Compact Houses: Architecture for the Environment
by Cristina Del Valle
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cristina Del ValleEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-20
ISBN: 0789313499
Number of pages: 420
Publisher: Universe
Book Reviews of Compact Houses: Architecture for the Environment
Book Review: Interesting subject - shame about the book
Summary: 2 Stars
I had high hopes for this book. I've always found tiny houses fascinating, especially Japanese ones, and here's a book about that very subject, with many Japanese houses.
Superficially, it seems fine: the book feels nice, and a flick through reveals plenty of colour photos of minimalist house interiors. It ought to be good. So how did they mess up?
First, the houses in question aren't always all that compact, though some certainly are. The criteria is that they should be no more than 1300 square feet in terms of floor space. Measure your own house - it would probably qualify for this book. But okay, some of the houses are a more challenging sub-500 square feet, so we'll let that go.
The book is laid out in quite a rigid format. Each house gets about seven or eight pages to itself. There's a brief text intro, then a few pages of photos. The graphic design is the same all the way through and a bit unadventurous. Each house has accompanying plans and elevation drawings.
Which sounds fine. But let's start with the text. The one page of blurb for each house is frankly badly written, and pretty much the same for each house. You soon tire of the phrase 'floods the building with light', which is a typically overused and not very enlightening phrase. That's what windows do isn't it? Mostly you get the most uninteresting description of basic shapes and materials. There's never a whiff of insight into the architects' thought processes. Worse, the text is often banal and cliched, like it's written by a teenager. And there are mistakes.
There are also a couple of lines of text with the third page of photos, but these are to the same standard as the main text. What you soon notice is missing are captions to the photos, and this is a serious problem. Why? Because the photos aren't especially good at revealing the buildings. You really need them explained. At least there plans, you may say, but these too are poor: they're too small and hard to fathom, too technical. You will need a magnifying glass and a good imagination.
I have my suspicions that despite a couple of famous arhitects' names on the cover, most of the houses in the book are quite ordinary. Some are presented with no furniture at all and it's like browsing through a shed catalogue. Without the evidence that somebody lives in a building you get no idea of how somebody might use the space.
So the book's supposed to be about the cleverness of small buildings, about ingenuity. But it's really hard to see what these stark little houses are all about. Most of them don't seem clever at all, just rather bleak.
I really think you should see this book in person before you buy it because it is not what it seems.
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