Product Description

Architectural historian Rachel Carley offers a richly detailed guide to 500 years of American home design. More than 600 precisely detailed illustrations show readers how to identify and describe a house of a particular style. Every element that may be found on a Beaux Arts townhouse, a Navajo hogan, or a Craftsman bungalow is displayed. An essential reference for American homeowners, restorers, and old-house buffs who, by the year 2000, will spend more on home renovation and restoration than on new-home construction. 600 illus.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50136 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From School Library Journal
YA?Over 500 illustrations trace domestic architecture from indigenous dwellings of Native American groups to contemporary homes of the 1990s. Each of the 12 chapters begins with a brief narrative that summarizes a type, period, or style of architecture. Multiple interior and exterior views of representative buildings (including outbuildings) are well labeled. Features such as stairs, doors, windows, framing and wall construction, and brickwork are clearly illustrated. Insets with additional text illuminate many of the pictures. Students curious about the structures around them or seeking information for design or history classes, and apprentice carpenters will be well served, and rewarded, by this volume.?Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This attractive dictionary presents the details and styles of residential architecture in the United States through over 500 annotated drawings. Skibinski and Lam base these examples on magazine illustrations and measured drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey. Particularly useful are the clearly delineated illustrations that focus on construction technology (the anatomy of a double-hung sash and a balloon frame building, for example). Carley's (The Backyard Book, LJ 5/1/88) text would have benefited from a more expansive discussion of regional variations in style and specific information with which to date buildings. While the most useful book of this type remains Virginia and Lee McAlester's Field Guide to American Houses (LJ 8/84), this dictionary, designed for use by homeowners and curious tourists, is a welcome addition to the field. [For another view of this work, see "Best References of 1995, LJ 4/15/95. p. 38.-Ed.]-H. Ward Jandl, National Park Svc., Washington, D.C.
--H. Ward Jandl, National Park Svc., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This collection of detailed black-and-white drawings of houses and other domestic buildings (barns, garages, gazebos) is presented in 12 chapters arranged chronologically, from Native American dwellings to contemporary trends. Each chapter is introduced by one page of text, and additional comments accompany the illustrations. Each drawing is labeled with the names of various architectural details.

Several examples are provided for each time period. For example, seven drawings reflect Federal-style homes in the chapter on neoclassical styles. The section on prefab housing in the postwar chapter includes traditional kit structures as well as Quonset huts and mobile homes. Some drawings highlight special interior or exterior features: fireplaces, staircases, gates, and so on. A series of inserts called "anatomies" look at basic construction methods: trusses, double-hung sashes, log notching. Floor plans are often provided. One helpful feature is that common usage is included in parenthesis next to technical terms that accompany illustrations; for example, split-wood shingles are also defined as shakes, a thatched sun shelter is also identified as a ramada.

Intended for architecture students and design professionals, this book could also be used as a resource for secondary school American history units. The first chapter covers Native American dwellings such as Algonquin wigwams, Apache wikiups, Navaho hogans, and Tlingit plank houses, and chapter 8 deals with folk and frontier houses. The index includes all the terms used as labels.

A better choice for public and school collections is the Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of Buildings (Dorling Kindersley, 1992), which uses photographs as well as illustrations and spans all sorts of structures from ancient through modern times. Other visual dictionaries, such as the Macmillan Visual Desk Reference (1993) and What's What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World (Hammond, 1981), also include sections on architecture that satisfy many browsing and general reference needs. However, as a specialized resource, Carley's unique graphic guide will be a welcome addition to architecture and design collections.

Customer Reviews

An Ambitious Field Guide to Domestic Architecture
Although the illustrations in this book are not as beautiful as the ones in Lester Walker's "American Homes", this book is very ambitious in its presentations. Many field guides to American homes concentrate solely on identifying a style. Usually, there are only a few brief descriptions of the architectural details that help define a style.

What makes "The Visual Diction of American Domestic Architecture" such a pleasure is the sheer ambition of its coverage. Not only are there detailed descriptions of building exteriors, there are also detailed desciptions of interior features. As an example, not many field guides detail interior framing plans or such important features like staircases and fireplaces. If that were not enough, there are also some representative floor plans.

I have been collecting field guides for a number of years and this is one of the best. If you want to go beyond picking out key features of a distinct architectural style and want to delve deeper into building details, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

excellent line drawings demonstrate styles
Not comprehensive enough in scope to be a true dictionary of architectural style, but certainly provides the visual images necessary to recognize the styles. Included floor plans also demonstrate the various modes. Good survey of vernacular styles, often overlooked in other texts.

Real McCoy!
I guess it isn't an easy thing to compose an illustrative guide on such complicated and multilayered portion of Architecture as American domestic styles, but all are included here: easily recognizable types, details, even construction methods! Special thanks to the Illustrator: the pictures are neither "overillustrated" nor of too "academic" appearance - just restrained professional still artistic graphic. As an international Architect often working for an American architectural firm I will surely make use of it.