5 comments about Earth-Sheltered Houses: How to Build an Affordable....

1. An excellent reference for those who are interested in Earth Bermed and Earth Sheltered houses. His attention to detail in the excavation and foundation chapters is worth the price of the book alone. Especially when there is a lack of in depth internet resources available for those wishing to build their own earth sheltered house. Although this book deserves the 5 stars for fulfilling its basic promise, I wish he had devoted some time to discussing plumbing for a simple structure. But overall, he gives this reader 90% of the information necessary to start a small sized earth bermed house.
   
   If you are looking to have an earth roof, you will need to purchase his other book "Timber Framing" where he goes into rich detail the structural engineering requirements of load and tension and compression. With these 2 books, you should be able to complete rough plans for a structural engineer to review and stamp with little or none modifications.
   
   Also, for those searching for energy efficient stoves, I recommend aprovecho.org's institutional rocket stove or Ianto Evans Rocket Stove which are both 300% more efficient than traditional wood stoves.
   
   On a conclusionary note. I priced out timber framing members for the roof section of a square 30'x30' roof and it came out to over $9000 in timber alone ( not including the tongue & groove planking). Compare that to a traditional 8/12 pitch roof somewhere in the $3000 price range for rafters, ridge, and plywood. Put a metal roof on that and you should be good for over 30 years atleast. Sure the earth roof is better for the ecosystem and eye but a regular roof allows placement of rainwater collection, solartubes and solar heaters/panels as well. For the cost conscious, I have come to the conclusion that a traditional roof that is superinsulated along with the earth berming techniques in this book will allow people to have their own energy efficient house for less than they think.



2. This is where I started when I began exploring of building my house underground. What bothers me is so much cement. I like Mike Oehler better. Check him out too and decide for yourself.



3. This is the so called "holy book" for building an earth sheltered home. Definitely should have started 20 years ago but it is needed for today's building needs. Energy efficient - low cost ( pretty labor intensive ) Awesome to build. Have a five year plan.



4. I thought the book was a very informative and practical account as well as very well produced and edited.
   
   Thanks!



5. This is a great book! If you really wanted to build your own earth-sheltered home you could certainly do it using the information presented here (though a wiser course would be to pick up more sources). Thanks to this book and "The New Ecological Home", building our own home with environmentally conscious materials and possibly earth bermed or sheltered is high on our list of priorities. There is only one complaint I have about many books of this variety. They tend to cover difficulties with things like building code and location very lightly.
   
   Building code and location are going to be huge factors in building an earth sheltered structure, especially one made with fewer traditional modern building materials. Difficulties with local regulations or inflexible inspectors/building comissions may prevent you from being able to build in the area you want. This may drive an individual to build in locations further away from urban centers where they might work. Commuting is no fun; and if you wanted to look at it from an environmental standpoint commuting a greater distance to work, grocery market or schools has just raised your carbon footprint and negated some of the savings your earth sheltered home has created.
   
   I would highly recommend that individuals check local code thoroughly and choose a location suitable to their daily needs such as work or other social necessities before building. One need not build out of logs and plaster to have an earth sheltered home, though I understand that the point of this book is to have an affordable home and avoiding expensive modern materials. Take a bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish; if you are purchasing this book it is somewhat safe to assume you are concerned about the environment. Please also consider materials used. Rob Roy's excellent use of modern materials such as rubber membranes and concrete block are high in initial cost to produce, environmentally speaking, but last longer and provide more benefit to long term savings such as insulative qualities and maintenance costs than lesser materials might. A lot of other earth-sheltered builders advocate natural materials to a fault, they have people using composting toilets and straw-bale homes. While effective in an environmental sense, they are not attractive to the average person. Rob Roy's book moves in a positive direction by using modern materials with environmentally conscious construction to create a home that just about anybody would like to live in.

No comments about Thom Filicia Style: Inspired Ideas for Creating Rooms You'll Love.

5 comments about Working Alone: Tips & Techniques for Solo Building.

1. If you use just one or two tips from this book (and you will) it is worth the investment in time and money. It is well written with simple concise instructions and advice. A little humor goes a long way toward making this an easy enjoyable read.



