A carefully curated and beautifully photographed selection of 50 architect-designed houses that reflects contemporary concerns about the unique challenges presented by life in the desert’s sensitive environment

The desert provides a sense of mystery and rugged beauty that attracts architects, home owners, vacationers, and anyone looking for an escape within its arid climate. This book showcases 50 works of residential architecture from across the last few decades, each with a unique connection to the desert in which it's situated from the US, Europe, Asia, Australia and beyond.

Each building, designed by established and well-known contemporary stars as well as emerging architects, includes a short text and several exterior and interior images of its structure and surroundings.

From the publisher of Living on Water, Elemental Living and California Captured.

There is a growing trend around the world, particularly in Europe and the United States, to build greener and more sustainable housing in the form of floating homes. Cities like Amsterdam and Seattle boast spectacular neighborhoods of floating homes with all the comforts and amenities of traditional houses. Available in different sizes and finishes, they are tailored to the needs of each homeowner.

From weekend homes to get-away cabins in the mountains, by the sea, or in the woods, this architecture embodies our longing for lounging in nature. For the first time in the history of humankind, more people live in cities than in the country. Yet, at the same time, more and more city dwellers are yearning for rural farms, mountain cabins, or seaside homes. These kinds of refuges offer modern men and women a promise of what urban centers usually cannot provide: quiet, relaxation, being out of reach, getting back to basics, feeling human again. Rock the Shack is a survey of such contemporary refuges from around the world--from basic to luxury. The book features a compelling range of sparingly to intricately furnished cabins, cottages, second homes, tree houses, transformations, shelters, and cocoons. The look of the included structures from the outside is just as important as the view from inside. What these diverse projects have in common is an exceptional spirit that melds the uniqueness of a geographic location with the individual character of the building's owner and architect.

Reducing energy consumption and costs is an issue of ever-increasing importance, and European as well as international legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions is tightening up minimum energy standards for new buildings and those being extended or renovated. Energy-saving measures in the home will, therefore, become ever more cost-effective throughout our lifetimes. Find a comprehensive outline of them here.

From the stately Gothic Revival and Regency-style houses of Savannah to the majestic, multicolumned plantation homes that punctuate rolling farmlands throughout the state, David King Gleason presents a splendid pictorial record of Georgia's fines pre-Civil War residences.The book begins with the town houses of Savannah, which include such landmark residences as the Andrew Low House, built in 1848 in the style of an early Victorian Renaissance villa, and the imposing Gree-Heldrim House, a Gothic Revival mansion that was the most expensive house built in Savannah prior to the Civil War. Wild Heron, located just south of Savannah on the Little Ogeechee River, is the oldest plantation house still standing in Georgia. A one-and-a-half story farmhouse built in the style of a West India cottage, it is being restored to reflect the period of the early 1800s.

Farther to the interior, in the area around Augusta, are such homes as Fruitlands, now the clubhouse of the Augusta national Golf Club; Meadow Garden; Ware's Folly; and Montrose, built in 1849 and one of the Loveliest Greek Revival houses in the area. Houses photographed along the Plantation Trail, from Athens to Macon, include the white-columned President's House, home since 1949 to the presidents of the University of Georgia; the Howell Cobb House, in Athens; Whitehall, in Covington; Glan Mary, in Sparta; and the Woodruff House, in Macon.

Gleason devotes considerable attention to the homes of the western side of the state, from Chickamauga to Thomasville. The Gordon-Lee House, constructed in 1847, was headquarters fro the Union army during the battle of chickamauga. Other houses in this part of Georgia are valley View, which overlooks the Etowah River, west of Cartersville; the Archibald Howell House, near downtown Marietta; Lovejoy, in Clayton Country; The oaks, in the vicinity of LaGrange; and Greenwood and Pebble Hill, near Thomasville.

