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Home & Interior Design books:
American Homes: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture - A landmark reference with more than 1,000 illustrations, elevations, and palns

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Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers

List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $100.00
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Average Customer Ratings:

A landmark of architectural history, AMERICAN HOMES surveys over 100 American housing styles and illustrates them through nearly 1000 line drawings. Using his own unique combination of "exploded" diagrams and floor plans and easy-to-follow text, award-winning architect and author Lester Walker has created the definitive bible of home design, fully practical but wonderful, too, for armchair browsing and dreaming.

Walker describes each style's signature features, and how, where, when, and why the style developed in response to the landscape. The full evolution of American residential architecture is represented, including Dutch Colonials, Log cabins, Southern plantation mansions, Carpenter Gothics, Neo-modern styles, and more.

For anyone who has ever designed or owned a home--or just lived in one--AMERICAN HOMES is the quintessential reference to our country's dwellings, past, present, and future.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 728.37022273
EAN: 9781579122522
ISBN: 1579122523
Label: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2002-09-02
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Studio: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• A Field Guide to American Houses
• The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture
• American House Styles: A Concise Guide
• The Abrams Guide to American House Styles
• American Houses: A Field Guide to the Architecture of the Home


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Outstanding resource -
I teach a High School architecture class and I highly recommend this book for several reasons.
1) The black and white line drawings allow my students to focus on the specific details without being distracted by the colors of photographs.
2) The drawings are highly descriptive of the elements of style that distinguish one period from another and one region to another.
3) Walker breaks down the sections first by year and then by region.

You are able to see how the styles changed over a period of years and focus on the phases of development.

I especially liked that he devoted separate chapters to individual architects that made a significant contribution to the development of the distinct styles and Walker does a good job of picking houses that showcase these talented individuals.

A very good book -- but -
I am interested in historic architecture -- mostly eastern coast architecture of the colonial period. And this book does a grand job of displaying it in its varied forms and regional and ethnic differences. As you can see I rated it at 4. Why not 5? Because I caught a couple of mistakes in the identification of some of the buildings -- both as to location and to period of history from which they came.
The first mistake I noticed is the octaginal blockhouse on Davis Island in Edgecome, Maine on page 67. Mr. Walker idenitifies it as a building from the 1650's. It was in fact built in 1805 as the central fortification of an earthwork and palsade gun battery to protect Sheepscot Bay. It is one of a whole string of idential coastal fortifications designed and built by the Army Corp of Engineers the specific engineer for this series of fortifications was Moses Porter -- at that time based at West Point. I have lived most of my life within 40 miles of this building.
The second building that I believe to be mislocated is found on page 95. It is correctly identified as an early georgian house. Where I disagree with Mr. Walker is it location. It is in fact a house that stands to this day in the city of Portmouth, New Hampshire and was the home of an 18th century merchant of that city. There is also a wooden example of the same house on route 1a just outside of the town of Newberryport, Massachusetts and another one built, 1782, in Saco, Maine.
With these exceptions I have enjoyed reading and re-reading this book

A Splendid Architectural Overview -
"American Homes" by Lester Walker is a bargain at the price Amazon is charging. It is a lavishly illustrated (albeit in black and white) comprehensive work detailing every style of American home in drawings, sections, and elevations emphasizing the differences that make a certain home or style unique. In this way it is extremely useful for anyone with even a passing interest in architecture to learn about the varying styles of American homes.

Mr. Walker does not visibly seem to favor any one style over another, and avoids editorializing for the most part. Instead he seems to love all the differing styles for what they are, in different ways, and for different reasons, depending of the particular house in question. In addition to specifics on certain examples and styles, Mr. Walker also gives the reader a historical perspective of housing developments in a developmental time frame, starting with Pueblo and Tipi styles to the Inflatable, Deconstruction, Brutalism, and Neomodern styles that are decidedly more recent. As a fan of creative contemporary architecture, I especially found the coverage of the International Revival movement, the quirky Silo and Yurt homes of the early 1970s, and Fantasy homes from the 1940s in the shapes of an elephant (Margate City, NJ), Mother Goose (Hazard, KY), and a pig (Los Angeles, CA), among others, to be delightful.

This is a wonderful volume and I highly endorse it to anyone from architectural historian to collectors of Americana.

A Great History -
I really love this book - it has given me some useful information on the kinds of houses and buildings I may see all over the country - an historical education that I have wanted. And this book makes it fun & easy to learn. The illustrations are cool and the format is very helpful.

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