2. I have no read the entire book, however at a glance, I can see that there are many helpful ideas. Surely worth the $



3. Dobra ksiaka dla pracujacych samotnie lub dla tych, ktorych pracownicy zostawili "na lodzie". Zawiera sporo przykaldow jak dac s obie rad samemu. Autor zwraca te uwag na to, e niektóre prace powinny zostac wykonane przez podwykonawców ze wzgledu na wymagane doswiadczenie lub regulacje prawne. Polecam. Wydane pieniadze nie beda zmarnowane. Jest to dobra inwestycja.



4. This is a book I saw on store shelves for a while, then couldn't find it anywhere. So, I was very pleased to find it online. It is everything I was expecting, very informative. Lots of useful information for doing carpentry work, that may need a helper for a short time. A great deal of help if you don't need the helper longer than a few minutes.



5. If you have never done any type of construction, buy this book. Even if you have only visited a construction site once in your life this book is below your expectations. The majority of the book is showing that taking two pieces of wood nailed at 90 degrees with a triangle placed perpendicular to the joint in different jobs. I thought I would learn something new but I was wrong. I would have returned it but it would cost just as much to ship it back as it cost in the first place.

5 comments about Hunt Country Style.

1. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is filled with beautiful photographs of this unique part of our country. I bought the book because my home is decorated in "hunt style," but found that what I loved most about it was that it was replete with history about the area. Anyone who has or has had a love affair with a horse will love the book for that reason alone.



2. Beautifull book. This book explores some of the "beautifull" homes in the Middleburg area. The pictures are very well done and the written article on each house is superb. The preservation of these homes is a delight to see, especially "Welbourne" and "Oakland Green". This author has captured the "essence" of old homes in the "Northern Virginia" area.



3. I briefly previewed Hunt Country Style in a store before ordering it. When the book arrived, I was naturally able to get into it more thoroughly. Frankly, I am going to give my copy away rather than keep it on a book shelf. Although I recognize the goal of the authors, many of the rooms were simply mediocre, the settings not so well done. I have been around the Blue Grass and many parts of Virginia, and much of the decorating I saw in this book didn't strike me as being so good or in keeping with the best in those areas -- which, in fact, have some of the prettiest work anywhere in the country. Sorry to be so harsh, but the more time I spent with this book (again last evening), the more these feelings surfaced. I will say that many of the exteriors were far more fascinating than the rooms inside, and the text was insightful.



4. The book is informative and the pictures are splendid. However, I came across a substantial printing error on page 48 that detracts. The last sentence is not continued on page 49 or 50, so the narrative is incomplete. This error should have been caught in editing. The publisher refused to acknowledge the error or do anything about it.



5. This book does not disappoint in photography and text as it samples some beautiful Virginia Hunt Country homes and farms. A brief historical and chronological chapter heading of each featured home is included at the top of the page. The text is interesting without being tedious and there are enough beautiful photographs of each property's interiors and exteriors to leave one completely satisfied. The only fault is that on page 48 the text ends in an incomplete sentence, which appears to be a printing error.

5 comments about The Big Book of Small House Designs: 75 Award-Winning Plans for Your Dream House, All 1,250 Square Feet or Less.

1. The type and drawings in this book are so small you need a magnifying glass to read it. This book might be more suited to the classroom.



2. When I buy a book I either want to learn or relax. In this case I wanted to learn and had to really concentrate because of the lack of pictures in it. Great plans, great book but the lack of pictures makes it difficult to read.



3. I knew the book wouldn't be a great resource but I thought it might have some reason for having been published other than the author and publisher just trying to cash in on the "not so big" / "green" trend.
   
   There is really no redeeming quality in this book. Most of the houses are severely outdated and are poorly proportioned. Except for one or two, they don't even look designed by an architect, they just look like run-of the mill cracker boxes, some with poorly planned additions. There's no useful information on how to best economize space or anything. The "design" information is useless because the illustrations are so bad they are painful to look at. Some are so muddy, it looks as if the book were published using water damaged drawings and a broken Xerox machine.
   
   I apologize for not editing this review, but this book has already wasted enough of my time. If you're looking for something more current, try James Grayson Trulove's 25 Houses Under 1500 Square Feet. It's more design oriented, even if does have a lot of filler. It's not a 5 star by any stretch of the imagination. At least his illustrations are legible and the photos make the book look produced by professionals that actually care about design and architecture.



4. Be warned. This book contains only 2D home plans. Their are no photos besides the one on the cover.



5. The book have a lot of good ideaas for how to draw / design houses. There is a lack of pictures of the actual solutions, in order to give a good idea of how the the solutions actually work.
   Jan T.

