American Houses: A Field Guide to the Architecture of the Home - Hardcover
American Houses is a historical guide to the architecture of the American home. While other architectural field guides show only façades, this book includes floor plans, showing how the form of a house arises from its function. Photographs and drawings of exteriors illustrate the significant field marks of each style and help pinpoint the key elements that can identify a house even when it has been remodeled beyond recognition. Beautifully illustrated, clearly written, and impeccably researched, American Houses is an essential reference for anyone interested in the history of American residential architecture.
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About the Author:
Formerly vice president and partner of the Architects Collaborative, the famous firm founded by Walter Gropius, Gerald Foster has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Boston Architectural Center as well as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited at the DeCordova Museum and at various galleries. His books include A Field Guide to Airplanes, A Field Guide to Trains, and American Houses: A Field Guide.
From Publishers Weekly:
While the U.S. boasts many great public buildings, designed by architects both homegrown and imported, Foster's operating premise is that most of America's vital and expressive architectural tradition has been a domestic one. The great breadth of this tradition—from Monticello through "Early Louisiana Shotgun" to Frank Lloyd Wright—is immaculately and exhaustively described by Foster, a teacher and former partner of Walter Gropius's Architects Collaborative. The book's three extensive sections ("Colonial Traditions," "19th-Century Styles" and "20th-Century Revivals and Innovations") offer not only a visual primer on virtually every important strain of American home building but also extensive and useful annotation on their social and aesthetic backgrounds. The author's numerous drawings are models of clarity. It is useful to have the characteristics of such familiar styles as Gothic Revival and Mission so clearly delineated, and less well-known styles are amply explored. The author of two previous Field Guides, on trains and airplanes, Foster clearly intends this book to be used rather than consulted, to be thrown in the car or jammed in a shoulder bag rather than put on a shelf. While Foster is no Tom Wolfe–style polemicist, he is not afraid to be critical when it aids understanding. And more through implication than direct statement, Foster considers the vernacular tradition he describes as belonging to a quickly receding past, one that this book will do much to help preserve.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSan Val
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 1417717386
- ISBN 13 9781417717385
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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