In all, Gleason captures more than one hundred of Georgia's most beautiful antebellum homes, including many lesser-known houses. In addition to exterior photographs, Antebellum Homes of Georgia contains a number of interior views as well as aerial photographs that show the relationship between the houses and their environs: outbuildings, formal gardens, and recd clay fields that were once white with cotton. Captions provide brief histories of the houses and their owners as weel as notes on construction and outstanding architectural details.

In the early nineteenth century, Indiana was at the intersection of ideas from the East and the frontier - resulting in a unique opportunity to express creative adaptions of residential architectural styles in America. Industrialization later in the century created new wealth to build extraordinary houses outside of cities; by the early twentieth century, Americans had created their own distinctive residential architecture with the Prairie Style. This 240 page compendium includes over ninety houses in Indiana which are representative of the finest American residential architecture, from the Federal and Classical Revival styles to Modern. The fascinating story of the evolution of residential architecture elaborates on the character defining features of each period, including the exterior form, massing, details as well as interiors - all beautifully illustrated in large format black and white photographs.

Thirty-six architects from Europe and the USA present their very latest projects for luxury villas - from a villa in the city to a lakeside location and those on the coast or in the mountains. The book features over 100 unique and stunning houses.

One House Per Day no.001-365 collects the first 365 drawings from Andrew Bruno’s project One House Per Day, along with a foreword by Keith Krumwiede and essay contributions by Malcolm Rio, Alessandro Orsini & Nick Roseboro, and Clark Thenhaus. The drawings are high quality 1:1 reproductions of the originals, and the 7.5� trim size matches the size of the sketchbooks that the originals were drawn in. The drawings are each given a full page, with a subsequent section including a brief description of each drawing. While the drawings themselves are mute, and their descriptions relatively deadpan, the essays contemplate the place of the detached house in American culture from social, political, and economic perspectives. The book is 392 pages long and is softbound in grey recycled paper. The front cover features 365 debossed circles to represent the 365 houses; these give the book a unique tactile quality.

Winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Award for Excellence in Design Research, the Paul Davidoff Award for an Outstanding Book in Urban Planning, the Vesta Award for Feminist Scholarship in the Arts, and an ALA Notable Book Award: a provocative critique of how American housing patterns impact private and public life.

Americans still build millions of dream houses in neighborhoods that sustain Victorian stereotypes of the home as "woman's place" and the city as "man's world." Urban historian and architect Dolores Hayden tallies the personal and social costs of an American "architecture of gender" for the two-earner family, the single-parent family, and single people. Many societies have struggled with the architectural and urban consequences of women's paid employment: Hayden traces three models of home in historical perspective—the haven strategy in the United States, the industrial strategy in the former USSR, and the neighborhood strategy in European social democracies—to document alternative ways to reconstruct neighborhoods.

Updated and still utterly relevant today as the New Urbanist architects have taken up Hayden's critique of suburban space, this award-winning book is essential reading for architects, planners, public officials, and activists interested in women's social and economic equality.

The book is a portfolio of three Northern California architectural projects: Canyon House, Inverness House, and Mocabee House. Each house is very different in style, but the themes that are explored are consistent in the architecture and the interiors. Canyon House is detailed to seamlessly nestle into its steep creek side landscape. The house follows the contours of the landscape, and is built with attention to carving space out of the canyon. Using the expertise of crafts people and design consultants to create the unique wood carved screens and furniture, the soft stone floors, and the interior and exterior flow of the home make Canyon House an exceptional example of craft and beauty. Inverness House is built on a ridge top with views of Tomales Bay. The house explores the intersection between the local vernacular of an older western red cedar wood cabin and a new modern house. The materials used are sourced locally and the home has an organic, simple, cozy well being feeling in its architecture and presentation. Mocabee House is a modern concept of a farmhouse set on a former four-acre walnut orchard. The house has an agrarian feeling, set up as a way to capture light filled spaces all day long with its low horizon and borrowed distant views of the Mayacama Mountains. The house is designed to use the exterior spaces with ease and celebration, and its farm to table lifestyle is clearly explored in the houses material and interior design selection.

