A natural outgrowth of Curran's earlier book, "Drawing house plans," containing much of the same basic information, but also teaching you how to draw foundation plans, roof plans, sections, and details.

Southern Homes and Plan Books showcases the architectural legacy and design philosophy of Leila Ross Wilburn (1885–1967), a legacy that includes hundreds of houses in a variety of popular house styles, from bungalows to ranch houses, built using Wilburn’s plan books during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Wilburn opened her own firm in Atlanta in 1908 and practiced until her death in 1967. She published nine plan books that offered mail order house designs to contractors, builders, and prospective homeowners and allowed them the ease of choosing a preconceived design and construction plan. Sarah J. Boykin and Susan M. Hunter provide a survey of the southern homes built from Wilburn’s plan books, examining Wilburn’s architectural legacy and her achievements as a plan book architect. The book provides beautiful photographs of houses built from her plans, along with illustrations from the plan books themselves and other related documents from the time. Readers can thus see how her designs were realized as individual houses and also how they influenced the development of some of the Atlanta area’s beloved historical neighborhoods, most notably Druid Hills, Morningside, Virginia-Highland, and Candler Park, as well as the McDonough–Adams–Kings Highway (MAK) Historic District in Decatur. Today, Wilburn’s houses are enjoyed as appealing, historic homes and represent some of the richest examples of southern vernacular architecture to emerge from the plan book tradition.

This housing construction design manual documents and analyzes some 130 international residential structures from the last fifty years. From the standardized floor plans of the 1960s to the more individual concepts of the 1980s and the changed requirements and housing types of recent years, example structures by famous and lesser known architects from throughout the world showcase the tremendous variety of possible designs. The categorization of projects from a town planning perspective is supplemented by the detailed typological description of the relevant housing types. Every project is presented with its typical floor plans to a scale of 1:200; sections, site plans, and photographs illuminate each building’s structure and situation. In addition to incorporating some forty new projects, this new edition now contains figure-ground diagrams that highlight the most salient features of the floor plans, making them even easier to compare.

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