5 comments about The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live (Susanka).

1. I ordered this book after reading great reviews since I was in the middle of trying to work out the purchase of a turn of the century home where space was the size of just that, turn of the century. The Amazon review picked all the best photo's in the book and the only pages worth reading in it, so I bought it. I was extremely disappointed to receive a book that had too many 1980 - 1990's dated, uninspiring interiors and not so much in the way of smart architectural choices to think about, as was advertised.



2. First of all, I bought this book used and it was not in very good condition. A page that I really wanted to read was missing, for one thing. Unfortunately, I can't recall the seller's name now but I left a bad review when I received no response to my concern.
   
   But anyway, the book itself was very good. My husband and I are remodeling a house built in 1949 which used every nook and cranny for some function. It doesn't fit the modern concept of lots of empty space, so we are working on creating a little more empty space while using some of Susanka's ideas for making certain areas more compact. We are expanding our kitchen into a porch, but the ceiling in the porch is lower and this book gave us the idea to just keep it as it is because lowered ceilings add character and are something Frank Lloyd Wright used. I also like her recommendations for wood trim and moulding to warm up rooms and use many windows to bring the outside in. As my title implies, some of the details are pretty outdated such as any picture involving a computer and the kitchen chairs, but that can be overlooked since the overall ideas are still very usable.



3. The Not So Big House was given me by a craftsman friend who had used it building his new, wonderful home.
   I kept this book through my new addition / remodel project of 7 months, using it as the reference for my decisions.
   The ideas are sound; easy to understand and implement. I recommend The Not So Big House to anyone embarking on a home building project who loves good design and is on a budget.



4. This book was absolutely awesome. Beautifully illustrated, excellent content, and I totally agree with the idea that McMansions are not the way to go. I'd much rather have a smaller home that has been personalized to me and made beautiful than some big, cold half-empty McMansion.



5. I was expecting her projects to downsize to ~1000 square feet. It felt like she was reducing large McMansions to smaller McMansions. Good photographs though!

5 comments about Compact Houses: Architecture for the Environment.

1. This is basically just a coffee table book - plenty of nice pictures but light on substance. If you want detailed (even semi detailed) information on compact design, space saving ideas and the like than look elsewhere.



2. As a member of the Small House Society I love this book. The houses are small and to the point without all the clutter some small houses tend to have. And as the title says its Compact Houses: Architecture for the Environment. And in an era of McMansions its so refreshing to see small homes that use small lots to make the best use of the land and provide for the most open and airy feeling home. Or for those who like myself love the idea of a 500-800 square foot home in an open field that is environmentally sound but also simple and minimalist this is a great book.



3. I enjoyed the wide variety of projects presented. I'm a visual person, so thought there could have been more photos per home to orientate oneself with the accompanying floor plans.
   
   Overall, I return to this book (amongst others of its genre in my collection) because of the celebration of small project design.
   
   This is not for those who dislike modern, minimilistic elevations.



4. Empty square boxes; cold and modern. The flat roofs would never work in the northern climate.



5. I review a lot of architecture books, and this one more than most makes me want to go out and build a new house. The subject of the book is small houses. It consists of pictures and the story of some fifty houses, all of which are less than 1,300 square feet. Many of them are much less than 1,300 feet, indeed down into the 300-400 square foot size.
   
   I live in a small house -- 900 square feet or so -- that's about a hundred years old. But compared to the layout, the beauty the simplicity of design, mine's a dump. I'm getting the urge to go visit a realtor friend. One thing about these houses is that many of them are on what would be considered hard to build on lots. And such lots tend to be cheap. There's a new architect in town that's fresh out of school and may have more originality than the older guys. Maybe if I give her this book, with a few houses marked. Hmmmmm!
   
   One thing I didn't like, most of the bed rooms are on the second floor. I was in a house once that had a fire. The amount of smoke generated in just a minute or two was incredible. I don't want a bed room upstairs, if necessary I want to be able to close the door to keep the smoke out and get out through a wondow or emergency door.
   
   Other than that, this is a great idea book. The pictures are beautiful. There's not as much detail as I would like, but adding detail would have to mean either fewer houses or bigger book, so I guess it's a nice balance.

4 comments about Great Streets.

1. i love the drawing styles and methods presented in this book. i recommend it for anybody who loves buildings and great streets of our world.



