Featuring color photography by Philip Gould and architectural drawings, A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana by Carol McMichael Reese traces the evolution of Town's career, including his work on the Historic American Buildings Survey, his award-winning Modernist designs, and his later houses that came to define Louisiana's residential architecture. This work accompanies an exhibition that originated at the Hilliard Art Museum - University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018 and has since traveled to additional venues.
A. Hays Town changed the face of the Louisiana house. In a career that includes designing more than five hundred homes, he led architects, builders, and homeowners to embrace the finest elements of Louisiana's architectural past. Almost every home built in Louisiana during the last twenty years is in some way inspired by Town's work. The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town honors his legacy as Louisiana's premier residential architect. Color photographs of numerous homes -- including Town's own -- by Philip Gould combined with an illuminating text by Cyril E. Vetter produce a volume that captures the appeal and beauty of the state's finest architectural tradition. Born and raised in rural southwest Louisiana, Hays Town graduated from Tulane University with a degree in architecture in 1926 and worked for a firm in Jackson, Mississippi, for many years. He established his own successful commercial practice in Baton Rouge in 1939, but in the 1960s, Town turned to his abiding passion -- residential architecture. Throughout this chapter of his career, he perfected his inimitable style and emerged as one of the most prominent architects in the South. Town's residential designs are perceptibly influenced by the diverse culture of south Louisiana. His synthesis of the classic Acadian cottage, Spanish courtyards, and exterior French doors with Creole-influenced full-length shutters achieves an original confluence of seemingly disparate yet elegantly balanced themes and forms. Other Town trademarks include pigeonniers, tree alleys, thirteen-foot ceilings, heavy use of such woods as cypress and heart of pine, plantation-style separate structures, and brick floors with a special beeswax finish. The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town illuminates the momentous effect Town has had on the look of Louisiana. Crafted from the perspective of two people, Vetter and Gould, who are not architects but admirers of one man's exceptional talent, this delightful book demonstrates that each Town house is a work of art that fits both person and terrain. At the door of each home, proud owners hang a bronze plaque that says it all: A. Hays Town, Architect.
DIVLearning a new discipline is similar to learning a new language; in order to master the foundation of architecture, you must first master the basic building blocks of its language – the definitions, function, and usage. Language of Architecture provides students and professional architects with the basic elements of architectural design, divided into twenty-six easy-to-comprehend chapters. This visual reference includes an introductory, historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines./divDIV /divDIVWhether you’re new to the field or have been an architect for years, you’ll want to flip through the pages of this book throughout your career and use it as the go-to reference for inspiration, ideas, and reminders of how a strong knowledge of the basics allows for meaningful, memorable, and beautiful fashions that extend beyond trends./divDIV /divDIVThis comprehensive learning tool is the one book you’ll want as a staple in your library./divDIV /div
A new volume from the esteemed architecture firm Historical Concepts features extraordinary homes rooted in tradition and enriched with a modern sensibility. Known for designing welcoming Southern homes, Historical Concepts, one of today's leading traditional architecture firms, is now working on diverse projects across America and in exotic locales, such as the Caribbean and Patagonia. A multigenerational team of architects is extending the firm's founding philosophy--expressing both timeless and inventive perspectives on design. Showcased are beautifully photographed country estates, coastal retreats, and pastoral properties, all weaving the classical principles of symmetry, scale, and proportion with vernacular motifs and artisanal craftsmanship to create stylish and comfortable backdrops for contemporary living. Sophisticated interior decoration and stunning landscapes accompany the architecture, creating a harmonious sense of place. Through engaging stories that inform, Andrew Cogar shows how to reimagine the traditional home--whether an elegant Greek Revival pavilion, a chic Hamptons summer house, or a reinterpretation of a historic Charleston single house--to capture one's unique point of view. Visions of Home is an invaluable resource for those who enjoy the warmth and charm of traditional architecture.
