A Field Guide to American Houses
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Product Description
For the house lover and the curious tourist, for the house buyer and the weekend stroller, for neighborhood preservation groups and for all who want to know more about their community — here, at last, is a book that makes it both simple and delightful to identify the various styles and periods of American domestic architecture.
Concentrating not on rare landmarks but on predictable dwellings in ordinary neighborhoods all across the United States — houses built over the past three hundred years and lived in by Americans of every social and economic background — the book provides you with the facts (and frame of reference) that will enable you to look in a fresh way at the houses you constantly see around you. It tells you — and shows you in more than 1,200 illustrations — what you need to know in order to be able to admit the several distinct architectural styles and to know their past significance. What does that cornice mean? Or that porch? That door? When was this house built? What does its style say about the people who built it? You’ll find the answers to such questions here.
This is how the book works: Each of thirty-nine chapters focuses on a particular style (and its variants). Each starts with a large schematic drawing that highlights the style’s most vital identifying features. Additional drawings and photographs depict the most common shapes and the principal subtypes, allowing you to see at a glance a wide range of examples of each style. Still more drawings offer close-up views of predictable tiny details — windows, doors, cornices, etc. — that might be hard to see in full-house pictures. The accompanying text is rich in information about each style — describing in detail its identifying features, telling you where (and in what amount) you’re likely to find examples of it, discussing all of its notable variants, and revealing its origin and tracing its history.
In the book’s introductory chapters you’ll find invaluable all-purpose discussions of house-building materials and techniques (“Structure”), house shapes (“Form”), and the many traditions of architectural fashion (“Style”) that have influenced American house design through the past three centuries. A pictorial key and glossary help lead you from simple, easily recognizable architectural features — the presence of a tile roof, for example — to the styles in which that feature is likely to be establish.
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I use this book at work and around others in the building industry. Many times a client says she wants “mediterranean” yet when she describes what she likes, its clearly NOT medit. I can quickly right the client. This is just like an encyclopedia of architectural styles.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Wonderful, concise guide to American Homes
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
An architect friend of mine recommended this and it has be a valuable resource and learning tool. If you have any interest in architecture/remodeling/building/real estate or anything related. . . buy this book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This as an brilliant guide with hundreds of photographs and line drawings illustrating details such as porch supports and dormer windows to be establish in tiny town America. Is that Second Empire or Tudor detailing on my Queen Anne home?
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As a native Virginia historian and leader, NEEDED this detailed background book on styles of our society’s everyday home architecture. Brilliant!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5