2. This wonderful book consideres the civic street from many perspecitives and describes it with poetic attention. The author has spent days on these great streets and brings careful measurement and observation to his carefully crafted text. If everyone planning streets and highways in America read this book and visited one of two of these great streets, it would enable a huge improvement.

   This book studies the street not from the simple American perspecitve of high velocity traffic sewar, but from the realities of a place to hang out. eat lunch, shop, socialize, people watch, court, celebrate and be. The read how these places work in this book is to realize how much our desperate focus on the automobile costs us.

   Buy this book and photocopy some of its illustrations for your next public hearing on town planning.




3. This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the study of urbanism.



4. ...this is a reference book in the sense that it mentions so many important and peculiar streets in the world, many of which, I'm sure, you've heard about or possibly even visited. Mr. Jacobs' accounts of his own travels and his feelings while strolling down those streets could even put this book in the travel journal caegory, complete with beautiful sketches by the author himself. Not only the sketches, but the technical and historical information, (like street dimensions, the schematic comparison of several different city plans worlwide and the decline of once great streets) establish this book as a constant source of information for Architects and Urban Planners, as well as students.

   I could clearly recognize the Traveler, the Urban Scholar and the Artist in Mr. Jacobs as I took a stroll down these great streets through the drawings and heartfelt passages of his book.

3 comments about Tom Kundig: Houses.

1. It has it all...big picture (site info, plans/sections/elevations and design sketches) to little picture (construction details and process).
   Too bad the recently published Ebsworth monograph isn't as comprehensive as this...



2. In a world of inflated egos and misplaced priorities, Tom Kundig rushes in with a clear view, a warm heart and an undisputable eye for beauty. His whimsical but exact and gorgeuos designs display a playfulness that catagorizes a true professional who does not "take himself too seriously" and works to infuse joy in his client's life.
   I had the same exhuberant reaction to his work that I had the first time I saw a Jean Michel Basquiat painting up close and personal in 1987...a true artist, an undisputed original.



3. I own many books dedicated to a single architects work. Often times these type of books display two or three rooms of a house and never get into the nitty gritty of a project. "Tom Kundig: Houses" is different. This book leaves little to the imagination, offering sometimes up to 15-20 pages to a single project. The pictures are very clear and tell a lot about the concept of a house as a whole. The only knock I'd say is that every project is so similar to the next that it becomes hard to differentiate. But if you admire his style, that shouldn't be much of a problem.

1 comments about Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture.

1. As the former Director of Material Research at Material ConneXion, Liat Margolis combined her many years of experience in innovative multi-industry materials research with the professional design experience of her co-author and fellow Harvard GSD graduate, Alexander Robinson in "Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture."
   
   "Vertical landscapes also represent a conceptual shift toward a synthesis between landscape and architecture; building facades, for example, can be embedded within emergent, active and responsive skins..." Liat Margolis and Alexander Robinson wrote.
   
   They continued to discuss various living systems and applications demonstrated with real examples, including:
   
   Launch (Multi-tiered Vine Park, Misting Vine Pergola, Wind Adapted Road Canopy Structure, Fire-Escape Ecosystem, Parasitic Vegetal Structure)
   
   Stratify (Mechanically Stabilized Landform, Floating Glass Plain, Multi-Operational Modular Surface, Gradient of Resilience, Surface Inversion)
   
   Fluid (Weaving Porous and Non- porous Surfaces, Inflatable Dam System, Stormwater Garden, Drop Structures for Suburban Stormwater System, Networked Sidewalk Stormwater System, Bio-technical Wave and Erosion Control Structures)
   
   Grooming (Tree Crutches Growing Guide, Artificial Winter for a Bamboo Garden, Saltwater Herbicide System, Low-Maintenance Perennial Plantings, Stunted Growth Pattern)
   
   Digestive (Bio-Remediation Park Design, Fluvially Integrated Effluent Wetlands, On-site Sewage Treatment System, Ground Reconstitution Strategy, Strategic Contaminated Soil Placement)
   
   Translate (Pheumatic Body, Power by Wind, the Ground is a Turntable, Weather Informed Park Access System, Fiber Optic Marsh)
   
   Volatile (Responsive Cloud Machine, Computer Animated Rain, Dynamic Thermal Wind Wall, Impression of Rain).
   
   There is a helpful list of products and technologies at the end of the book.
   
   "Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture" has 191 pages and many color interior photos and illustrations. It is a good reference book for both design major students and seasoned professional designers.
   
   Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated," LEED AP, AIA