A guided tour of the variety of architectural home styles that have developed throughout America's history.

America has an abundance of fascinating and varied house styles, as diverse as its people. This unique book will allow readers to recognize the architectural features of virtually any house they encounter.

John Milnes Baker designed a simple four-bedroom house, and then developed a basic plan for each historical style. Starting each drawing with the same plan and adding essential characteristics, Baker leads the reader through a series of additions. Each section of American House Styles begins with a historical overview of the period, followed by commentary. The author shows how different styles developed and what influenced their development. His elevation drawings, each with a floor plan, illustrate the details and embellishments of each style.

Through an understanding of earlier styles, we develop insights into the architecture of our own era. Thus the study of architecture allows us to make informed judgments about what is being built today.

Part architecture, part history and part anthropology, this encyclopaedic volume limns the rich story of housing around the world from the pre-urban dwellings of nomadic, semi-nomadic and sedentary societies to today. It covers housing around the world and suggests solutions for modern housing problems based on historical precedents.

In 1848, Orson Squire Fowler, published A Home for All, or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building in which he announced that the octagon house with its eight sides enclosed more space than a square one with equal wall space. The octagonal form had been used in public buildings in the past, but now as a concept for domestic architecture it had a dedicated and convincing champion. Fowler's books, stressing the functional and stylistic advantages of the octagon house, found many readers and several hundred followers who sprinkled the landscape from New England to Wisconsin with eight-sided houses, barns, churches, schoolhouses, carriage houses, garden houses, smokehouses, and privies. Fowler's creative idea for an octagon house came to him while contemplating a design for his own home. He wondered why there had been so little advancement in architectural design, particularly given the preponderance of scientific advancements. Looking for a radical change in house style, Fowler questioned why the spherical form that is predominant in nature was not employed in architecture. The constraint of right angles for the framing of houses was the obvious reason. Fowler thought "Why not have our houses six-, eight-, 12-or 20-sided? Why not build after some mathematical figure?" The solution: the octagon. Since octagons enclose more floor space per linear foot than comparable squares or rectangles, Fowler claimed they cost less to build and reduced heat loss. He also insisted octagons allowed in more sunlight and had better ventilation than conventional houses; owners of these unusual homes found that the improved light and ventilation went into the triangular closets and pantriesthat occupied the octagons' angles.

A reprint of an 1890's catalog of a Stockholm manufacturer of wooden houses, with floor plans and perspective drawings of 86 pavilions, bathinghouses, balconies, verandas, kiosks, and dwelling houses.

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.

Updates the highly acclaimed original edition with extensive new material that relates to the form, essence, and age of each Dutch barn as well as the evolution of the barn building era.

Gregory D. Huber updates John Fitchen's The New World Dutch Barn with extensive new material. Added to Fitchen's descriptions of barn types, framing style, and exterior appearance is research information that relates to the form, fabric, and essence of each Dutch barn. Huber notes the secondary expressions seen in barns in various locations in both New York and New Jersey, the evolution of the barn building tradition, and why only one of the four major tie-beam types found in the Netherlands proliferates in America.

The legacies of theatres, hotels, fire stations, flour mills, and more -- torn down, burned down, and otherwise lost -- are uncovered in this bittersweet collection. Using archival photographs, blueprints, and written reports, Raymond Biesinger has rendered a selection of Canada's most iconic lost buildings in his signature minimalist style. Accompanying Biesinger's illustrations are Alex Bozikovic's descriptions which capture each building's historical, cultural, and architectural significance. Bozikovic draws on local histories, archived building permits and his own extensive knowledge of the Canadian urban architectural landscape and its history -- from the letters passed through Kelowna's unlikely art deco post office to the destruction of a home in Halifax's Africville -- to offer fascinating, sometimes forgotten stories about each building and its significance. An impossible architectural walking tour, 305 Lost Buildings of Canada spans the country, its cities and countryside, and its history. Cities change, buildings come and go, but in this fact-filed compendium, you'll find the lost wonders of Canada's architecture.

House design is evolving fast following trends and the needs of our society. A myriad of design schemes aim to meet diverse requirements and there is never a single solution to make the most of a living space. This book offers tips on different ways of creating an environment that is functional and aesthetically pleasing where space is limited.

