5 comments about Intimate Weddings: Planning a Small Wedding that Fits Your Budget and Style.

1. This book was very helpful. We had three months to plan and it has great check lists.



2. You will not be sorry! The information is organized and practical! There are real-life examples that really make sense and will be useful to you if you are planning an intimate wedding. The author also has first-hand knowledge since she has been through the same experience! My favorite part was the budget guide!



3. While planning my wedding, I found this book to be okay. There were some interesting ideas, but nothing that I really found to be too new/novel; nothing I hadn't already seen in a lot of the bridal magazines. After doing a lot of searching, I found the books published by The Knot to be a lot more helpful.



4. Was a gift for my sister and future brother-in-law. Had it shipped to them, but it was never received. Sounds like a good book though.



5. Friedrichsen's book is good to jump start ideas about having an interesting, frugal wedding. The best parts of her book are the profiles done of various couples, how they managed their small wedding, and how they broke down the budget. Especially well done are ideas that the couples used to save money.
   
   The book may not be good for in depth wedding planning, but perhaps no book is good for that. We have turned to Wedding Planning for Dummies, among others, to help us with the details of ceremonies, contracts, etc.
   
   If you're interested in a good introduction to frugal weddings, this is a good place to start.

1 comments about Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Writing Architecture).

1. This may come down as Vidler's best critical work on Modern Architecture and the historicization of the Modern Movement. Through a critical discussion of the parcours of these four major historians [Kaufmann, Rowe, Banham and Tafuri], and by default theoreticians of modern architecture, Vidler effectively focuses on the 'faultlines' of the current architectural 'crisis', arguing, like Habermas before him, for a renewed engagement with the architectural project of Modernity, based on these critical readings that reaffirm the role of history. The conclusion may appear to some as a bit too optimistic, suggesting for instance that the work of Corbusier and Koolhaas come under the same umbrella, but this does not take away from the importance of this book as one of the few significant recent theoretical publications.

5 comments about Design with Nature (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design).

1. My husband is a landscape designer and architect. So, he loves this stuff! I bought it for him as one of his birthday gifts. He has been wanting something of high quality and loves McHarg. I would recommend this book. We keep it on the coffee table because the pictures are wonderful and the design shows through. My husband and I love it!



2. As a former colleague of McHarg's at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960's, and currently working in a planned community he designed (The Woodlands, TX), I decided to buy this book to try to understand the strange idiosyncracies of The Woodlands, TX.
   
   The book is very wordy, but it is well illustrated. McHarg successfully blended community design with natural boundary conditions (watershed management, geology, forestry, slope properties, etc) with the case histories he presented (some of which I remember when serving on an invited basis on jury's in McHarg's academic program). The book's strength is his advocacy of melding human planning needs with nature's boundary conditions.
   
   BUT, does it really work? Only at the expense of the time of people working and living in such a planned community. The inconvenient practices that go with such a planned community require a lot of adjustment that asks a bit much of people who work in such places but don't live there.
   
   But it works fine for the affluent and the unhurried who can afford it.



3. No has estudiado arquitectura si este libro no ha caido en tus manos. Sin Ian Mcharg la arquitectura sostenible no seria posible. Por lo menos la arquitectura sostenible pensada a escala regional."



4. this highly recommended book started out as a compelling read, but became something i had to force myself to finish. it seems to be a series of lectures strung together, which may have been interesting as lectures, but is not cohesive enough to be a book. the good information is lost amidst the rambling style.



5. Anyone studying environmental planning or LA should read this book.

1 comments about Residential Interior Design: A Guide to Planning Spaces.

1. As a textbook purchased for class its great. It works great as a reference guide when your doing a project.

4 comments about Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies are Poised to Transform Building Construction.

1. There are some good ideas on this book, but most of it looks like a manager's meeting powerpoint presentation. There is Too much common sense and simple diagrams. I really expected more.



2. The overall strength of this work is the reminder to architects to look outside their field for inspiration, investigation, and implementation. Process is approached as beyond just "design process" to physical fabrication methodologies in various industries and the architectural conclusions are drawn from a comparative perspective.
   
   The initial theme seems to be interpreted as a mechanized approach void of craft but upon further digestion the intention is to celebrate craft in architecture, the approach the authors have taken in practice.
   
   I applaud the efforts to take what could have been a quite cumbersome topic and distilling it in a concise and intentional way.



3. In this book, the authors compared the present construction process of buildings to that of the automobile, ship building and aerospace industry. This is not new (remember Towards a New Architecture?). While Corb's book talked about end products, this talks about processes. Indeed, the authors presented some impressive research evidence on how the building construction industry can learn from these neighbors by sharing many common features of process and final product between industries.

   However, what is not clear as an example, is the articulated, and perhaps even necessitated need for a building to emulate the joint tolerances of a car or an airplane. While the latter can sometimes determine the life and death of the user, a "half-inch tolerance" on a hospital facade will occur over the "millimeters" simply because there is no pragmatic need for such an emulation. This is, of course, not even an excuse for the lack of craft, but a statement that there should be a real need presented before a necessitated manifestation in form to occur. One simply should not look over to the greener pastures for the sake of doing so. The book is peppered with many such unclear determination and one has to really specify what kind of architecture does what, in a rather blunt way, before assuming with this pretense that emulation is good. Spirit of the Age has erred twice now over the raison d'etre.

