design magazine abridged from 1928-1999. If you're interested in design, architecture etc, sell a kidney and get it...

5 comments about Contemporary.

1. I feel this book should be titled more as to the content. The design work in the book is primarily l950's and l960's.
   This was not what I expected when I purchased a "Contemporary" book. I felt it should reflect at the most the early 2000's to date. I feel it is worth while for my purpose now which will be a donation to the local library.



2. Woah! This is one of the coolest books ever! I very seldom have given 5 stars to anything, but this one deserves it! Jackson really went out of her way in obtaining these pictures-the real deal, too. If you've ever seen a retro Armstrong flooring ad, a home modernizing magazine from the 50s-60s, Matt Maranian's book "Pad", or anything on retro ranch homes and furniture, this one takes the cake! It's also gives a pseudo-history of midcentury architecture, through pictures-and it's amazing how many pictures are here. I haven't purchased the books "Modernism Revisited", "Inspiring Interiors from Armstrong", or "The Eames Primer", although I plan to get these, but if you or someone you know are into this period, this is definitely a book to obtain. I have a friend that just went ape over it when he saw it. Now he wants to go retro, too. Another book that I've had my eyes on is "Modern Retro Living with Midcentury Modern". Once I get these, I'll leave reviews, as well. Don't hesitate to get this one if you're into this period, also!



3. If you like the direct innovative designs of the 50's & 60's this book will provide a great overview with lots of photos.
   It would have been nice to see more coverage of the furnishing specifics, especially DUNBAR and Edward Wormley - my personal favorites.

   Put on some lounge music, pour a martini and enjoy!




4. This is a pretty cool book. The photos are honest, as they're from the era instead of reconstructed rooms today. Very in depth also; it covers furniture, architecture, glassware, kitchens, textiles and other home furnishings.



5. This book is a great general guide to what was 'contemporary' - including architecture of the home, public building and office. In addition, it delves into interior design - including glass, wall treatments, flooring and furniture. The prospective reader should be made aware right off that this book is written from the British perspective - one will see British English spellings of words, and names of British companies. However, the vast majority of the book deals with American developments, which is more pertinant to the US reader. I call this book a great 'general' introduction because it digs about 75% of the way into each subject. But how many other books can cover so many subjects as well? None that I've been able to find so far. The book is richly illustrated, including some photos which span the entire page. The text is interesting and easy to understand. After reading each chapter of the book, you are left with a good basic undertanding of what you've just read. The pictures themselves are generally period photos, which really help the reader see what 'contemporary' was to the eyes of the folks living at that time. If you are contemplating purchasing a 'contemporary house', or perhaps decorating in the 'contemporary' style, this book will give you some good ideas. Overall, a very enjoyable book - it would make a good present, and look great sitting on your coffee table!