American Houses is a historical guide to the architecture of the American home. While other architectural field guides show only façades, this book includes floor plans, showing how the form of a house arises from its function. Photographs and drawings of exteriors illustrate the significant field marks of each style and help pinpoint the key elements that can identify a house even when it has been remodeled beyond recognition. Beautifully illustrated, clearly written, and impeccably researched, American Houses is an essential reference for anyone interested in the history of American residential architecture.

Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons are at the forefront of a movement among architects today who draw inspiration from the wellspring of the classical traditions in architecture. They have developed a body of work that reflects and adheres to the long-held theories of proportion and order passed down through many past generations of scholarship and practice. The firm's office also served as the headquarters for Henry Hope Reid's Classical America, the only organization offering an alternative to modernist aesthetics until the establishment of the Institute of Classical Architecture in 1992. The twenty-four projects in this volume show the firm's consistent focus on classical architectural beauty, whether the chosen style be Palladian, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Georgian, Adamesque, Neo-classical, British or Dutch Colonial, Colonial Revival, or even East Coast Shingle Style, in all of which Fairfax & Sammons are eminently proficient. The projects selected out of the firm's large body of work include country houses located in Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Florida, including the renovation of town houses and apartments in New York City—all presented in new color photography.

This volume in the Nearby History series helps the reader document the history of a home. The reader will learn to examine written records, oral testimonies, visual sources, and the house's surroundings. The author covers American housing patterns, the individual characteristics of houses in different regions, construction techniques and materials, household technology, and family life styles. Houses and Homes is Volume 2 in The Nearby History Series.

In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her seven-year odyssey took her over 90,000 miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand house portraits, Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in this volume.

This book is a delightful guide to understanding and identifying architectural styles for kids and their parents Why do houses look the way they do? Why do dome have small windows, while others seem to be all glass? Why do some hug the landscape, while others are tall with very steep roofs? Why do dome people live in mansions, while others live in mobile houses? Can you imagine a house that looks like an elephant or a shoe? Children and adults will learn about the history of domestic architecture, the styles of the houses we live in, and the terms for the architectural elements that compose the buildings. Use the pictorial field guide to investigate your own house, then take it along on family outings to identify different architectural details. Under Every Roof features more than 60 houses from 30 states and the District of Columbia that are listed in the National Register of Historic Places; many of these are house museums that are open to the public. Kids need to understand the house they live in, so the book also includes a wide variety of regional styles and architectural types. The full-color, watercolor illustrations add a unique, gentle humor to the text.

Albert, Righter & Tittman Architects create finely crafted houses that pay homage to classic American house styles yet are adapted with skill, mastery and a good dose of irreverence to suit contemporary American life. At first glance, their Cambridge Cupola House loks like a typical mid-19th-century Greek Revival house, but on closer inspection, one realises that nothing is quite where it should be. The grand, cupola-topped rotunda entrance, for instance, is located not in the front, but on the side of the house! The reason? To increase the living space for the inhabitants. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned photographs, as well as with plans, drawings and watercolours, this sumptuous volume celebrates AR & Ts timeless, innovative designs and explores the historical styles on which they are based from Classical to Shingle, from Carpenter Gothic to Cape. Focusing on the superb craftsmanship and exquisite detailing of AR & Ts exteriors, interiors and outbuldiings, each chapter features one or more sidebars highlighting their inventive use of architectural elements, including columns, fireplaces, balustrades and moldings. It will be a trove of design ideas for professionals and homeowners alike.

There are places in the United States of America where violent acts of bloodshed have occurred. Years may pass—even centuries—but the mark of death remains. They are known as Murder Houses. From a colonial manse in New England to a small-town home in Iowa to a Beverly Hills mansion, these residences have taken on a life of their own, gaining everything from local lore and gossip to national—and even global—infamy. Writer Steve Lehto recounts the stories behind the houses where Lizzie Borden supposedly gave her stepmother “forty whacks,” where the real Amityville Horror was first unleashed by gunfire, and where the demented acts of the Manson Family horrified a nation—as well some lesser-known sites of murder that were no less ghastly. Exploring the past and present of more than twenty-five renowned homicide scenes, American Murder Houses is a tour through the real estate of some of the most grisly and fascinating crimes in American history. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS