Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1419467 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Altogether 103 styles of American housing are featured in this book, spanning the earth lodge (circa 300) to the projected space unit (circa 2000). There are full diagrams, history, and a description for each of the Native American and settler homes, including the pueblo, longhouse, and wigwam; the log cabin, garrison house, and saltbox; and on through the Georgian, Greek Revival, false front, Queen Anne, and neomodern. Whether you're a student of architecture, a dabbler in design, a house-history buff or a novice home-buyer attempting to decipher your realtor's descriptions, Lester Walker's American Shelter has a lot to offer.

Customer Reviews

American Shelter: a definite "keeper"
If your bookshelf only has room for one book on American architecture, this should be that book. Most of the books on architecture seem like a lot of style, but not much substance: many pages of pictures, often quite enticing, but leaving the reader with little knowledge of just what constitutes the various architecture styles so illustrated, or how styles relate to one another.

Lester Walker spent hundreds of hours researching various American architectural styles, going to such sources as the 1900's editions of Ladies Home Journal, which published plans for "A Small House With Lots of Room in it" by a young upstart named Frank Lloyd Wright. Walker gives us the first-floor house plans, along with a birds-eye view of Wright's "Small House." In this illustration Walker uses captions and arrows to innumerate the salient features of "Wrightian" architecture.

So it goes throughout American Shelter. Walker starts with the dwellings of American Indians and takes us through over 100 different styles that were popular at one time or another in our diverse history. A read through this book is a stroll through our history. The author not only points out the defining features of each style, but also tells why and how it came into vogue.

Color photos are not the only "must have" features conspicuously absent. Missing is also judgmental, cavalier, snobbery. No architectural style is treated as inferior, common, or "tiresome." Quonset Hut, Converted Train Car, and Prefabricated are given just as much respect as Victorian, International, and Prairie.

Examples of houses of various architects that typify or characterize each style are shown in line drawings with accompanying floor plans and often with illustrations on house building styles or techniques. For example, on page 71 a "method for making cedar clapboards" is illustrated. Balloon, Platform, and Post and Beam framing methods are explained with accompanying illustrations.

The book is about individual dwelling units, not apartment houses, and not commercial or industrial buildings. For what it is, and does, it is the definitive work. I have had many hours of enjoyable reading and learning from this book. My only complaint is with the bookbinder, not the author. Some of the pages of my copy are upside down! Perhaps, like the famous upside-down airplane stamp, my copy is rare and valuable? Then again: perhaps not, but right side up, or upside down, it has been well worth the purchase price.

One final piece of advise: buy the hardback copy, not the paperback. This book is a "keeper", one you will frequenly get down from the bookself to review, loan to friends (holding the friend's firstborn ransome for the book's return), and pass on in your will.

The Best Field Guide to American Domestic Architecture
In the world of architectural field guides, there is a division between the guides that rely heavily on photographs and those that use line drawings to represent buildings. Photographic field guides are good in that you can see actual historic homes. This is a valuable thing for people who like me live very far away from historic areas and rarely see a building over a hundred years old.

However, the great problem with photographic field guides is that it is often times difficult to understand a building style by looking at one or two representative photographs. What's worse is that often times the eye is drawn to details like electric lines or automobiles. One can spend more time trying to identify the decade the photo was taken than on concentrating on the image. For this reason, I prefer field guides that use line drawings to represent buildings. In my opinion, line drawings are a better tool for teaching the different architectural elements that come together to form a style.

Of the field guides that use line drawings, Lester Walker's "American Shelter" is the very best. It is the best for two reasons. First because of the sheer number of styles he identifies. In this book he details 103 styles whereas a typical field guide will usually identifies 20-30 unique styles. Second and foremost, Lester Walker is a very talented artist. His drawings are not hyper technical like the Historical American Building Survey (HABS) drawings which one finds in some field guides. They have a lot of personality which seperates them from what I call the illustrator school of architectural drawings.

I have been collecting field guides for a number of years and this is my favorite guide. That is not to say that there are not other very high quality guides. However, if you need to purchase just one field guide, this is the one. Hopefully, this book will inspire you to start collecting architectural field guides which in my opinion is a most worthy hobby.

A superb tribute to the American home
Lester Walker's "American Shelter" is one of those great reference works which is not only informative, but also fascinating and beautiful. A true illustrated encyclopedia of the American home (as the subtitle says), this book covers a vast range of styles, historical periods, and geographic regions.

Each short chapter--beginning with Native American earth lodges and ending with speculative space station housing--covers a specific type of home architecture in the United States. Walker's straightforward prose is accompanied by cutaway drawings, detailed floor plans, and superbly rendered drawings of home exteriors.

It would be impossible in a short review to name all of the various styles covered by Walker. He covers everything from such well-known styles as the A-frame and Greek Revival to styles that may be less familiar to some: the baled hay and sod homes of 1890s Nebraska, the silo and yurt homes which gained popularity in the 1970s, and more. Another fascinating part of the book is the presence of many famous homes: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, and more.

Along the way, the reader will encounter many wonderful surprises--check out, for example, the "Elephant House" designed by James Lafferty! "American Shelter" is a book that you can pick up and start reading anywhere. But if you read this from cover to cover, you will have taken a truly epic journey with a master artist-historian.