Single Family Houses (in DETAIL)

The book describes simple and neat residential building design in detail , shape, and material. The book should be applicable to architects or designers who aspire to work in modernism or minimalism on housing and who desire to improve the residential detil design to be more insighfully clean and blight. As well, the analysis from the publication could be developed to function in other architecture types.

The drawings are exactly like the ones in Detail magazine, which means Americans might have occasional trouble translating some of the terminology, but the presentation is top quality. Features cutting-edge designs that are the stuff of architectural journalism: shed roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows, natural wood slat siding, and, my favorite, a house built with two-foot-thick sand-lime brick cavity walls. Not your average homes; then again, no reason to compile them into a book if they were.

In itself this is a beautiful book. The book contains sixteen, excellently crafted homes with superb photography. The houses are organized into 4 categories: Timber, Steel, Concrete, and Masonry. The drawings (building/wall sections, plan details) are very clear and reveal some hidden truths. The book also contains three short essays (Single family house: Myth and Reality; A Small House with a Garden; The Image of the House) that are equally as inspiring.Yes, these are high-end, avant-garde, mostly European homes as the previous reviewer has pointed out. But, Isn't this the type of book us more conventional architects should be getting our inspiration from? Perhaps some of these elegant details and constructs could trickle down into conventional residential practice, even speculative housing. If every residential architect were to study these types of details and enlighten their clients, I'm sure the quality of the built environment would improve. Let's broaden our horizons.

Amazon's listing's for these fine books is a little screwy. There are 2 versions of "Single Family Housing", which are substantially the same but have different covers. Had I ordered the one published in 2006 without noticing this first in person, I'd have been disappointed.At any rate, each volume features a few worthwhile essays and a collection of exquisitely presented photos and drawings. Despite the fact that all dimensions are metric, and many of the materials are not common to construction in the United States, there is a lot of inspiration to be had in these pages.

This book is a great collection of different modernist works from Tadao Ando to Eduardo Souto de Moura. The drawings included are more specific and illustrative than other publications. Would highly recommend this book to other modernists and architects and look forward to the next edition.

The book was exactly as I expected, high quality, detailed explanations in the Caliber of detail magazine. I will defiantly be purchasing the other books in this series.