A Homeowners Guide to the Custom Home Building Process introduces the new homeowner to the paperwork and processes that it takes to build a home from the ground up. The Homeowners Guide walks you through contractor selection, bidding and contract administration, all the way to project completion. You will learn of some warning signs along the way, so you dont get taken advantage of. Building your new home can be an enjoyable experience, by educating yourself, staying positive, and visualizing the outcomeyour dream house. I have personally known Christy for over twenty years. Christy is very personable, honest, hard-working, and dedicated. She has an excellent understanding of the construction industry and associated paperwork, and her estimates have always been accurate. Paul U. Dritenbas, AIA, principal architect
This volume explains the designer's role in the creation of new buildings from the development of the plan through to completion. It expands on the first edition including sections on CAD and sustainability, incorporating updates to legislation and adding new illustrations and discussion points.
Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings are sexy, but few realize the value in existing buildings and how easy it is to get to “zero energy” or low-energy consumption through deep energy retrofits. Existing buildings can and should be retrofit to reduce environmental impacts that contribute to climate change, while improving human health and productivity for building occupants. In The Power of Existing Buildings, academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save the world. The insights and practical experience of Sroufe, Stevenson, and Eckenrode, along with the project case study examples, provide new insights on investing in existing buildings for building owners, engineers, occupants, architects, and real estate and construction professionals. The Power of Existing Buildings helps decision-makers move beyond incremental changes to holistic, results-oriented solutions.
Neufert's Architects' Data is an essential reference for the initial design and planning of a building project. It provides, in one concise volume, the core information needed to form the framework for the more detailed design and planning of any building project. Organised largely by building type, it covers the full range of preliminary considerations, and with over 6200 diagrams it provides a mass of data on spatial requirements. Most illustrations are dimensioned and each building type includes plans, sections, site layouts and design details. An extensive bibliography and a detailed set of metric/ imperial conversion tables are included. Since it was first published in Germany in 1936, Ernst Neufert's handbook has been progressively revised and updated through 39 editions and many translations. This fourth English language edition is translated from the 39th German edition, and represents a major new edition for an international, English speaking readership. Reviews of the Previous Edition: "Neufert's Architects' Data was the first book I bought when I started my studies in architecture. It was invaluable for me then and it is still a useful aid in my designs." —Cesar Pelli "With this thorough rewrite Neufert has produced yet again an invaluable reference book." —The Architects' Journal
Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective presents the principles of the practice-oriented research programmes in the CSCW and HCI domains, explaining and examining the ideas and motivations behind basing technology design on ethnography. The focus throughout is on generating ethnographically informed accounts of the building process and discussing the concepts of cooperative work and coordinative practices in order to frame technology development. Lars Rune Christensen provides an invaluable resource for these communities in this book. Illustrated with real examples from the building process, he reports on the cooperative work and coordinative practices found, allowing readers to feel that they know, from the point of view of the people working in the building process, what it is like to coordinate and do this kind of cooperative work.
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
