American Houses is a historical guide to the architecture of the American home. While other architectural field guides show only façades, this book includes floor plans, showing how the form of a house arises from its function. Photographs and drawings of exteriors illustrate the significant field marks of each style and help pinpoint the key elements that can identify a house even when it has been remodeled beyond recognition. Beautifully illustrated, clearly written, and impeccably researched, American Houses is an essential reference for anyone interested in the history of American residential architecture.
Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons are at the forefront of a movement among architects today who draw inspiration from the wellspring of the classical traditions in architecture. They have developed a body of work that reflects and adheres to the long-held theories of proportion and order passed down through many past generations of scholarship and practice. The firm's office also served as the headquarters for Henry Hope Reid's Classical America, the only organization offering an alternative to modernist aesthetics until the establishment of the Institute of Classical Architecture in 1992. The twenty-four projects in this volume show the firm's consistent focus on classical architectural beauty, whether the chosen style be Palladian, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Georgian, Adamesque, Neo-classical, British or Dutch Colonial, Colonial Revival, or even East Coast Shingle Style, in all of which Fairfax & Sammons are eminently proficient. The projects selected out of the firm's large body of work include country houses located in Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Florida, including the renovation of town houses and apartments in New York City—all presented in new color photography.
America has an abundance of fascinating and varied house styles, as fascinating and diverse as its people. This unique book will allow readers to recognize the architectural features and style of virtually any house they encounter.
In America, we are eager to claim ownership: our homes, our ideas, our organs, even our own celebrity. But beneath our nation’s proprietary longing looms a troublesome question: what does it mean to own something? More simply: what is property? The question is at the heart of many contemporary controversies, including disputes over who owns everything from genetic material to indigenous culture to music and film on the Internet. To decide if and when genes or culture or digits are a kind of property that can be possessed, we must grapple with the nature of property itself. How does it originate? What purposes does it serve? Is it a natural right or one created by law? Accessible and mercifully free of legal jargon, American Property reveals the perpetual challenge of answering these questions, as new forms of property have emerged in response to technological and cultural change, and as ideas about the appropriate scope of government regulation have shifted. This first comprehensive history of property in the United States is a masterly guided tour through a contested human institution that touches all aspects of our lives and desires. Stuart Banner shows that property exists to serve a broad set of purposes, constantly in flux, that render the idea of property itself inconstant. Despite our ideals of ownership, property has always been a means toward other ends. What property signifies and what property is, we come to see, has consistently changed to match the world we want to acquire.
This beautifully illustrated tour of America's houses begins in 1640 with the early roots of American style -- a combination of European skill and attitude combined with American know-how. This architectural journey continues on through the 18th and 19th centuries, through the Greek Revival, the Americanization of the Gothic Revival, and the early Colonial Revival. The houses of the 20th century are the main attraction as House Styles in America delves into the major movements in the Romantic Revivals of the 1920s and 1930s: English, French, and Spanish. Replete with 200 color photographs, this architectural journey is an essential and beautiful guide for realtors, tourists, and students of architecture.
Long before designing his signature Usonian houses, Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned an earlier series of affordable models for the middle class: The American System-Built Homes. He developed seven floorplans of varying size and layout, standardized so that materials could be precut at the factory to reduce costs. Only a few years after the project began, the United States entered World War I, and all home construction was stalled due to lumber shortages. Wright then turned his attention to other projects, and with fewer than twenty built, the American System-Built Homes were all but forgotten.In 2011, Jason Loper and Michael Schreiber purchased the only American System-Built Home constructed in Iowa, the Meier House, which set them on a course of refurbishing and researching their new residence. In This American House, Loper and Schreiber trace the history of the Meier House through its previous owners, and shed light on this underexplored period of Wright's oeuvre. With a preface by John H. Waters, the Preservation Programs Manager of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, This American House addresses what it means to be the stewards of a piece of history.
Albert, Righter & Tittman Architects create finely crafted houses that pay homage to classic American house styles yet are adapted with skill, mastery and a good dose of irreverence to suit contemporary American life. At first glance, their Cambridge Cupola House loks like a typical mid-19th-century Greek Revival house, but on closer inspection, one realises that nothing is quite where it should be. The grand, cupola-topped rotunda entrance, for instance, is located not in the front, but on the side of the house! The reason? To increase the living space for the inhabitants. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned photographs, as well as with plans, drawings and watercolours, this sumptuous volume celebrates AR & Ts timeless, innovative designs and explores the historical styles on which they are based from Classical to Shingle, from Carpenter Gothic to Cape. Focusing on the superb craftsmanship and exquisite detailing of AR & Ts exteriors, interiors and outbuldiings, each chapter features one or more sidebars highlighting their inventive use of architectural elements, including columns, fireplaces, balustrades and moldings. It will be a trove of design ideas for professionals and homeowners alike.
In the first book of its kind, architectural critic Michael Webb and Esto photographer Roger Straus III examine 35 extraordinary modern houses that have been restored, enhanced, or extended by new owners who see them as timeless classics. Built in the heyday of modernism, from the 1930s through the early 1960s, these houses were designed by exceptional architects for themselves or for adventurous clients. A few were preserved as time capsules, but most endured years of neglect or abuse and might easily have been torn down. Webb explores how these houses were created-- as daring experiments or as creative responses to site and climate-- and the research and effort that went into their restoration. Included here are villas that fuse craft and invention, machines for living, and residences that embrace the landscape. Here, too, are houses inspired by the purity of classical temples, and frugal dwellings that have been sensitively enlarged. After a long eclipse, these houses and the enlightened attitudes they embody are being rediscovered by creative individuals searching for distinctive, open, light-filled places to live. Modernism is a way of living, more than a style, and this book celebrates the architects and owners who respect its character and scale. Also included are nearly 200 photographs taken by Roger Straus, all of which were specially commissioned for this book.