   The second major criticism for this book is the uncritical constant comparision between the building and the . As much as I can appreciate the way automakers think of creative ways to make money from us, the allegedly "creative" folks through the streamlining of the process, a car differs vastly from a building because of context. Sure, context is too well hyped these days but surely we can speak the same for a plane or car in any context but we cannot do the same for every building we make. A car is driven in Asia or Europe but a building, as the authors noted, does not move very much. Context, therefore, as well as the ill-defined problem space of design is the problem here.

   Thirdly, one cannot talk about refabricating architecture without commenting on the economical, labor structure of our society. Who are the conceptual workers of this industry? What is their wage and labor structure like? We simply cannot compare industry to industry on such a macro-scale because some fundamental aspect, though microscopic at this scale, dictates much of the process. The automobile or aerospace engineer can streamline their methods compared to architectural designers because of a marked difference between their wage, working and corporate conditions. What about forms of insurance, legal laws governing these different industries? All these are "form-makers" of the design process too. One cannot proceed to such an unbridled admiration of other design processes without at least commenting on these discrepancies.

   The only salvation, in my opinion, of this book, remains to be the salvation of an architect's vision (architects, in this case of two authors). The very last part of the book displayes what modern architects are trained best to do, a marketable vision, possibly manifested in physical or representational format. While this remained as one of the rare books out there to tackle difficult topics of architectural process and methods, it needs a rigorous rework and editing (and perhaps peer review) before what is simplistically presented can be deemed as a useful reference for folks out there who is trying to do what the authors intended.

   As a last reminder, F. Brunelleschi had the might of the Medici's empire backing him when he invented the cranework or the shell of the Dome. One simply cannot compare singularities in history with the challenges that the small to medium size offices face in this country everyday.

   (The author of this review is not an Architect, but is interested in design in the larger context.)




4. Once again, Stephen Kieran and his firm has put out a great book on Architecture. He has totally transformed modern Architecture and taken it to another level. Seeing his work first hand is truly a treat for those of you interested in this field. A gold Medal - Congratulations !

2 comments about European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford History of Art).

1. took far too long to recieve the requested item. Was told it would be 1-2 weeks but recieved the item 6 weeks after purchase. this is the last time i will use this seller.



2. this book must be read with Modern Architecture by Oxford in order to understand the history of architecture. This book covers the must needed areas of the field including, the hut to Palladio, and others up until the rise of modernism, where incidently the book Modern Architecture takes over. I recommend this book in concordance to that book and for the architecture student whether for class or not.

1 comments about The Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice, Student Edition.

1. This was a required text for my daughter's architecture class at the University of California. Someone must think its GOOD!!

1 comments about Statics and Strength of Materials for Architecture and Building Construction.

1. Items arrived in perfect shape and also arrived ahead of schedule...Great seller.

5 comments about How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built.

1. The book addresses another one of these important but rarely discussed architectural issues, which is how building age and evolve over time. What happens when we build projects that by their shape and choice of materials cannot change and evolve but simply freeze and decay. That fate will impact many trophy prize winning architectural projects. The book does a fairly good job at covering all aspects of this topic. I would have liked however more contemporary examples of buildings with specific illustrations to make the subject matter more current to our existing design practices. As a side note some supporting information is incorrect because the data provided to the author by the sources he interviewed was misleading but there was little opportunity for the author at the time to know the difference.



2. In 1997 the BBC aired a six-part TV series called, "How Buildings Learn," based on my book. I was the presenter and co-writer, James Runcie produced it, and Brian Eno provided original music.
   
   The series is now available online at Google Videos. Episode 1 is at the link; from there you can find the other episodes.
   http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852



3. A great review, from the experience, of the dynamics of buildings. A change in the paradigm of how we think of buildings. Professionals of the building sector can't miss it!!



4. This is a book someone foisted upon me unawares and I devoured. I write software for a living and I found this book has a lot to say about software that Brand probably doesn't realize he's saying. His constant return to Christopher Alexander is a dead giveaway: The pattern-language movement Alexander started took the software world by storm in the mid 90's. It is now generally assumed that the pattern-language movement in software is still unfolding. The authors of the first major pattern-language texts are heavily involved in the kind of "Agile" design processes that one associates with what Brand advocates in this book: the idea that the end is the beginning and understanding your work must be an evolutionary process where if it's done right, a building and a system is never finished and never perfect but always improving.



5. I am an acoustical and systems design consultant who specializes in worship and performing arts facilities, and use this book regularly in my practice. I have found no better resource for introducing the facility planning "layperson" to the enormous blind-spot that many in the architectural design and construction profession have regarding the relevance of buildings to the functional needs that should define their design, as well as the ongoing process of maintaining this relevance over time.
   
   While highly specialized rooms such as auditoria do not usually lend themselves to significant modification over time, or to strategies such as "loose fit," Brand's advice about the risk of architectural experimentation in the fundamental form of most buildings is spot on. This book is an extremely engaging read, and also serves as an excellent introduction to other key literature on architectural programming, scenario planning, the evolution of the architectural profession, and so forth.
   
   As other reviewers have suggested, anyone who lives or works in a building can profit from reading this book. I would add that anyone who works in the construction or facility management industries, or who expects to be involved in planning a building project from the perspective of the owner or user, has a duty to seek out the sort of education that this book provides.

2 comments about Lighting Design Basics.

1. If you are looking for a beginner lighting course, this books is just what you need. It goes through lighting applications per room/area, explains how to calculate foot candles, but if you want to read more about lighting plans, layouts, electrical requirements.....I would say - keep looking.
   
   This is a good quick resource with little technical detail.



2. This book is great for designers! It covers everything you need to know and has some great ways for doing calculations for lighting!