One of the finest architectural photographers in America, Robert W. Tebbs produced the first photographic survey of Louisiana's plantations in 1926. From those images, now housed in the Louisiana State Museum, and not widely available until now, 119 plates showcasing fifty-two homes are featured here. Richard Anthony Lewis explores Tebbs's life and career, situating his work along the line of plantation imagery from nineteenth-century woodcuts and paintings to later twentieth-century photographs by John Clarence Laughlin, among others. Providing the family lineage and construction history of each home, Lewis discusses photographic techniques Tebbs used in his alternating panoramic and detail views. A precise documentarian, Tebbs also reveals a poetic sensibility in the plantation photos. His frequent emphasis on aspects of decay, neglect, incompleteness, and loss lends a wistful aura to many of the images -- an effect compounded by the fact that many of the homes no longer exist. This noticeable vacillation between objectivity and sentiment, Lewis shows, suggests unfamiliarity and even discomfort with the legacy of slavery. Poised on the brink of social and political reforms, Louisiana in the mid-1920s had made significant strides away from the slave-based agricultural economy that the plantation house often symbolized. Tebbs's Louisiana plantation photographs capture a literal and cultural past, reflecting a burgeoning national awareness of historic preservation and presenting plantations to us anew. Select plantations included: Ashland/Belle Helene, Avery Island, Belle Chasse, Belmont, Butler-Greenwood, L'Hermitage, Oak Alley, Parlange, René Beauregard House, Rosedown, Seven Oaks, Shadows-on-the-Teche, The Shades, and Waverly.
The Forever Home provides the foundation to confidently explore what you want, plan your dream home, and find the right professionals to make it a reality. Renowned architect Kevin Harris will guide you through his proven, step-by-step process to design and build a house that fits you so well it becomes your forever home. No matter where you travel, your forever home is the place you feel complete. Inside these pages, you’ll learn how to: • Determine when it makes sense to hire an architect • Evaluate and assemble the design team and construction team that’s right for you • Understand the residential construction process • Use the Hierarchy of Design to make the most important decisions first • Recognize the pitfalls and avoid many common, but ill advised cost-saving schemes The Forever Home will pave the way for you to design and build not only the home of your current dreams, but the home that will be perfect for your children, grandchildren, aging parents, and even you later in life.
An award-winning architect and educator demystifies the process of making architecture and explains why good architectural design matters. The design of cities and buildings affects the quality of our lives. Making the built environments in which we live, work, and play useful, safe, comfortable, efficient, and as beautiful as possible is a universal quest. What many don’t realize is that professional architects design only about five percent of the built environment. While much of what non-architects build is beautiful and useful, the ugliness and inconveniences that blight many urban areas demonstrate that an understanding of good architectural design is vital for creating livable buildings and public spaces. To help promote this understanding among non-architects and those considering architecture as a profession, award-winning architect and professor Hal Box explains the process from concept to completed building, using real-life examples to illustrate the principles involved. To cause what we build to become architecture, we have three choices: hire an architect, become an architect, or learn to think like an architect. In this book, organized as a series of letters to students and friends, Box covers: what architecture should be and do how to look at and appreciate good buildings how to understand the design process, work with an architect, or become an architect an overview of architectural history, with lists of books to read and buildings to see practical guidance about what goes into constructing a building an architect’s typical training and career path how architecture relates to the city where the art of architecture is headed why good architecture matters
For centuries, across nations, dialogue between the domestic and the foreign has affected and transformed architecture. Today these dialogues have become highly intensified. The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture examines how these exchanges manifest themselves in contemporary architecture, in terms of its aesthetic potential and its practice, which, in turn, are impacted by broad economic, cultural and political issues. This book traces how diverse cultural encounters inevitably modify conventional categories, standards and codes of architecture, such as domestic identity, its political and economic representations and the negotiations with what is deemed foreign. Theoretical reflections by distinguished scholars are accompanied by interviews with some of the most influential architects practicing today, as well as stunning visual presentations by professional photographers.
Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. This intriguing book explores the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings.
