Away from it all dreams that became real

The houses in this book are a good test of an architect's ability to work outside the normal commercial constraints and concentrate more on the environment and supplying non-commercial utilities. Looking through the book's 310 photos it's clear that lots of clever solutions have been created to provide a simple living experience or in some cases minimal luxury ones, I spotted an Eames chair in one house, Mies de Rohe's Barcelona chair in another and architect Malcolm Davis installed a solar heated outside pool for a property in Sonoma County, California (and I couldn't see a TV or sat dish in any of the book's photos).

What I liked about the book is very wide selection of houses the author has chosen from Henning Larsen's Granja Experimental Alnardo, a very contemporary looking farmhouse in Spain that seems quite large to what is basically one-bed transparent cabins designed by Jeanna Berger on a private Swedish island, all the materials had to be brought in by boat.

The Introduction sets out the various options for living off-grid: respect for the environment, focusing on renewable sources of energy, landscaping and using timber for construction. One of the joys of living in these houses is the ability to merge into the natural environment and so many of them have large expanses of glass but with triple glazing that cuts down on heat loss.

The houses are divided into three chapters: Countryside and forest; Hillside and mountains; Waterside and coast. They are the work of forty-three architectural practices mostly in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand (email addresses are provided). The back of the book has eight pages with a comprehensive listing of what to consider if you are contemplating off-grid living.

The owners of these wonderful houses have shown it's possible to escape from everyday city and urban living and enjoy nature instead.

US

Off the Grid: Houses for Escape: Bradbury, Dominic: 9780500021422: Amazon.com: Books

UK

Off the Grid: Houses for Escape: Amazon.co.uk: Bradbury, Dominic: 9780500021422: Books

　

 
 

　

　

　

　

　

Great Steel City shots in a poor format

Elliott Erwitt was only twenty-two when Roy Stryker (formerly boss of the FSA Photo Division during the Depression and early war years) asked him to come to Pittsburgh in 1950 to join a small group of photographers under Stryker's direction. He had been commissioned by Allegheny Conference on Community Development to capture a modern Pittsburgh rising from the steel heavy city of past decades. Of the ten in the group Erwitt was the second youngest and certainly the least well known among others like Esther Bubley, Harold Cosini, Arnold Eagle, Russell Lee, and Sol Libsohn.

Oddly, for a photographer Erwitt didn't drive (he came from New York on a Greyhound bus) so he walked around the city and this enabled him to take photos of gritty streets and the people who lived in them. The pictures are full of blacks and dark greys and actually show very little of a changing Pittsburgh but others in Strykers team did capture the new city which is best revealed in a beautiful looking book: Witness to the fifties: the Pittsburgh photographic library 1950-1953 (ISBN 0822941112) with more than a hundred photos including fifteen by Erwitt.

This is a wonderful selection of Erwitt's photos (with about eighty) but unfortunately the book's layout is very poor. The images bleed off the page in different sizes in an attempt create visual interest which isn't necessary with photos this good. In two cases photos are butted together into the book's spine. The Witness... title I mentioned above looks good because, although the photos are different sizes, they are all centred on the page with generous margins and a caption. Another annoyance with the GOST book is that all the captions are on one back page so the reader has to flip backwards and forwards.

Matin's life on the beach

Martin Parr loves beaches because they provide the ideal locations for him to capture people letting themselves go either as families, couples or individuals. He has another reason to favor the sea scene, a chance to explore new photographic ideas that are possible with the latest kit.

There is only one page of text in the book but it's quite fascinating because it lists, historically, how equipment has fashioned Parr's creativity during his professional life. Starting in 1970-1982 in black and white because colour was only regarded then as the medium for advertising and personal snaps. The decades move forward using flash (1982-86) standard lens (1987-88) macro and ring-flash (1995-2008) digital (2007 onwards) and telephoto lens (2014 onwards). I've mentioned all of this because I think the book is probably of interest more to photographers than the general photobook reader. The seventy-five photos show a variety of beach scenes in various European, Asian and South American countries but mainly in Britain. There are close-ups, long shots, crowds or just a few people on large expanses of sand. The most interesting, I though, are where Parr uses foliage on the edge of a beach to create almost abstract shapes in front of the camera, sometimes slightly out of focus, with beach, sea and people in the distance.

The book's landscape format works well for this kind of photography and the photos are printed with an impressively fine screen on a matt art. Oddly, all the photos are printed as captioned thumbnails on four pages at the back of the book rather putting these brief captions centred below each photo on the relevant pages.