What does an architect's dream house look like? Explore the homes of thirty of the world's most talented architects. Inventive and imaginative homes in 17 different countries. Spacious or frugal, ambitious or modest, refined or rough-edged, daring or reductive, the inspiring buildings in Architects' Houses are unique in design concepts, details, and materials, and how they interact with their landscape. A treasure trove of ideas for homeowners, practitioners, and interior designers. Architects' Houses is richly illustrated with photographs, sketches, and plans. Learn how established architects design their own homes' design. Explore the creative process and influence of architects' houses over the past two hundred years. From Jefferson's Monticello to the creations of Charles and Ray Eames, Toyo Ito to Frank Gehry. This generously illustrated book brims with ideas and inspiration as these architects' houses show different answers to the question: how can a house enrich lives and its natural surroundings?

A #1 best seller for years, Bill Hirsch's Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect has been called an essential read for Homeowners as well as Professionals. Bill's flowing style of writing makes you feel like you are sitting with him having a chat about your project. The philosophy behind design decisions is explained with stories, photos, sketches, and checklists. The book is divided into Twelve Lessons, with an additional Bonus Lesson ," Building Green, Naturally". You will learn how to evaluate your needs and work towards creating a suitable design, perfect for you and your family. The experience of home design and construction should be controllable, gratifying and enjoyable. With the valuable advice that Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect provides, it can be.

Best-Selling House Plans offers readers more than 360 of the most successful and sought-after home designs from the top architects and designers across North America. CAD files are made available for every home and are easily customizable. Completely updated and revised, this new edition offers new home plans and pricing, special sections on home automation, home design trends, curb appeal tips, and more.

Select from 730 of the most popular home plans from the country’s top architects and designers, with full color photos of the actual homes, floor plans, and design ideas. Virtually every home style is offered, including farmhouses, country cottages, contemporaries, luxury estates, vacation retreats, and regional specialties. Once you’ve selected your dream home, you can obtain easily customizable construction blueprints, cost estimates, materials lists, and CAD files.

In a lavish, oversize format (12.25x12.25), this book features 40 extraordinary houses on five continents selected by veteran architecture writer Webb for their courageous and innovative design and their site integration. Plans, drawings, and full page color photos take center stage; the text supports the visuals, describing the houses in terms of

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

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.