How much do the English really care about their stately homes? In this pathbreaking and wide-ranging account of the changing fortunes and status of the stately homes of England over the past two centuries, Peter Mandler melds social, cultural, artistic, and political perspectives and reveals much about the relationship of the nation to its past and its traditional ruling elite. Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture besotted with its history and its aristocracy, Mandler portrays instead a continuously changing and modernizing society in which both popular and intellectual attitudes toward the aristocracy -- and its stately homes -- have veered from selective appreciation to outright hostility and only recently to thoroughgoing admiration.

With great panache, Mandler adds the missing pieces to the story of the country house. Going beyond its architects and its owners, he brings to center stage a much wider cast of characters -- aristocratic entrepreneurs, anti-aristocratic politicians, campaigning conservationists, ordinary sightseers and voters -- and a scenario full of incident and local and national color. He traces attitudes toward the stately homes, beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century when public feeling about the aristocracy was mixed and divided. Criticism of the "foreign" and "exclusive" image of the typical aristocratic country house was widespread. At the same time, interest grew in those older houses that symbolized an olden time of imagined national harmony. The Victorian period also saw the first mass tourist industry, and a strong popular demand emerged for the right to visit all the stately homes. By the 1880s, however, hostilitytoward the aristocracy made appreciation of any country house politically treacherous, and interest in aristocratic heritage declined steadily for sixty years. Only after 1945, when the aristocracy was no longer seen as a threat, was a gentle revival of the stately homes possible, Mandler contends, and only since the 1970s has that revival become a triumphant appreciation. He enters today's debate with a discussion of how far people today -- and tomorrow -- are willing to see the aristocracy's heritage as their own.

This book consists of a discussion of the features of the North Italian domus and a catalogue of over sixty examples. George examines the components of the domus such as atria, porticoes, peristyle gardens and triclinia as well as interior decoration, construction, the houses in their urban context and how they fit into the overall picture of Roman domestic architecture. The catalogue consists of sixty-two plans of houses which builds up a good picture of the range and complexity of the buildings under scrutiny.

On the occasion of Tennessee's Bicentennial, four distinguished authors offer new insights and a broader appreciation of the classical influences that have shaped the architectural, cultural, and educational history of its capital city.

Nashville has been many things: frontier town, Civil War battleground, New South mecca, and Music City, U.S.A. It is headquarters for several religious denominations, and also the home of some of the largest insurance, healthcare, and publishing concerns in the country. Located culturally as well as geographically between North and South, East and West, Nashville is centered in a web of often-competing contradictions.

One binding image of civic identity, however, has been consistent through all of Nashville's history: the classical Greek and Roman ideals of education, art, and community participation that early on led to the city's sobriquet, "Athens of the West," and eventually, with the settling of the territory beyond the Mississippi River, the "Athens of the South."

Illustrated with nearly a hundred archival and contemporary photographs, "Classical Nashville" shows how Nashville earned that appellation through its adoption of classical metaphors in several areas: its educational and literary history, from the first academies through the establishment of the Fugitive movement at Vanderbilt; the classicism of the city's public architecture, including its Capitol and legislative buildings; the evolution of neoclassicism in homes and private buildings; and the history and current state of the Parthenon, the ultimate symbol of classical Nashville, replete with the awe-inspiring 42-foot statue of Athena by sculptor Alan LeQuire.

Perhaps Nashville author John Egerton best captures the essence of this modern city with its solid roots in the past. He places Nashville "somewhere between the 'Athens of the West' and 'Music City, U.S.A., ' between the grime of a railroad town and the glitz of Opryland, between Robert Penn Warren and Robert Altman." Nashville's classical identifications have always been forward-looking, rather than antiquarian: ambitious, democratic, entrepreneurial, and culturally substantive. "Classical Nashville" celebrates the continuation of classical ideals in present-day Nashville, ideals that serve not as monuments to a lost past, but as sources of energy, creativity, and imagination for the future of a city.

" A concise and amply illustrated introduction to Kentucky folk structures--log cabins, houses, cribs, and barns--that should be treasured as irreplaceable expressions of the cultural values of the Commonwealth's past.

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an expression of culture.
"A splendid analysis of the centrality of architecture in the daily lives of the Batammaliba and its integral role in articulating social values....The story is beautifully told in the best of anthropological traditions."--Judith R. Blau, "Contemporary Society"
"A remarkable study....Blier's volume carries the study of African architecture to a qualitatively new level of scholarship. It introduces a new dimension whereby the architectural medium can be used to illuminate much of the entire belief system of any culture."--Labelle Prussin, "African Arts"
"In this excellent book Blier provides a richly detailed and searching account of what architecture means to the Batammaliba of northern Togo and Benin....The finest account I have yet read of the relations between systems of beliefs, ritual practices, and African aesthetics and plastic arts....The ethnography and basic insight should be the envy of any social anthropologist."--T.O. Beidelman, "Man"

From the haunting grandeur of the Etowah Indian Mounds to the futuristic steel and glass of the Atlanta skyline, The Guide to the Architecture of Georgia spans 500 years and numerous miles to reveal the state's rich architectural heritage. Award-winning architect Tom Spector and free-lance photographer Susan Owings-Spector traveled Georgia's backroads and highways to catalog impressive examples of Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Neoclassical, Victorian, and Modern architecture that are open to the public and well worth a visit. The volume supplies all the information necessary to locate, tour, and enjoy these architecturally significant structures. Organized by region and subdivided by county, the guide allows architecture enthusiasts to identify sites of interest quickly. Essays throughout the book describe the rise and fall of architectural styles, and a glossary clarifies more than 100 architectural terms. Whether planning a day trip, a weekend get-away, an extended vacation, or merely a scenic drive through the state, The Guide to the Architecture of Georgia is an ideal companion for touring the state's architectural treasures. The guide features descriptions of more than 300 important structures arranged by region and county; 78 photos and 35 easy-to-follow maps; an entire chapter on the Atlanta area; practical visiting information including addresses, opening times, entrance fees, and handicapped accessibility; a glossary of architectural terms and descriptions of the major architectural periods, from the early American through the Postmodern.

Behind the ""Big Houses"" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view. The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South. Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections. |Exploring the structures and spaces used by slaves on antebellum plantations, Vlach shows how slaves subtly appropriated this landscape as their own. These newly claimed spaces fostered a feeling of community that served as a seedbed for further resistance and for the invention and maintenance of a distinctive African American culture. 206 illustrations. A New York Times Notable Book.

Rare architects' catalog includes dozens of authentic designs. Detailed descriptions of special features, dimensions, costs, etc. 231 b/w illus.

Log construction entered the Ohio territory with the seventeenth-century fur traders and mid-eighteenth-century squatters and then spread throughout most of the area after the opening of the territory in the 1780s. Scottish-Irish and German settlers, using techniques from the eastern states and European homelands, found the abundant timber resources of the Ohio country ideally suited to this simple, durable form of construction. Hutslar documents this early architecture with extensive descriptive materials from local histories, diaries, traveller's accounts, building contracts and many recent site photographs. These descriptions will be interesting for modern craftsmen and other builders involved in historic restoration or log construction generally.
Hutslar's extensive fieldwork is valuable to students of vernacular architecture and preservationists and this abridged paperback edition of his book is a boon to travelling or local history buffs who can refer to this wealth of information at their leisure.

In print since 1948, Dwelling House Construction is a homebuilding classic that covers site inspection, foundations, framing, windows, roofing and flashing, coatings, fireplaces and chimneys, insulation, hardware, plastics, mobile homes, and manufactured housing.This new edition has been substantially revised to take into account the many changes in materials and building technologies that have occurred over the past decade. The chapter on roofing has been completely revised. The chapters on coatings and plastics have been combined, as have those on manufactured and mobile housing. Sections on masonry, wood, steel, steel framing, and concrete have been added; the sections on septic tanks, balloon framing, braced framing, plaster, and standard requirements have been shortened, and specification clauses have been eliminated.Albert G. H. Dietz is Professor Emeritus of Building Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Old-House Dictionary From a One Room Cabin to a Beaux-Arts Mansion… Here’s a concise and easily understandable architectural dictionary for professionals and amateurs alike. More than 450 illustrations, 1500 terms, 750 definitions, and 17 useful cross references guide you smoothly through the oftentimes confusing language of American domestic architecture. Who is This Dictionary For?

• Architects and Architectural Historians
• Preservationists
• Building Trades Professionals
• Interior Designers
• High School and College Students
• Old Home Owners and Lovers

Exploring America's material culture, "Common Places" reveals the history, culture, and social and class relationships that are the backdrop of the everyday structures and environments of ordinary people. Examining America's houses and cityscapes, its rural outbuildings and landscapes from perspectives including cultural geography, decorative arts, architectural history, and folklore, these articles reflect the variety and vibrancy of the growing field of vernacular architecture.

In essays that focus on buildings and spaces unique to the U.S. landscape, Clay Lancaster, Edward T. Price, John Michael Vlach, and Warren E. Roberts reconstruct the social and cultural contexts of the modern bungalow, the small-town courthouse square, the shotgun house of the South, and the log buildings of the Midwest. Surveying the buildings of America's settlement, scholars including Henry Glassie, Norman Morrison Isham, Edward A. Chappell, and Theodore H. M. Prudon trace European ethnic influences in the folk structures of Delaware and the houses of Rhode Island, in Virginia's Renish homes, and in the Dutch barn widely repeated in rural America.

Ethnic, regional, and class differences have flavored the nation's vernacular architecture. Fraser D. Neiman reveals overt changes in houses and outbuildings indicative of the growing social separation and increasingly rigid relations between seventeenth-century Virginia planters and their servants. Fred B. Kniffen and Fred W. Peterson show how, following the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the structures of the eastern elite were repeated and often rejected by frontier builders. Moving into the twentieth century, James Borchert tracks the transformation of the alley from an urban home for Washington's blacks in the first half of the century to its new status in the gentrified neighborhoods of the last decade, while Barbara Rubin's discussion of the evolution of the commercial strip counterpoints the goals of city planners and more spontaneous forms of urban expression.

The illustrations that accompany each article present the artifacts of America's material past. Photographs of individual buildings, historic maps of the nation's agricultural expanse, and descriptions of the household furnishings of the Victorian middle class, the urban immigrant population, and the rural farmer's homestead complete the volume, rooting vernacular architecture to the American people, their lives, and their everyday creations.

The architects of atelier Arcau are always sensitive to the elements of the contexts where they are called on to work. This could be almost the firm's hallmark, if it were visible, but it is a quality that precedes all visibility. The practice does not produce chameleon architecture, with every project tinged with a local character. Atelier Arcau's architecture is not versatile, but neither does it rest on a hard line which produces a style identifiable at first glance. It not only sets itself firstly and necessarily in the service of its first function, or simply submits to it, but enhances its value. * Xavier Fraud - You can't get away from the contextual reading. On whatever terrain it may be, even if it's really ordinary, our questions will always be the same. How will the project be installed on the site? What will it be able to say? What sense should we give to our intentions? How will the residents and users live in it? All the dimensions of this new arrangement are concerned. Architecture, city planning and landscape are inseparable, and we believe that their combination lead to harmonious places. * Julien Veyron - In the ongoing relationship between things urban and architecture, each way of thinking informs the other. What interests us is getting to know the site and who we're dealing with... The studio approach is first of all anthropological. The logic of projects does not have to do with the form of projects. It has to do with the urbanness you have to reckon with, and the urbanness that we want to develop. Concept is virtual, process is pragmatic. * Xavier Fraud - We've never confined ourselves within a response mode or plan. Does the Arcau studio have a style? I don't think so. It doesn't concern me. The architectural expression which has to come out of it can't be predetermined, so as to preserve always more desire and more freedom.

The Pelican Guide to Old Homes of Mississippi Volume II: Columbus and the North features the following areas: Macon, Columbus, Starkville, Aberdeen, Corinth, Holly Springs, Oxford, Sardis, Como, Carrollton, Grenada, and the Greenville Delta. This volume includes all the essential information that will make the area a sightseer's delight: photographs of famous homes and landmarks, locations, hours open, significant features, notable history, and admission policies. Author Helen Kerr Kempe is a former associate editor of the Louisiana Almanac. She has also written The Pelican Guide to Old Homes of Mississippi Volume I Natchez and the South. Her Mississippi guides are significant contributions to the Pelican Guide Series.

This famous study of the planning, financing and building of the New Town in Edinburgh brings to life one of the most remarkable urban expansion programmes ever undertaken. A. J. Youngson brings to life the vigour of the planning debates, the fundraising schemes, the administrative and legislative infrastructure of planning, the construction of public buildings as poles of attraction for speculative building, and all the hopes, quarrels, victories and civic bankruptcy that went into this great experiment. Superbly illustrated with photographs by acclaimed photographer Edwin Smith, along with a selection of contemporary images and a preface by Colin McLean, this book is a classic work of economic and social history, and a fascinating account of the shaping of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Instant Houses presents in more than 450 photos the wide variety of beautiful prefabricated houses.