Edward Ford's forty years of practicing and teaching architecture have focused on one area: the architectural detail. Yet, despite two hugely influential books (The Details of Modern Architecture, volumes 1 and 2), numerous articles, and lectures given from Vancouver to Vienna, there are two questions Ford has, remarkably, never answered: "What is a detail?" and more importantly, "What is a good detail?" Ford is an architect as well as a writer, so it is not surprising that rather than answering these questions in a third book, he spent six years on the design and construction of a house. Building it was not an exercise in the application of ideas about detail; it was, rather, a mechanism for answering those two simple questions.

A description of the elephants and other wildlife in the Luangwa River Valley, Zambia. The animals are protected from molestation by man, but, the elephant is a threatened species due to shortage of food.

Spaces of Tolerance addresses the topic of tolerance in architectural production. Through examining the boundaries of where discourses, practices and designs are considered publishable (suitable to be made public) or not, the book exposes criteria and cultures which censor architecture so as to offer ways that architecture can be more inclusive and diverse for society at large. The contributors to the book discuss: disciplinary tolerances and constraints related to architecture and its interdisciplinary exchanges and modes of working; physical, spatial, temporal and digital tolerance in material assemblages and production between drawing and building; and social, cultural and political tolerance and threats contingent on geography and history. This timely book aims to look at extremities, margins and marginality to explore acceptable levels – and their fluctuations – in deviation and divergence. Chapters in the book involve ungendering, unacculturating (in disciplinary terms) and diversifying the architectural practitioner, writer, editor, reviewer, and reader, and retooling the instruments and tactics of architectural practice and theory. They argue that tolerance in interdisciplinary research in architecture can cultivate more diverse and productive conversations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Architecture and Culture.

A House and its Atmosphere is a meditative essay about the experience of designing and building a house of one¿s own. Told in seventy black and white photographs and a series of narrative excursions, architect Ben Jacks reflects on a lifetime of influences as he reveals the personal nature of inhabiting a place at the edge of a tidal cove on an island in Maine. In the book he quietly advocates for the simple logic and modest ease of direct experience and an observational perspective in architecture. In chapters about imagining, walking, and designing Ben Jacks reflects on the essence of architectural experience, describing what it is like to begin to make momentous decisions, arguing that aesthetic experience is the result of how one has learned to see. Memory, family, nature, relationships, and work inform design at every step. A House and its Atmosphere is a grounded story about designing and building a small work of architecture. With students of architecture and amateur builders in mind, Ben Jacks makes a case for design informed by theories of place-identification, detail, and craft. The book is a primary source and a chronicle of experience of radical empiricism. As such it offers a kind of conceptual tool kit for those interested in thinking about the processes of architecture, designing, and placemaking. The book is a fresh and valuable contribution to the shelter memoir genre, from a professional architect¿s perspective.

The Architectural Detail is author Edward R. Ford's life's work, and this may be his most important book to date. Ford walks the reader through five widely accepted (and wildly different) definitions of detail, in an attempt to find, once and for all, the quintessential definition of detail in architecture.

This book brings the timeless lessons of residential design to homeowners who seek inspiration and direction in the design or remodelling of their homes.