This title is dedicated to a common and very frequent construction task in Switzerland and Austria: the detached house. Current design trends and new interpretations of alpine building cultures, different life forms and realities, changed demands and needs can be discovered in what architects and designers have created in recent years. A particularly exciting phenomenon in this context is the creative handling of room arrangements and the spatial partitioning, for which very different solutions are found.

For this volume, the author has selected outstanding contemporary concepts and designs that deserve to be noticed and appreciated much more. Between prefabricated houses on the one hand and fancy villas on the other, all presented homes are within a middle-class budget. Floor plans and elevations, key figures on square feet, facts on ecological aspects, materials used and, last but not least, the respective designers offer the potential builder an extremely practical benefit.

The lack of affordable housing and the climate crisis are two of the most pressing challenges facing cities today. Green affordable housing addresses both by providing housing stability, safety, and financial predictability while constructing and operating the buildings to reduce environmental and climate impacts. Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing is the most comprehensive resource on how green building principles can be incorporated into affordable housing design, construction, and operation. In this fully revised edition, Walker Wells and Kimberly Vermeer capture the rapid evolution of green building practices and make a compelling case for integrating green building in affordable housing. The Blueprint offers guidance on innovative practices, green building certifications for affordable housing, and the latest financing strategies. The completely new case studies share detailed insights on how the many elements of a green building are incorporated into different housing types and locations. The new edition includes basic planning tools such as checklists to guide the planning process, and questions to encourage reflection about how the content applies in practice. While Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing is especially useful to housing development project managers, the information and insights will be valuable to all participants in the affordable housing industry: developers, designers and engineers, funders, public agency staff, property and asset managers, housing advocates, and resident advocates. Every affordable housing project can achieve the fundamentals of good green building design and practice. By sharing the authors' years of expertise in guiding hundreds of organizations, Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, Revised Edition gives project teams what they need to push for excellence.

Bauernhauser pragen die Identitat der Allgauer Kulturlandschaft seit Jahrhunderten. Die Zukunft bauerlicher Hofstellen ist jedoch durch den Strukturwandel der Landwirtschaft bedroht, mit den Bauten droht die Kulturlandschaft zu verschwinden. Die Publikation Weiter|Nutzen zeigt rund zwanzig besonders interessante Projekte, in denen die Altbausubstanz landwirtschaftlicher Gebaude auf vorbildliche Weise zu neuem Leben erweckt wurde. Damit sollen Eigentumer|innen und potentielle Bauherr|inn|en angeregt werden, mit dem sensiblen Erhalt ihrer Hoefe einen Beitrag zum authentischen Gesamterscheinungsbild der Region zu leisten. Gegliedert werden die hochwertig fotografierten und gestalteten Prasentationen der Projekte nach spezifischen Landschaftsbildern des Allgaus. Speziell fur die Buchpublikation von Studierenden der Hochschule Augsburg erstellte Planunterlagen erlauben einen guten Vergleich vor und nach der Umbauphase der jeweiligen Hofstellen. Begleitend eroertern eine Historikerin, Architekt|innen, Landschaftsplaner, Museumsleiter und ein ehemaliger Kreisbaumeister Entwicklung und Perspektive der Baukultur, Typologie und Sanierungsmoeglichkeiten. Das unterstreicht die Betrachtung der jeweiligen Falle, die in einer Synopse mit Projektdaten verglichen werden. Ein Fachteil gibt abschliessend konkrete praktische Ratschlage zum Umbau. Zudem ist eine Bildstrecke mit historischen Fotografien eingewoben, die einen Einblick in vergangene Zeiten der Allgauer Kulturlandschaft gewahrt.

After the discovery of oil, the Kuwaiti State estab lished a means of wealth distribution for its citizens through housing programs aimed at improving standards of living. It allocated residential neighbourhoods for Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis through the introduction of two main architectural typologies: the apartment and the villa. However, in response to certain economic, sociocultural, and regulatory constraints, an unplanned hybrid typology has recently emerged. The multiplex, specific to Kuwait and yet not officially recognized by the state, has become the informal expression of specific living needs that is now ubiquitous across Kuwait. Here, for the first time, the authors of The Multiplex Typology explore everyday life in these hybrid homes, arguing that the one-size-fits-all housing model of the past is both outdated and unsustainable. But this book is not merely a doc umentation of the current state of living in Kuwait, nor a straightforward analysis of Kuwaiti domestic architecture today. It is also an urgent and timely call for alternative approaches to housing that are sustainably driven, culturally rooted and responsive to future change.

John Richardson s Bohemian Aristocrat interiors are, and have been throughout his life, filled with fine English and American antiques; interesting textiles; works of art by friends, legendary artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe; vivid colour combinations; and objects that prompt stories from a well-lived life. From London and the stately buildings of Stowe School, in the idyllic Buckinghamshire countryside, to the south of France, New York City, and the Connecticut countryside, Richardson shares the story of his life through places, objects, and people a form of autobiography, gloriously illustrated, entertainingly told. In stories about his residences in the south of France (at the Chateau de Castille with celebrated art historian and collector Douglas Cooper), London (a set of rooms at the famed Albany apartment house), and the United States (glamorous New York City apartments and a country retreat in Connecticut), Richardson reveals his life through a melange of interesting places, mementoes, works of art, furnishings that prompt stories, and an endlessly fascinating assortment of friends and acquaintances Fernand Leger, Lady Diana Cooper, Fran Lebowitz, and Oscar and Annette de la Renta, to name a few. Essential reading for those interested in twentieth-century art and social history, grandly liveable interiors, and the good life.

Frederic Church, the leader of the much-loved group of artists known as the Hudson River School, made his name as a painter of monumental landscapes in the mid-1800s, helping to develop our vision of landscape and shaping the cultural identity of America. He applied his artistic talent to the house and property that he named Olana, known today as Olana State Historic Site and located in the heart of the beautiful Hudson River Valley. The 250-acre naturalistic landscape surrounding the house is a work of art in itself, and the magnificent views beyond Olana were an essential part of Church s composition, which he carefully designed with an artist s eye to the property s 360-degree views of neighbouring hills, valleys, the Hudson River, and distant mountains. Church was an observer of the cosmos, and Olana, set in the centre of the Hudson River Valley, was his laboratory of observation of all of nature. Spectacular photography by Larry Lederman of Olana, its landscape and house, inside and out, illustrates one of Church s greatest works of art. The images, many taken especially for this book, have been shot in all seasons and all weather, and include panoramic and aerial views, sunsets, detail shots of both the house and landscape, as well as interior views of the house. Essays will delve into Church and his inspirations and motivations, illuminating not only the estate he built but also his work as an artist.

Wood Houses documents wood as a building material in residential houses and includes both supplemental architects' plans and more than 100 interior and exterior photos.

The work of [STRANG] is beautifully explored in this robust monograph which highlights the firm's site-specific and climate-driven designs. The ability to create stunning architectural designs while maintaining an acute awareness of the surrounding environment has come to define their work. Under the creative direction of Max Strang FAIA, the Miami-based firm continues to advance many of the timeless concepts set forth by the famed Sarasota School of Architecture. Strang's early exposure to that mid-century modernist movement resulted in a deep respect for structures that are intimately connected to their surroundings as they celebrate the Florida climate. This first monograph of Strang's work contains a collection of conceptual drawings, text and professional photography that underscores the ongoing relevance and importance of regional modernist design. It is the architectural responses to site and climate that infuse the specific designs with character and identity, resulting in a uniquely Floridian version of modernism.

Energy efficiency and sustainable green standards have emerged in developed countries, particularly in the United States and Canada. This book explains this new direction in the construction of buildings through three parts, with illustrative examples of several types of homes: prefabricated, rehabilitated, and made with natural materials. The three R's in the construction of a home are: recycle, reduce, and reuse. The first part of this book explains how we can reduce the amount of waste. The second part is dedicated to new technologies in the house. The third part deals with ideas for alternative homes (cave houses, houses on trees, camouflage, etc).